Flex 3 default background colour
If you would like to change the default ‘blue’ of your Flex movie as it preloads:
Select Project > Properties > Flex Compiler and under the Additional compiler arguments add ‘-default-background-color #yourcolour’. So if you want a plain white background it would look like:
-locale en_US -default-background-color #FFFFFF
Project collaberation notes
I have just set-up and started using Protonotes - a free javascript web based service that allows you to add notes to your prototype that allows project team members to discuss system functionality, design, and requirements directly on the prototype.
It takes about 4 mins to set-up and get started. Project team members don’t have to install anything or sign up for anything to use it. It just works. Simple….easy… just what I like.
Actionscript 3 Simple click EventListener
If like me you are making the transition from Actionscript 2 to 3 you may well find that creating simple onPress functions don’t use the same syntax. I checked the Adobe help files but got confused by the overly complex details.
If you want a simple clickable moveClip use the following code. The first line means that the movie clip will act like a button and the cursor will change when the mouse is hovering over.
movieclip_name.buttonMode = true;
movieclip_name.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, onClick);
function onClick(event:MouseEvent):void{
trace(”Yes, this works!”)
}
Flex bandwidth profiler
I have just started learning Flex and realised there is no way to test the download speed of your movie and whether your preloader is working as it should – like you can with the bandwidth profiler in Flash.
After a quick search I decided that Charles met my requirements. I have had a quick play with it and the interface is well designed, it has a Firefox extension and most importantly I can test my Flex preloaders are working! It also works on OSX which means I can use it on my home machine as well. Its seems to be a great bit of software and well worth testing.
Update – I couldn’t figure out how to get it to throttle my bin-bug folder which resides on my local drive. To get around this I created a new workspace on my local server (http://localhost/flex/….) which solved the problem. This probably isn’t the correct way to set-up your Flex development environment….. any advice appreciated.
Screengrab a complete web page
Ever needed to screen grab a web page and realised its three times the height of the screen? I certainly have and admit to wasting time pasting screen grabs together – Screengrab to the rescue!
Screengrab! 0.95 is a superb Firefox extension developed by Andy Mutton that makes it easy to save a web-page as an image. You can save anything that you can see in a browser window – from a small selection, to a complete page.