Candes | Cristian Neagu - UI Designer, UX Consultant - Magento, Drupal » Flash, Flex, AIR

Flex 3.0 CSS Property – Complete List

Cristian — Thu, 08 Oct 2009 12:22:04 +0000

I have start to work on a new Flex project and I’m still a novice to it so I was looking for a list of CSS properties for components and stumbled across this:

Flex 3.0 CSS Properties List

CSS Matrix Layout

Cristian — Sat, 14 Mar 2009 17:59:31 +0000

This is an idea of Jonathan Snook, an web designer and developer that I admire and follow.

He propose a new layout system on extending the CSS property “position” by adding value “:matrix (x,y)”. The Matrix Layouts should be like table-based layouts combined with absolute positioning and without any “hacks” for overflowing.

How this should work? You use the position property to specify where the box should be placed within the grid. Have a look at the following example diagram:

It’s a 3 column design but with a little extra pizzazz in the middle column. I’ve also lettered each section by their source order. Now, let’s look at what that code would look like with matrix layouts:

#a { position: matrix(1,2, 1,4); } #b { position: matrix(2,2); } #c { position: matrix(2,3); } #d { position: matrix(2,4); } #e { position: matrix(1,1, 2,1); } #f { position: matrix(1,5, 2,5); }

I think this be a kick-ass CSS feature and I would love to use in my layouts. This will bring so much fun to CSS work and I’m sure that others would love it, but there is long way till it’s really implemented. Also will be good to have the Matrix Layout implemented in a CSS framework.

You can read the full blog post here or the Matrix Layout concept here.

Census Data Loading Benchmarks

Cristian — Tue, 03 Feb 2009 09:53:58 +0000

Benchmarks are hard, particularly for complex systems. The Census is a Flex application to demonstrate various methods of loading data in RIAs and see how these methods impact performance, bandwidth and client memory usage. Census renders a large chunk of data using Ajax ( HTML, SOAP, XML and JSON ), Dojo, Flex ( SOAP to AS and E4X, XML to AS and E4X, AMF3 and Paged). We can see the Server Exec Time, Transfer Time, Parse Time and Render Time easily.

http://www.jamesward.com/census/

How it works: Adobe Flex & PHP (Zend Framework)

Cristian — Mon, 02 Feb 2009 09:33:55 +0000

One of my Flex beginner question was “How do I connect Flex with PHP” or any other language and pull the data from a database. I most interested in PHP and I tried with CakePhp AMF plugin but no luck. Then I tried to follow Zend Framework AMF example from their book but the same.

Here is a good video tutorial on how to make Adobe Flex to work with PHP true XML and AMF (Action Message Format). You will learn how Flex WebServices and RemoteOjects work with Zend Framework. For me this tutorial has answer to many questions and I recommend you to have a look at it if you are Flex beginner like me.

http://www.viddler.com/explore/skinnerfam95/videos/1/

Starting with Adobe Flex

Cristian — Fri, 30 Jan 2009 18:15:07 +0000

As the title say I have start to learn Flex. I’m consider myself a beginner and I will try to post my experience developing Flex applications. So let me start from the beginning ….

What is Flex?

Flex is a highly productive, free open source framework for building and maintaining expressive web applications that deploy consistently on all major browsers, desktops, and operating systems. Flex is designed in order to give Flash Developers an edge when developing Rich Internet Applications (RIAs).

RIAs created with Flex can run in the browser using Flash Player or on the desktop on Adobe AIR™, the cross-operating system runtime. This enables Flex applications to run consistently across all major browsers and on the desktop. And using AIR, Flex applications can access local data and system resources on the desktop. Pretty cool!

One of the major reasons why Flex is becoming more and more popular is because it utilizes ActionScript 3.0.

What do I need to start Flex?

In order to start to develop fast Flex applications you need to download from Adobe.com website Adobe Flex Builder, which is free. Flex Builder 3 it is an Eclipse based development tool enabling intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of the user interface layout, appearance, and behavior of RIAs. It includes the complete Flex framework, including compilers, a component library, and debuggers, pretty everything what you need to start to work.

What is a Flex Application?

A Flex application at it’s very basic level is a Flash .swf file embedded in a generated HTML file. Since Flex outputs it’s data as a .swf, this allows you to utilize everything that Flash Player is famous for; dynamic animations, sound and video handling, and of course, the Flash Drawing API. The HTML that Flex spits out has the necessary JavaScript code in order to detect whether the user has the Flash Player installed, or whether they need to update to the current player.

Adobe AIR finaly gets out of beta

Cristian — Tue, 26 Feb 2008 18:48:52 +0000

Hi again! In this post I announce you that Adobe AIR 1.0 is open for download. It almost appears that this announcement surprised the AIR development community. Very few applications are available at the moment on the Adobe site and of those most (maybe all) are only compatible with the last beta version.

The Adobe ® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating systems. What type of developer are you?

The new Adobe AIR runtime enables Ajax developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy on the desktop. AIR applications run across operating systems on the WebKit HTML engine and are easily delivered using a single installer file. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use their existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web.

Download now the latest version