The Flex Guy

As I discussed previously, caching can have it’s advantages.  It makes referencing objects and binding much more straight forward.  Unfortunately, it comes at a performance cost.  Since I’ve been using caching, there are some important things to keep in mind when you use caching to make sure your data sticks around and your performance doesn’t [...]

The project I’ve been working on for a while now uses caching.  This means that the application will store the objects returned from the server in a DataCache and anytime objects are returned from the server, they are synced with the DataCache.

Here’s another gotcha that took me a while to realize what was wrong. I was using an ArrayCollection to hold a collection of items. I had a custom sort applied since the items were typed objects that needed to be sorted according to certain, out-of-the-ordinary fields. In the sort method, I was comparing values and [...]

I have been immersed in Flex 4 lately and had this issue come up.  It seems like it might be fairly easy to run into and isn’t entirely obvious at first so I’ll share.  I had a custom component that included buttons that weren’t registering click events. Here’s the scenario.  I created a custom component [...]

Adobe has made the announcement that AIR developers will be able to create applications for Android in late 2010!  This is exciting news for AIR developers, since it opens up the mobile devices arena.  AIR 2.0 will have support for multi-touch gestures, GPS, accelerometer and screen layout. Check out the AIR team blog to see [...]

It’s a new year and that means a great excuse to make some site improvements. I feel like theflexguy.com has been a moving target ever since it’s conception. I was originally hosting my site on GoDaddy. I was fairly pleased, although they gave me a dirty feeling (have you seen their commercials?). Here’s some of [...]

Recently, I was racking my brain trying to solve a problem I had with a DataGrid not refreshing data. It took me a while to find the reason, so to help someone else with the same problem, I decided to write about it. Background I had an ArrayCollection of custom classes called Build. Those Build [...]

In this article, I’m going to discuss four considerations for developing high quality custom components: Portability Flexibility Performance Weight Using these considerations, you’ll be able to develop more professional, usable components. Even if I don’t think I will use my component in another project, I like to use these principles.

The little “Chat with Marty” module on the left side of my website is a cool little widget I got from Google. It allows visitors to your website to chat with you without revealing your google talk name, or requiring them to add you. You can get the widget from here: http://www.google.com/talk/service/badge/New Update: I removed [...]

There’s a couple of projects I’ve been working on lately, one of which is the BugQuash QuashBoard, that require a search input. I decided to quit duplicating some of the work I’m doing and create a SearchInput control that extends the TextInput control and wraps the search logic into a reusable component. The thought process [...]