After quite a bit of work, I’m relieved to present a beta release for the next version of my TreeMap component for Flex. It took me a while, but I reworked much of the core item renderer code to optimize performance, improve maintenance tasks, and generally make it a better component for everyone to use. For full details, visit the TreeMap project page and grab the new build from the downloads section. The package is marked 2.0.0 BETA.
One of the features I’d like to highlight is the new header renderer. The most obvious change is the new zoom button. Because the headers may be selected (when the branchesSelectable property is set to true), a separate zoom button is needed to differentiate these actions. Additionally, you might notice another interesting change in the example linked below. Choose the “Slice-and-Dice” layout, and you’ll see that some of the headers have a little arrow after any text that gets truncated. Roll the mouse over the header, and it will grow with animation to its optimal size, revealing the full text and the zoom button. A drop shadow makes it pop out a bit to help differentiate the header from the surrounding component. With particularly complex data providers, this feature helps usability enormously because the headers often become very small, which hides parts of the text and the icons on the zoom buttons too.
As with all beta software, a word of warning. This component is not completely tested, the documentation is obviously incomplete, and you should use this in production apps at your own risk. I did my best to get everything stable, but obviously, this is the very first release of some new code, so I know there will be bugs. If you’re feeling adventurous, though, I hope it works well for you. Should you see any strange behavior, please file a bug report so that I can make the next release better! If you have any questions, send them to the new flextreemap discussion group I set up recently so that others can learn too.
Monday, May 26th, 2008
Some personal news for you all. Today’s my last day at Yahoo!. I’ve had an awesome time building cool Flash and Flex components and I’m honored to have been able to shape the best practices and directions taken with ActionScript here under the purple banner. Contributing to the Astra and YUI libraries and helping to expand and improve the Flash Developer Center has been a lot of fun. I’m excited to continue watching what new and interesting open source projects come out of the talented minds at Yahoo! long after I’m gone.
Where am I going now? Next week, I’ll start working full time with Clint and Ben and all the great folks at ESRIA. Besides coding in the trenches on various projects there, I plan to continue contributing to the open source Flash and Flex community as much as possible. Keep your eyes on my blog for more details as I get settled in. I have some cool ideas for applications, components, libraries, and all sorts of fun stuff. ESRIA digs my community contributions, and I’ll definitely have a lot more time to work on a wide range of interesting projects thanks to their support. I’m excited!
Friday, May 16th, 2008
But seriously, where are the docs and compiler support for the new and exciting beta of Flash Player 10? I watched the video, and I looked at what is probably the only Flash 10 SWF on the web from the demo page on Adobe Labs. What else can I do? I couldn’t seem to get the the “Download Source” buttons to work at all, and now I’m getting frustrated! There’s a new Flash Player, and I want to play! I need API docs and a new playerglobal.swc to do it. Let me write some code and run it, damnit!
Yours truly,
Every Flash developer on the planet
UPDATE: Targeting Flash Player 10 Beta with Flex SDK 3.0.x
UPDATE 2: Lee Brimelow made a Video Tutorial on Compiling for Flash Player 10
UPDATE 3: Download the Flash Player 10 API Documentation. Courtesy of Lee Brimelow again.
Wednesday, May 14th, 2008
Grab the open source goodness known as Astra 1.2 from the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center and read all about the new 1.2 release on the Yahoo! Flash Blog. This release includes updates to the Flash components, the removal of the Flex Maps hack from the Web APIs library (use the new Yahoo! Maps AS3 API instead), and the addition of the new Astra Utilities library.
Looking over the release notes, I realize that I made loads of contributions to this release. In particular, here are some highlights:
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Charts now support legends! This is a much needed feature that just required a bit of time to get right.
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Some cool new additions to LineCharts. I’ll be writing a blog post highlighting some of these new features soon.
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Layout containers should be a big help to many projects. I’ve seen time and again Flex developers doing an AS3 project and complaining that there are no layout controls available in Flash CS3. Now you’ve got HBoxPane, VBoxPane, FlowPane, TilePane, and BorderPane at your disposal.
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A lightweight Animation class. Yeah, I know, why do we need another tween library? We probably don’t, but when I wrote it, nothing else quite fit my needs. This actually got released in 1.1 as part of the charts, but now that we’ve got a library for generic utilities, I can give it a proper moment in the spotlight.
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The layout utility provides the core framework used by the Flash CS3 layout containers. The purpose of this library is to allow component developers to build layout containers for any component set a bit more easily. Please read the documentation on YDN if you want to learn more. I explain the layout utility in much more detail over there.
Again, grab all the new downloads from the Yahoo! Flash Developer Center. All of our releases are available under the terms of the new BSD license, so enjoy! If you have any questions, comments, bug reports, or feature requests, please post them to the ydn-flash list.
Monday, May 12th, 2008
