Flex Stuff by Gilles Guillemin

Today, a moment of self promotion in FlexStuff.co.uk. After all, what is the point of working like crazy 7 days a week and being able to only write a short post every couple of weeks if all this hard work remains unknown? (at least on this side of the pond, those ads being designed for the US market).

As already stated here and there in this blog, I’m currently employed by a London based company named Tailgate Technologies as their lead Flash Platform programmer. And believe me, it’s no easy task to work for a start-up when the global economy has decided at the same time to go deep down the sink. And the recent news about our main competitor surely do not help either (hey, we also had our own TechCrunch article!).

Anyway, we try at Tailgate to create a new type of online ads that actually try to be (at least a little bit) helpful and informative and not just some random stroke inducing stroboscopic animations as most of online ads have turned to be nowadays. It seems sometimes that “creatives” just took Flash only for its sole name and thought that flashing was somehow its one and only function.

The result of this? Nobody seems to give a bloody crap anymore (to quote the locals ) about ads. And I’m just talking here about the most open minded, the others have already long activated some ad blocker, just to avoid what has become an annoyance.

And that’s when we arrive (drums and trumpets here, please) to save you all from boredom!

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In my previous post, I explained how to create nice gradients using Degrafa’s CSSSkin. Once again, CSSSkin is one of the very powerful, yet overlooked function of the Degrafa framework (look at this, or that for those who would still doubt it). But it has in my opinion a limitation: it works almost only for containers (Canvas, Panel, List, etc). But as it stands by default in the latest version (Beta 3.1), it doesn’t work for buttons (Button, ButtonBar and the like). When it comes to the define CSS tags like upSkin, downSkin, selectedOverSkin, etc, there’s no choice but to use tailor made classes extending GraphicBorderSkin like in this example. But actually, there’s a rather easy way to use CSSSkin defined in a CSS file only, by simply extending CSSSkin.

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Degrafa is a fantastic tool and has become for the past few months a core component of all my developments at Tailgate Technologies. Still, some very powerful tools among Degrafa Framework seem to be a bit underused by most users (at least most bloggers). I’m thinking here of Advanced CSS with CSSSkin class. Or at least, there rather is a relative lack of examples and documentations on how to use it. You can still find on Degrafa’s website Ben Stuki’s example along with Juan Sanchez’ one, but when you try and watch the screencast tutorials you unfortunately end up hitting dead ends. One thing in particular took me a significant while to figure out: how to set elaborate gradients (for a background color for example), so I thought that sharing my discoveries (and improvements in a further post) might be useful to some of you.

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A little while ago, I was asked to develop a little Pong game in AS3 to gauge my AS3 skills (I’ll explain why another time. Or will I?). My first move was to ask my friend Google what others might have done around the same subject (no need to reinvent the wheel, mostly since I was already crazy busy on some urgent project to finish up for the next hour or so). That’s how I found Jackson Dunstan’s own Pong.

That was something interesting to begin with but a little bit dull. So I decided to have some fun and to improve the thing with additional technologies. Some that I already knew pretty well (like Flex of course, but Degrafa as well even if its use here is pretty discreet…), some others I wanted to explore a little bit more (Mate) and finally one I wanted to give a try without any particular purpose (Away3D). I had been playing a lot lately with Papervision3D for a new version of Doug McCune’s Coverflow component (which shall be the subject of another post, pretty soon hopefully) and I wanted to give a try to at least another 3D engine. I kinda really liked a lot fooling around with that 3D stuff!

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