I’ve been working on a Flex radio button component that will allow users to select nested options.  The control accepts an XMLList as the data source for the button options, and expands to show nested buttons beneath selected options according the data passed in to it. The nest level of radio buttons is essentially infinite.

The best way to understand it is to take a look.

Live Example     View Source

For the moment, this is only a proof-of-concept version of the control. The control has 2 values to indicate selected values. One is bottomValue which holds only the value of the bottom-most selected radio button. The other is fullValue which holds a comma separated list of values beginning with the top-most value and ending with the bottom-most value.

With this version of the component, you can also pass in an initial bottomValue and the control will select all of the parent radio buttons recursively and accurately fill in the fullValue field.

Flex developers: Check out the control and let me know what you think! If there is significant interest, I’ll work on revising the component to feel more like a native Flex Framework control and add some additional features to it. It’s usable as is, but needs work to polish it up before it can used efficiently and reliably in a live Flex application.

Adobe Flex

Mint.com just informed me that my monthly donation to Feed The Children was deducted from my checking account and that they "..hate those!"   Check out the screen capture of the email:

stuff

Have you seen Google's new keyword tool?  I'm surprised I haven't read more about it throughout the affiliate blogosphere. Anyway, If you haven't seen it yet, check it out:  http://www.google.com/sktool

Google

Have you ever had a Windows Update run on your computer, and soon after your favorite application starts acting funny, or just plain freezes entirely? If you run Windows I can just about guarantee this has happened to you.

A quick solution to this is to remove the patches/updates Windows just dropped on you. To find which updates were just installed on your windows machine you can look in the Windows update log located at %windir%\Windowsupdate.log and try to decipher WTF it means, or you can use this script and generate an easy-to-read one:

--------------------------------------------------------------------

dir c:\windows\*.log /o:d | findstr /i /r /c:q......\.log /c:kb......\.log /c:q......uninst\.log /c:kb......uninst\.log > c:\TimeLine.log
pause

-------------------------------------------------------------------

Just copy the text between the dashed lines above into a new notepad file and save it as "UpdateLog.bat" somewhere on your machine. Then double-click the file to run it, and viola! - you'll have an easy to read log located at c:\timeline.log containing all the information you'll need to find and kill the windows update that is messing with your application.

The file will have the date & time the update was installed, and the name of the update.  Just find the newest ones that were installed (it will be ordered oldest to newest and top to bottom), open up Add/Remove Programs, and uninstall the offending "patch" with the matching kb number.

Microsoft

I made a new example showing 3 ways to pop-up HTML content with Flex 3.2. You can view the example here:

Demo: http://www.brentlamborn.com/examples/popup/

Source: http://www.brentlamborn.com/examples/popup/srcview/index.html

I also posted an article over at the Flex Cookbook.

Adobe Flex

I hope everyone had a great Christmas! For me, one of the most rewarding parts of Christmas is giving to those who are less fortunate than I. Having traveled to the Horn of Africa with the Marines over a decade ago, I experienced the plight of the people there (especially the children)  first hand. Because of that experience ( see photos) I choose to give to the Abandoned Babies and Children Center which is an organization that is in the process of helping babies and children in Kenya right now. Now I'd like to encourage you to help as well!

I know it's not why you or your friends give, but time is running out to take advantage of the tax benefits of your 2008 charitable giving. The deadline for tax benefits on 2008 returns is days away and abandoned babies need help now. What better time than the start of a New Year to invest in a child's future? Babies unlucky enough to be born in one of the poorest places on earth need help just to survive. You can help provide everything an abandoned baby needs to grow and thrive. Plus, you'll get a tax break in April.

You can give as little as $5 so why not give now and help children and babies!

stuff

I recently ran across a question in a Flex forum from a visitor asking how to embed YouTube videos inside Flex . The solution is very simple. Since the YouTube player is a Flash object itself,  we can simply use the SWFLoader object to load the Youtube video into our Flex app. You just need to copy the embed code on the YouTube page for the video you want to embed in your application. It will look like this:

<object width="425" height="344"><param name="movie" 

value="http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1">

</param><param name="allowFullScreen" value="true">

</param><param name="allowscriptaccess" value="always">

</param><embed src=http://www.youtube.com/v/zlfKdbWwruY&hl=en&fs=1

 type="application/x-shockwave-flash" 

allowscriptaccess="always" allowfullscreen="true" 

width="425" height="344"></embed></object> 

Then just grab the URL to the video from the embed code and use it as the source property for your SWFLoader.  I created a working sample here with view source enabled.

Adobe Flex

This is an excellent video detailing the lifecycle of Adobe Flex components. Unless you are an expert Flex dev, you are almost certain to hear a tip that will improve your applications efficiency by watching it. I really wish I would have known even just some of the information in this video before beginning work on my recent projects. I'm including it here on my blog for my own reference, as well as any Flex devs that happen upon my other Flex posts. It's about an hour long - but well worth the time!

Adobe Flex