January 22, 2009

Download Flight Effect

Imagine an airplane that takes off the ground, flies across a distance and lands at an arbitrary destination. This post will explain how to do the same in Flex, using the Flight effect, which you can download here.

Before I explain any further, take a look at a running example. I’ve taken the Cairngormstore and added the Flight effect to the point when the user wants to add a product to his shopping cart. Simply click on the “Add to Cart” button to see the effect playing.

The key here is that the product doesn’t immediately appear in the shopping cart DataGrid control as the user presses the “Add to Cart” button. Instead, the Flight effect animates the product into the shopping cart control. Download it here.

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Posted by auhlmann at 07:54 PM | Comments (0)

Lighted Distortion Effects and Tour de Flex

There’s a slightly updated version of the distortion effects shipping with the amazing Tour de Flex AIR application (flex.org/tour). This update adds another feature that our User Experience team found “adding to reality”. Lighting!

Lighting works on all effects supplied. Here’s how it looks like on CubeRotate:

But see all the effects in action from this example. Download it here directly.

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Posted by auhlmann at 07:36 PM | Comments (0)

March 05, 2007

Distortion Effects - Updated

Here’s a new version of the distortion effects.

Thanks for all your tremendous feedback on the previously released distortion effects. Some of that feedback is now included in this updated version. This version adds various features and updates. Here’s an excerpt:

Exceed Bounds

Much of the feedback I’ve received was about making the flip effect more realistic. The hint was to let its bounds overlap while the flip effect is coming towards the user. (flipping in). The new exceedBounds property on the Flip effect does exactly that and is now turned on by default!

Pop mode UP

The Pop effect now has an additional mode. The default mode is DOWN, which pops a display object off a stack/pile, away from the user. The new UP mode pops it towards the user.

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Posted by auhlmann at 12:37 AM | Comments (160)

February 12, 2007

Creating a Popup in a Cairngorm Architecture

Often I see this question coming up:

"How should I best create a popup in my Cairngorm application?"

I think of creating a popup control as something only views should be concerned about. It’s like creating other view components, managing states of view components or effects. Therefore this question isn't just about creating popups, instead it's about how to invoke methods that belong to the view. (BTW: I often hear from our User Experience team that they try to prevent popups where possible)

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Posted by auhlmann at 02:02 PM | Comments (22)

February 04, 2007

Best Practice: Code Behind versus MXML Script Blocks versus View Helper

Often I see the question coming up on whether to use MXML Script blocks, Code Behind or Helper classes.

I think the question behind the question we're addressing here is not whether to use Code Behind, MXML Script blocks or View Helpers, but is actually where is it best to place functionality in a Flex application.

But first of all, let’s have a quick rundown on what Code Behind, View Helper and MXML Script blocks actually are:

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Posted by auhlmann at 10:56 AM | Comments (12)

November 03, 2006

Download Distortion Effects – From MAX 2006

For everyone who couldn’t attend my MAX presentation in Las Vegas, here is the presentation as PDF. Furthermore, I’ve released the complete source code for every effect shown.

And here is the Flex 2.0.1 version.

Behind the scenes, these effects are using the DistortImage utility from the open source 3D Engine Sandy. Make sure you check out Sandy if you haven’t yet! The effects included are called Flip, CubeRotate, Push, Pop, Door and Gate. But instead of talking about them, just see them in action for yourself:

Distortion Effects

This sample application lets you play with all effects available. You can also see different configurations, i.e. try enabling the blur checkbox.

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Posted by auhlmann at 01:08 AM | Comments (106)

September 28, 2006

Using Binding Securely

In my last post about the Cairngorm Dashboard example I’ve added a little functionality that allowed a view to react to a state change in the model in order to do something view related like invoking a popup or an effect.

I’ve been using the binding approach and that made it very easy and flexible to do. But as I said in my last post, this can have one slight drawback you have to consider. In this post I’ll showcase the drawback and provide a solution to it via an extended version of Paul’s Observe tag. Furthermore, this extended version of Observe makes it even easier to perform this kind of listening to the model.

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Posted by auhlmann at 11:58 AM | Comments (17)

Cairngorm Sample – How Business Logic Can Manage Views Part IV

In the last post about this topic, I’ve added some functionality and another use case to our stock quote application and showcased how a Cairngorm application could scale with focusing on creating model objects. In this post I’ll perform some further refactorings to our model objects.

Furthermore, our customer wants us to show a pop-up as soon as a successful stock purchase is being made. I’ll cover how a state change in your model can transparently cause view related code (like creating a pop-up) to be executed.

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Posted by auhlmann at 11:15 AM | Comments (13)

September 08, 2006

MAX 2006: Leveraging Flex 2 and Flash Player 9 for Truly Cinematic Experiences

As MAX 2006 in Las Vegas is coming closer and it’s shaping up to be a fascinating conference. I’m talking about

Leveraging Flex 2 and Flash Player 9 for Truly Cinematic Experiences

and I’d like to give you more information where this will be about, in hope you consider joining my session!

I’ll talk about how cinematic effects can dramatically improve the user experience of a Rich Internet Application and can contribute significantly to the success of how your RIA will translate the experience that your costumer wants to deliver.

You will see new types of effects and learn best practices toward their use and creation.

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Posted by auhlmann at 10:35 AM | Comments (6)

July 20, 2006

Cairngorm Sample – How Business Logic Can Manage Views Part III

The goal of this series is to demonstrate how you can manage views with investing in your client side business logic.

The previous posts (part 1, part 2) were primarily about the infrastructure of a very simple single and multiple view dashboard application. This and the following posts will add further functionality to the application with the indent to demonstrate how your model objects become a focus point of your application.

In particular, we'll add validation logic, formatting logic and an additional use case.

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Posted by auhlmann at 11:47 AM | Comments (7)