Finally.. an update.

Finally.. an update. No updates for more than a year..wow.

It has been over a year since my last update, not because I have lost interest in the Flex community or Flex but because my focus has been 140% on work and Degrafa. To all those folks that have sent email or made comments asking technical questions and submitting bug related issues on the various components here, my apologies for not being more responsive.

Degrafa has been and continues to be a huge undertaking. When Juan and I first started the project we understood it’s importance and wanted to fully commit ourselves to it. More about Degrafa in future posts.

Effective UI

During this period I have also switched gears career wise. I parted ways with my old business partner after 7+ years of working together in favour of a more concentrated Flex related effort. Since that departure in Oct of 2007 I have been working with Effective UI and have not looked back since. Effective UI unites a super group of people to work with and that experience has been and continues to be very rewarding. Working remotely from France has not hindered that experience in any way except perhaps the yearning to meet all of the individuals I’ve had the opportunity to work with and equally those with whom I have not yet worked.

My focus at Effective UI has been on a product called eDesign specifically the page editing piece of it. I will write and share more in the future on that. I feel eDesign is an excellent showcase RIA – something that definitely emphasises the “Rich” in RIA. It clearly shows how the power of Flex combined with an experienced team and a highly motivated customer can provide an elegant real world solution in a very complicated problem space.

Hats off to the team at Effective UI. The ability to succeed in pushing the limits in the RIA space for some of our industries largest and high profile projects requires optimal organization, processes, skills and collaboration, all of which Effective UI excels at. It’s a pleasure to be part of such a talented and experienced team.

If anyone is ever looking to switch gears as I have, whether it be in design or development and looking to broaden your horizons in this exciting space I highly recommend Effective UI as a potential candidate.

Degrafa

Pushing innovation on the Degrafa front will of course continue. Degrafa is still my top side work priority and in working closely with Juan, Greg, and Tom and all the other collaborators I feel great motivation and excitement in moving forward and pushing Degrafa toward it’s goals.

At the moment Greg and I are focused on performance, optimization and bug fixes plus a few new smaller features and recently we welcomed the involvement and helping hand of 2 new collaborators, Josh and Rick.

If you should have input on any of these things we would love for you to voice them so that they can be included in our efforts.

As most of you should know by now the Degrafa team and Adobe have been in collaboration to bring Degrafa and Flex 4 graphics closer together. We are all honoured to be part of this effort and I feel this affirms Adobe’s commitment to the Flex community and it’s open source initiative. We all look forward to working closely with the Flex team. I can assure you that these efforts will directly benefit both the Flex and Degrafa communities. More information and samples on how these 2 graphics frameworks will integrate soon.

This Blog

This blog will ramp back up a notch. I have a slew of components and research to share with you all. Some Flex related and some Degrafa related. I have always strived to make this blog something worth reading and hope you find future posts valuable.

In Closing

This blog will be moving to a new url location very soon so kindly update accordingly to

www.flexibleexperiments.com.

Related Links
Effective UI
eDesign Click the “Preview eDesign at:” link to learn more.
Degrafa

Cheers.

Degrafa for Flex in Action: SVG Tiger in MXML

Juan has posted an example showing just how complicated of graphic, Degrafa for Flex can render. In that particular example the famous cubic spline tiger was chosen as it’s a rather complex svg document. The path geometry data in that svg graphic was copied directly into Degrafa path short hand data objects, with no changes to the geometry.

Read and see more here.

Jason Hawryluk

Degrafa for Flex in Action: Thermometer Skin Sample

Juan has published another example of skinning with Degarfa on the blog. Using Degrafa, Juan skinned a vertical slider component into a thermometer type gauge component. Slick work Juan!

Degrafa for Flex in Action: Repeaters

Juan from ScaleNine has published another great post where he discusses repeaters in Degrafa and how they work. It’s definitely one of my preferred extender type objects in Degrafa. The lines of typing and time you can save with repeaters is immediately evident once you get comfortable and put them to good use.

Degrafa for Flex in Action: Fills and Strokes

Juan has published a new post introducing the various Fill and Stroke objects that Degrafa supports, and explains how they can be used. He also discusses some other interesting things that we are working on in this area.

Degrafa for Flex in action: Skinning

Juan from ScaleNine has posted an example of how Degrafa can be used for skinning. Though a simple example, it goes to show that we have not left skinning out of the equation in the Degrafa framework. I personally think that the idea of programmatic skinning with out the need to write action script or extend one of the programmatic skin classes is way cool, just 100% MXML declarative mark-up.

A great example of Degrafa for Flex in Action

Juan Sanchez from ScaleNine just posted another great example on the Degrafa blog that showcases some of the power of Degrafa (Declarative Graphics Framework). Juan also talks briefly about how Degrafa works to help close the designer/developer gap.

Degrafa: A declarative graphics framework for Flex.

This blog has been silent lately (promise I’ll get back to cool components soon). However I have not been without thoughts or work on what could/will benefit the Flex community.

Flex 2.0 Samples and Source Restored

Last night sometime during the wee hours here but peak hours for the western hemisphere, my hosts server crashed and crashed big. They had to rebuild the server and every sample app this blog points to on that server became corrupted.

Flex 2.0.1 Rating Component

Allot of online applications today presenting anything from news, to photos, to video all have a public rating feature. So here is a component that can serve as a really good start.