In trying to track down the cause for the printing bug that’s been harassing me lately, I’ve been simplifying the printing code as much as is possible. In the process, I’ve been cleaning up and evaluating the different implementation details. What functionality, for example, is absolutely necessary when implementing both print preview and general printing support? What’s required to print to multiple devices, such as both a printer and a PDF?
Posted by Kaleb Pederson on February 18, 2009 at 12:58 pm
11 Comments or Links | Adobe Flex, Printing
11 Comments or Links | Adobe Flex, Printing
Many people have complained or indicated that they need or would like a print preview component. FlexReport seems to have had a short lifetime and the demo site has recently been suspended, so it’s no longer an option. We at Soph-Ware Associates, Inc. recently needed such a component — so we wrote one. Try it out here!
When Adobe released Creative Suite 2 they included a new color palette format. ASE or Adobe Swatch Exchange was designed so that colors could be accurately moved between the variety of applications in the suite. Since it was specifically designed to make sharing colors easy it was an obvious target for color sharing websites (ColourLovers and Kuler both use it for downloads, for example). So ASE files with interesting and useful sets of colors are easy to get ahold of, and easy to use in Adobe programs. But what if you wanted to use them in a Flex or Flash application? Well, now you can use my AS3ASE library (generic name, I know). Note that it makes use of Yahoo!’s Astra libraries, since they already had some great classes for RGB and CMYK colors.
A little over a month ago, somebody posted this question to the Flexcoders mailing list asking about encrypting SWF’s to prevent them from being “captured” by applications or individuals. The solution is fairly simple, “encrypt the SWF!” But how would the Flash player handle that you might ask? Let’s find out.
I haven’t been doing much Flex development lately as I’ve been busy with some other new projects. However, I did recently install the alpha of FlexBuilder under Linux, which has been out for a while now. I’ll document briefly what it took to make it run on my system.
I love the new AdvancedDataGrid for Flex 3.0, it can do multiple column sorts, group my data and provide a tree view, among other amazing things. My problems began when I wanted to handle sorting of multiple properties in my own in code. The short version is that you need to apply the sort to the dataProvider property of the grid, not to your GroupingCollection. That does work, but I dug into it a bit more to find out, at least partly, why it worked.
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If the shortest distance between two points is a straight line, then the shortest distance between start and finish of a quick hack is “every relevant programming language.” Thus, not too long after hacking out some PHP, Python, XSLT, Bourne Shell script, Regular Expressions and Actionscript I completed a small Flex application that, given a swc, determines and visually represents the size of its library dependencies.
You can try it out here:
http://blogs.soph-ware.com/posted-content/files/SwfSizeDisplay/
Well, I had no idea that this was coming, but Adobe AIR has received a finalized logo. I’d actually kind of thought that the square with “AIR” in it was final, after all it did match the form of the current CS3 apps. It looks like Adobe may be trying to give it’s individual applications or application families a stronger visual identity, which can only be a good thing.
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In Part I of this series, I talked about some of the generated code that supports data binding in Flex. In this part, I want to take a look at a few more facets of data binding, but mainly as they can be used within MXML.
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Since we needed a good way to test our undo/redo framework, and a nice simple demo, we built our Cairngorm Calculator. You may have spotted the link in our recent article on the UndoRedo framework. It’s sort of an odd application of some heavy duty frameworks, but it let us sort out some issues with the application of our framework.