If you haven't seen, Apollo is now alpha and up on Adobe Labs! This is going to revolutionize the way people develop applications that need to run cross-platform and have network abilities. Heck, even some that don't need network connectivity! It's just plain easier to develop flashy applications using Flex Builder.

I'm sure I'll end up posting examples of apps I've created in Apollo as soon as I get some time. Adobe has announced Creative Suite 3 and things are a little busy right now, hence the lack of blogging on my part.

Don't you wish Adobe released new product versions this quick!

Ok, so after playing with the first version of the htmlText Editor, I realized there were some major improvements needed. The main thing I added is the ability to supress tags, so that you can cut down on unnecessary clutter in the htmlText. In doing this, I also gave the ability to "undo" those changes by unchecking the tags to supress and applying it again. There is a little help that gives some tips on how it's used, nothing fancy since the app isn't that complicated. If you use this or have feature requests, let me know. I'd like to hear some of the ways it's being used. My guess is, it will be used mostly when giving a Text or TextArea htmlText or in specifying the htmlText in an XML file, like I've done. I hope it makes your work easier like it did for me!

htmlText Editor v2.0 (yeah, that was a quick dot release) ;)

Many of you may experience some of the same things I do when it comes to maintaining a Flex site. I try to create tools that help make my job easier, and at times create twice as much work making the tools. Well, here's a tool that took 2 lines of mxml and made a big difference in the amount of time it takes me now to update htmlText.

The situation: You've got a TextArea component with text that you want bold, italic, underline, different sizes, bulleted, etc. Using htmlText is great for that, but here's the catch: you can't shortcut the design of it using Dreamweaver or whatever your favorite wysiwyg html editor is, because they generate HTML 4.0. You may do the guess and check type of editing where you do what you think will look good, then build your project to see if you like it. But if you do a lot of editing, that gets old fast.

Another scenario might be that you pull the text from an XML file to populate some of the TextArea's htmlText components. It's the same situation.

The solution: Create a RichTextEditor component (id="myRTE" for the example), and a TextArea (id="myTA"). You bind the TextArea's text to the htmlText of the RichTextEditor. If you want to be able to change the html and see it reflected in the RichTextEditor, bind myRTE's htmlText to myTA's text property. Here's the mxml for the application at the link.

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="vertical" pageTitle="htmlText Editor">
  <mx:RichTextEditor id="myRTE" width="100%" height="50%" htmlText="{myTextArea.text}" title="Formatted Text"/>
  <mx:Panel title="HTML 1.0" width="100%" height="50%">
    <mx:TextArea id="myTextArea" text="{myRTE.htmlText}" width="100%" height="100%"/>
  </mx:Panel>
</mx:Application>