Aww, my baby is famous. Check it out at http://www.flex.org/blogs.

In response to the 360Flex badge on the 360Flex blog, and the one from polyGeek, here’s my 360Flex badge.

Here’s my second attempt at making a List control for Flex that has the functionality of using the Control and Shift keys, but without making the user actually press the Control or Shift keys. For those poor programmers who have been crippled by RSI, now you can at least drag around list data with your one good hand.

This version is much better than the previous version. Now you click on an item and drag to select multiple items. You can still drag and drop items from one list to another. The only difference is that you must first select the items, then click and drag to move items to the other list. Control-click functionality is the default if you only click one item. If you drag to select items and try to select below the visible items it will scroll the list into view.

Here’s the source.

This is a little experiment to play with a different method of selecting items in a Flex List control. It allows you to re-create some of the multiple selection options you usually get by holding down the control or shift keys while you select items. But now you don’t need to hold down the control or shift keys. Just play with it to see what I mean, it’s hard to explain.

There was a question on flexcoders that was about something like this. I’m not sure if this little experiment solved the right problem for the original poster, but trying to figure out how to get some of the functionality of using the control and shift keys without using the actual keys was kind of interesting (what can I say… item renderers and list controls turn me on). So this is what I came up with. Another thing to note is that the checkbox acts as a visual indicator only, it is not actually a clickable control.

View the source here.

Here’s the newest version of the MXNA RSS Reader Flex application that was shown at 360Flex. It’s been updated and another Flex community component was added into the mix. And full source is published. I call it ZOMGZ!!1 RSS Reader.

The updated recipe is:

• FishEye component from Ely Greenfield
• Custom fisheye modifications to add the bouncing functionality to the icons
• New: Fire component from FlexLib
• Reflection component from Ben Stucki
• Distortion effects from Alex Uhlmann
• TreeMap component from Josh Tynjala
• New: Sticky Tooltip component from Maikel Sibbald

So what’s new?
I added the sticky tooltip component by Maikel Sibbald, which shows the description of the article when you hover your mouse over it. I think it looks sweet. There’s a new icon for the most popular posts of the day. There’s also an options panel (click the rightmost icon). You can configure how many posts you want to read for each category. And you can choose to use the “Smart Categories” or the regular categories that MXNA offers (not all categories have smart categories that correspond). Those options are stored in a shared object, so next time you load the app it will remember your settings. And it will automatically load the last category you were browsing. I utilized a better method for sizing the font in the TreeMap that I didn’t realize Josh had included in the component. It looks a lot better now. I had to make a small modification to the component to get it work with embedded fonts, but now the fonts looks silky smooth and they show up in the reflection. I made some performance enhancements, turns out that drawing that reflection when you’re using embedded fonts really eats up processing power.

Future development
I’ve been working on getting the source to an acceptable point to release it to the wild. I didn’t get all this code to a point I’m truly happy with, a lot of it’s uncommented, but my ADD is kicking in and I’m tired of working on it, so here it is as it is. Use it to learn, use it for inspiration, use it for whatever. The only restriction is that Josh’s TreeMap is licensed under the GPL license (AFAIK the other stuff is MIT-ish license). I dropped this into an Apollo app and it kind of makes a cool desktop RSS app, but I didn’t add anything that really makes it any better than the web version, so I’m not going to release the Apollo version. I’m not planning on working on it anymore. I’ll be working on a few other RSS visualization apps.

ZOMGZ!!1

So check out the example below. View the source here.

[Or launch it in it’s own window: here’s the link]

I added a new Fire component to the FlexLib library. This is a Flex component that creates a fire or smoke effect. It can be customized in a variety of ways, including setting multiple colors for the flame. Check out the demo app below to see a few different presets I came up with. Try playing around with the different controls and you’ll get an idea of the different kinds of effects that are possible.

The key to this is using the perlinNoise function of the BitmapData class, and the DisplacementMapFilter. I don’t claim to be an expert on using these functions. Others have written about using them, I just copied the same approach.

View the documentation
View the example in a new window.

To get the source of the Fire component, download the FlexLib project from Google code.

And don’t complain about this using a lot of CPU horsepower, go get a faster machine 😛 Or look at the source and figure out how to optimize it for better performance and contribute the improvements back to FlexLib.

Oh, and for anyone wondering, I’ll be releasing the source for the RSS reader that was shown at 360Flex… soon. Probably tomorrow. And it’s an even more pimped out version.