O’Reilly: Inside RIA

I'm as excited as anyone about the prospect of Flash Catalyst, but I recently discovered that skinning in Flex 3 is down right easy. When I first was learning Flex, I had Studio 8, so I managed to completely overlook...

Here's a trick combining graphics filters with Google maps for some interesting effects. They don't necessarily make it easier to read the maps, nor do they have a lot of value, but they look interesting, and are fun to play with. I can't claim this idea as my own. I just randomly stumbled across this post on axismaps.com, and figured I'd throw together a Flex example showing how to do it.

Flash Player's display API offers three different tools for hiding display objects from the screen: the visible variable, the alpha variable, and the removeChild() method. All three tools achieve the same end result—hiding a graphic—but each tool serves a different structural need. Hence, there is no single answer to the question "Should I hide graphics with visible, alpha, or removeChild()?" Instead, developers must choose the approach that suits the task at hand based on a variety of factors. Before we consider those factors, let's take a look at visible, alpha, and removeChild() in action.

Since diving back into PaperVision3D in my last post, I've been having some fun playing with 3D concepts. I forgot how cool 3D visualizations can be, but at the same time, they can get really confusing and really complicated very quickly. At the same time as they are getting complicated and confusing, they also start creating abstract shapes that are intriguing.

With all this talk about Astro, and PixelBender, it made me think more about graphics filters. So, I thought I'd revisit them. A few months back, I did a series on graphics tricks. This time, I'm sticking to the good old filters (not the shiny new ones in PixelBender), and decided to focus on displacement map filters. Basically, the displacement map filter displaces the pixels of a component, based on the bitmap data that is passed into the filter.

One of the most important aspects of delivering a rich user experience is what a user sees and interacts with on the screen. Graphics, whether static or dynamic, comprise the face of an application. Static graphics can definitely suffice for creating the necessary visual parts of an application, but to change them you must replace them with other static graphics. Dynamic graphics, created with programmatic drawing are very powerful because it can be manipulated at run-time, but it can involve more advanced knowledge of the Drawing API. Degrafa is a declarative graphics framework that aims to offer the best of both worlds.

I've discussed graphics filters previously, and here's a trick to use them to extend the capabilities of basic Flex controls. In this example, graphics filters will be used to alter the appearance of a basic tree control. I've run into this scenario numerous times... How can you change the appearance of tree folder icons to imply meaning to the branches of the tree?

If you are a Flex developer, and you haven't checked out Degrafa yet, you should. Degrafa is an open source declarative graphics framework for Flex. It allows you to easily create complex shapes, patterns, skins, gradients, strokes, etc... without intimate knowledge of the drawing API. The framework allows you to do some really cool things, without a lot of code. Here's a quick example of what can be done with a Flex datagrid, Degrafa, and some time to kill.

At MIX08 in Las Vegas, Microsoft announced and released a couple of new products, including Beta 1 of Silverlight (and O'Reilly announced and released Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date). Silverlight, however, comes in several downloads, and it is a bit difficult to keep track of all of them, so we'll have a look at what you can and what you should download.

An XML editor would be enough to create Silverlight applications…but who would want to do just that? Instead, we'll examine three different kinds of Silverlight tools: XML editors, vector graphics editors, and Silverlight IDEs. Introducing Silverlight Tools is a chapter from O'Reilly Media's Essential Silverlight 2 Up-to-Date by Christian Wenz, released this week.

One of the key concepts for a RIA is that it has to be rich. This could be rich content, rich interactivity, or a combination of the two. The extent of the richness of the application directly ties to an emotional response when using the application. We always want that to be a good response, otherwise that application that you spent a lot of time and effort creating will be dead before you know it.

Here's the third installment of my mini-series on Flex graphics tricks. These do not only apply to Flex, they apply to Flash as well. My particular focus here is using graphics filters within a Flex application. Graphics filters allow you to perform bitmap-level effects on any DisplayObject... thus any object that can be displayed in Flex. Filters enable everything from blurs, glows, and dropshadows all the way to color processing, sharpening, and edge detection. This sounds very daunting, however they are really pretty easy to get started with.

Here's the second installment of my mini-series on Flex graphics tricks. The first one was about using masks with Flex objects to create interesting effects. There are lots of cool thingsthat you can do with masks, but this time I am going to focus on graphics blend modes.