Allmas

Back to School! I decided to take the Adobe's Flex in a Week training course to refresh and improve my Flex expertise. I even decided to start from Day 1 to make sure I don't miss anything!

Videos are funny and can help you learn faster, but they are not searchable. So I started making notes while watching the videos and I will be sharing them with the community. The notes are in no way a replacement for the videos, they are incomplete and only contain information that I, personally, find important.

Every time I finish a day in the course, I will post a link to the corresponding Google Notebook page I created.

My notes about Day 1: Flex Basics are here.

If you have any comments about the notes, please post them here.

It's been a long time since my last post. I was very busy with some projects and I have again some time for writing. I've learned a lot from these projects and I will try to write about what I learned, so stay tuned!

For now, I finally managed it to create my Portfolio, please take a look at it and don't hesitate to drop me a mail if you have any comments.

Adobe released the first beta of the new Text Layout Framework (TLF) for Flash Player 10 and AIR 1.5. Built on the new text engine of Flash Player 10, the framework offers advanced typographic and text layout features. It supports bidirectional and vertical text, multi-column layout, text flow around inline images, advanced antialiasing and transformations (alpha, rotation, etc.) for device fonts and much more.

Flex Gumbo, the next release of Flex, already includes the framework and offers text components that use it. Flex 3.2 and ActionScript developers can download the framework and use it to develop their own text components and classes. For Flash CS4 Professional users, Adobe offers an extension to integrate the framework in their projects.

Gumbo defines 3 new text primitives that take advantage of the new text functionality of the Flash Player 10 Text Engine: TextBox, TextGraphic and TextView. More information about them can be found in the following Gumbo features specification document: Text Primitives (TextBox, TextGraphic, and TextView).

To use embedded fonts with these text primitives, the fonts must be embedded in the Compact Font Format (CFF). This is achieved by setting the new property "cff" for font embedding to "true". Here are two examples on setting this property:

Using CSS

Using ActionScript

The text primitives also support the new style property "fontLookup", which sets the source where to lookup for fonts. This property can have two values:

• device : uses the fonts installed on the system that is running the SWF file
• embeddedCFF : uses font outlines embedded in the SWF

As you can guess, this property must be set to "embeddedCFF" :

Directly in the MXML tag

Using CSS

If you ever worked with regular expressions, you know how difficult and time consuming it is sometimes to create and test them. Ryan Swanson released the Flex 3 Regular Expression Explorer to help you with this task. The explorer allows you to create and test regular expressions instantly and find common ones published by himself or by the community. It also features a simple reference to the ActionScript 3 regualr expressions syntax. Thanks Ryan!