I’ve started noticing FlexLib components out in the real world. It’s a pretty cool feeling to launch some Flex app and suddenly realize that some component you wrote is being used. Here are a couple of screenshots of a few Flex apps that I’ve seen using a few components from FlexLib.

Salesbuilder demo app by Christophe Coenraets
Uses the SuperTabNavigator. This is a great use the SuperTabNavigator. By setting the tabs to be rectangular and skinning the close button on the tabs, it ends up looking great. Download the air app, play with it, and notice how super the tabs really are.

Synchronicity by Eric Cancil and team (sorry, I only know the name of the guy who blogs it)
I was using this app to test it out and watch some recorded performances and then I noticed that the tabs use the SuperTabNavigator (see those blue tabs with the close button?). I also noticed that the form fields use what looks like the PromtpingTextInput control (see the fields that say Firstname, Lastname, and City?).

AgileAgenda by Marc (don’t know last name)
Uses the Horizontal Accordion.

Also, I just started a contract working with a Flex startup here in the Bay Area. When I got set up with the project files I noticed that in the /lib directory was flexlib.swc 🙂 They’re using the Highlighter component.

If you’re using a FlexLib component in a Flex app, I’d love to know about it. Send me an email if you want. It would be interesting to try to figure out which components are used most.

I just made a quick new component and added it to FlexLib. It’s a Button component, but it allows you to add any child UI components to the button via MXML. So if you find the single icon and label format of the button to be a bit too restrictive, you can use this component to layout your button however you want. This is in response to a recent question asked on flexcoders.

So for example, in the sample below the top button is created like this:

View the source
View the documentation

Note: this has been added to the SVN repository for FlexLib but is not yet in the distribution zip. The distribution zip will get updated once we have a bigger changeset (oh, and it’s coming…)

I’ve just updated FlexLib and added some components from new contributors and fixed some reported bugs in the existing components. The new additions include: Text Highlighter from Tom Lee, Base64 Image from Stacy Young, and Enhanced ButtonSkin from Daniel Wabyick. Darron also added a component this morning, HorizontalAxisDataSelector. And I’ve also fixed some reported issues that people had submitted, specifically issues 1, 6, 9, 13, 24.

So a big welcome to the new contributors, Tom, Stacy, and Daniel.

Regarding the bugfixes, there were fixes for the SuperTabNavigator and Scrollable Menu controls, and enhancements to the Draggable Slider and ConvertibleTreeList. If you’re using any of those components (especially the SuperTabNavigator), I’d strongly recommend getting the new version. And if you have any bugs to report in any FlexLib components, make sure to submit bug reports. We actually read those and make changes.

Check out the new additions by downloading the FlexLib project from the google code project page. The newest distribution release, version .1.8, is available as a zipped package to download.

Here are the links to the docs and examples for the new components

If you’ve got components that you want to contribute then send ’em our way. Read the How to Contribute page and send in your code.

The Docking ToolBar component that was released by the Adobe Flex Team has been contributed to FlexLib. This component was originally released on Adobe Exchange. The description from the Flex team:

The docking toolbar component collectively helps managing toolbars in an application.

The toolbars can be docked to the top or bottom edges or kept floating within application area. The contents within a toolbar use a flow based layout approach.

A big thank you goes to Matt Chotin at Adobe for supporting the FlexLib project and getting this contribution into the library.

Future updates to the DockingToolBar will be found in the FlexLib project, and bugs and feature requests should be logged here.

Here’s a sample showing off the Docking ToolBar component: