« December 2005 | Main | February 2006 »

January 26, 2006

FlashLite 2.0 app: Stock Charts using the Drawing API

FlashLite 2.0 offers quite a bit in terms of better mobile application development. Trying out the new features, I've created the following application which provides stock quotes for any stock the user enters and charts the historic prices of that stock, which you're free to download and try out either on your PC or your FlashLite 2.0 enabled phone. Some of the great things about FlashLite 2.0 that I appreciated include the following:

• Speed of development: Being able to use ActionScript 2.0 for this project cut my development time to being able to complete this in under 10 hours.


• Drawing API: I love the drawing API and it's great to use it in mobile development. Particularly in this app, I'm able to download under 3K of data points in order to plot charts over the past year, 6 months, 3 months, and 5 days with great speed. The screenshot to right itself is over 16K (larger than the actual app). Image what four separate charts as images would be in size.


• UI Expressiveness: Although it's not a uniquely FlashLite 2.0 thing over FlashLite 1.1, nothing beats Flash for great expressiveness and great UIs.

So, without further ado, to download the swf, which will run on both your PC or your FlashLite 2.0 enabled mobile device ... CLICK HERE.

Posted by Peter Baird at 11:55 AM | Comments (9)

January 23, 2006

How To: Flex Style Explorer's Glossy Panels

Several people have asked how the glossy panels on the Flex Style Explorer were done, and while I've attempted to explain it in the comments, I thought I'd go a step further and include source code for such a design, rather than attempting to explain it again in words.

So, included is an mxml file showing a styled panel with the appropriate asset for the reflection.

Click here to download the mxml and asset

Posted by Peter Baird at 9:40 AM | Comments (0)

January 2, 2006

Yahoo Maps + Coldfusion = Dynamic Marker Example

While it's nothing ground-breaking, I wanted to show a quick example of how to create a Yahoo Map with dynamic markers using coldfusion and LoadVars() in Flash. The coldfusion script pulls the data from an SQL database and passes it on to the flash app to plot as many markers as there are data entries. It may not be the cleanest, but it's a quick solution.

I've also included a text file, in case you don't have coldfusion and a database set up, that would be similar to what might be passed on to the flash app. So, you can also play around with the text file if you don't want to set up a database and coldfusion.

UPDATE: I've included another swf for those without Flash authoring. This swf points to the cfm file for everything, including the app-ID. Also, the map auto-centers inself based on the first address in the events.

Click here to download the file..

Click here to download the .fla-less swf and cfm. (no flash authoring required)

Posted by Peter Baird at 12:53 PM | Comments (1)