Adobe Flex 2: Programming the Visual Experience

Introducing Flex 2: Programming the Visual Experience

• Modifying the default look-and-feel of Flex applications
• Understanding why Flex programmers need a design course
• Introducing Mastery Learning
• Understanding the Course Format
• Reviewing the course prerequisites
• Reviewing the course outline
• Setting up the application files

Enhancing the application with imagery and layering

• Adding background colors and imagery to the application
• Adding an application background image
• Adding imagery to the Natural Experiences application
• Layering content using absolute layout
• Creating a reusable embedded image
• Creating instances of an embedded image class
• Using bindable variables for imagery
• Creating simple popup functionality

Enhancing the application with fonts, filters and blends

• Understanding the limitations of device fonts
• Learning the limitations of device fonts
• Embedding fonts with direct calls to the font files in the file system
• Embedding fonts using FlashType
• Exploring advanced FlashType settings
• Exploring filters
• Exploring filter properties
• Applying blends

Modifying the look-and-feel of Flex components graphically

• Exploring 9-slice scaling
• Modifying the look-and-feel of Flex components using MXML styles
• Modifying graphical skins using Adobe Flash templates
• Extending Flex Components
• Learning display object basics
• Exploring the non-content children
• Introducing the DisplayObject class and its subclasses

Extending Flex components

• Creating an extended component
• Implementing the createChildren() method
• Implementing the updateDisplayList() method
• Calling the updateDisplayList() method of the super class
• Improving custom component reusability with stylesheets

Drawing shapes and programmatically modifying the look-and-feel of Flex components

• Understanding the relationship between display list objects and the Graphics class
• Calling the clear() method
• Exploring the clear() method
• Drawing lines
• Using the scaleMode argument of the lineStyle() method
• Ordering the lineStyle() method arguments
• Using line methods to draw a star
• Creating a visual element as an ActionScript class
• Creating shapes
• Defining fill methods
• Implementing a ButtonSkin from the mx.skins.halo package
• Implementing a programmatic skin

Animating components and state changes

• Reviewing Behaviors
• Defining behavior triggers
• Applying behaviors
• Creating a fly-in popup component
• Reviewing View States and Transitions
• Using the CurrentStateChange change event
• Understanding the order of events and transitions
• Setting a custom component’s size for state changes
• Handling child components that become invisible in transitions

Passing data between components to affect layout and data display

• Creating custom component properties
• Passing and displaying XML photo data in the gallery
• Reviewing the Repeater component
• Using dynamic data in the Repeater
• Using currentItem with a complex data structure
• Using Repeater data in ActionScript
• Calculating custom component size
• Creating a more flexible tile display

Creating mouse-aware application features

• Detecting the mouse position
• Moving the popup to the mouse position
• Detecting the stage dimensions
• Creating animation using the Timer class
• Understanding easing

Implementing Drag and Drop Functionality

• Understanding the DragManager
• Enable drag and drop functionality in a dragenabled component
• Specifying the data to display in a List control
• Enabling dragging on non-list-based controls
• Controlling dropping with formats
• Handling data in drag and drop operations
• Viewing data in the DragSource

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