Over the past few months, “flex calendar” has been the most popular search string that results in hits on Flex Daddy. A while back, when I was working for Achilles Foundation, we played with the idea of creating a custom calendar in Flex 1.5. Read more here. We soon gave up on the idea due to time constraints and the complexity involved.

But now … we’re all eagerly awaiting the release of Adobe Consulting EMEA’s Open Source Flex 2 Calendar Component. It’s been getting a lot of buzz, you can see by the number of comments, but we’re all awaiting a release date, or some more screenshots, or a teaser/demo … ooh, just something!

Be sure to check it out. Head over to Alex McLeod’s blog and make some noise!

Related posts:

1. What’s more than just a Flex Calendar?
2. Flex Calendar – can it be that hard?
3. Cairngorm 2.0 Alpha

A new group has been created on Yahoo! for Adobe Flex Component Development. The list/group will be a public forum for information on creating custom Flex components. If you’re interested in custom AS3 and Flex component development then please join!

http://groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcomponents/

Are you a member of the FlexCoders Yahoo! Group?  This is the forum/list for general Adobe Flex questions and discussion. You’ll also find a large number of Adobe staff and Engineers on this list, so it’s the place to be if you want your questions answered. Don’t have any questions? Then please share and share alike. The more knowledge and understanding in the community the better.

Oh, and don’t forget to check out Flex.org

Related posts:

1. Exciting Flex Development Competition
2. Flex pricing strategy
3. Build your first AIR application with Adobe Flex

The guys at iteration::two have created an Advanced TabNavigator component with the option of placing the tabs at either the top or the bottom. Pretty neat huh!

It will be the first of a component set that they will release into the flex community.

Go get it here…

Related posts:

1. Resizable, Minimizable/Maximizable TitleWindow
2. Flex Component Development on Yahoo! Groups
3. Flex Calendar – the most popular search string

A month ago I posted a question to flexcoders regarding cursors not showing in sub-applications loaded using the Loader control (mx:Loader). The solution was to embed the required assets into the root application.

Following this I needed to find out what cursors were available in the mx.skins.cursor package. But as Manish explains, this is not a package, yet a naming convention for symbols in the flex Library.swf

For a more detailed explanation, and steps on how you can read into the Library.swf, check out whats in mx.skins.cursor over at Manish Jethani’s Blog.

Related posts:

1. How to skin Flex 2.0
2. Resizable, Minimizable/Maximizable TitleWindow
3. Sizing apps within the Loader control

The TitleWindow component does not support resizing and collapsing the window, at least not until recently. Following on from Manish’s ‘Resizable Title Window’, Jesse’s ‘Collapsable Panel’, and Christophe’s ‘Draggable, Minimizable/Maximizable, Configurable Panel’, I felt the need to combine all such functionality into a single class.

The outcome of this was a Resizable, Minimizable/Maximizable TitleWindow. The component is work in progress, and could be approched in a much neater fashion, so consider it a stepping stone if you’re feeling adventurous!

On the roadmap:

1. Set the minimum height and width of the window for resizing. Currently the buttons and window title overlap. You can also resize the window less than the header height (whoops)
2. Modify the backgroundImage’s properties (offsets) to display a ‘wedge’ image in the bottom right hand corner. This will help show that the window can be resized.
3. Make the resize capabilty a modifiable property.
4. Combine all image assets into one swf/fla file.

That said, feel free to download the sample app and try it out!

Related posts:

1. Advanced Tab Navigator
2. Build your first AIR application with Adobe Flex
3. Sizing apps within the Loader control

I had a recent requirement to load a flex app into another using the Loader control, but I was stuck at trying to get the loaded swf to stretch to the available space.

The problem came as the Loader is a component and not a container and therfore doesnt know about percentages or flex, so it cannot size content in the way we would expect it to. There are 2 workarounds, yet i will always take the later as it allows the size to be dynamic.

There were 2 possible workarounds, but I would generally stick with the later for the sake of dynamic sizing:

1. You can set the height and width of the loaded app to be pixel values (i.e width=”800″ height=”600″).

2. You can add the following code to a script block in the root of the loaded app:


function getPreferredHeight()
{
if(_parent)
{
return _parent.layoutHeight;
}
else
{
return super.getPreferredHeight();
}
}



function getPreferredWidth()
{
if(_parent)
{
return _parent.layoutWidth;
}
else
{
return super.getPreferredWidth();
}
}


Related posts:

1. Cast a loaded Flex Application to an Interface
2. Flex library assets – cursors
3. AFR Access – one of the largest public Flex apps to date