Set Selected Color of LinkBar

We recently needed to set the selected color of a LinkBar item. This happens automagically if you are using it with a ViewStack, we however were using an Array for our dataprovider and for whatever reason, that is not supported. Fortunately I was able to find this little function to fix the problem. It basically loops through the children of your LinkBar. If the item clicked matches the current child in the loop it sets the style to your selected color. Code is below.

private function doLinkBar(event):void{
     for(var i:int=0; i<event.target.numChildren; i++){
      var curItem = event.target.getChildAt(i);
      i==event.index ? curItem.setStyle("color", 0x2a80d5) : curItem.setStyle("color", 0x000000);
     }
   }

tabIndex in Flex Popup Windows

This morning I had what seemed like a very simple task to complete, add a tab order to a small login form in an AIR app we're building. Several hours later I still had not accomplished this. I'm the first to admit that after a year or so of managing a team and not doing much hands on development my Flex skills are a bit rusty but this was ridiculous. The login form is in a modal popup window. Turns out that was m problem. When I would hit "Tab" the focus would jump back to the fields in the main application window. To fix this I created a FocusManager instance for the login screen and then activated it when the screen loaded. Once the screen was "activated" it held the focus while I tabbed through the form fields on that screen. Happy day. The FocusManager snippet is below, it's pretty simple, only two lines.

   //grab focus for the popup window so tabIndex works.
   var fm:FocusManager = new FocusManager(this);
   fm.activate();

My "frist" week at Knoware...an homage

On Friday I completed my "frist" week at Knoware. I say "frist" out of respect for my buddy Joe who helped get me this great new gig. He's a fantastic developer but he can't spell for shit :) After his first week he wrote a blog post entitled "My frist week at Knoware" so I thought I'd keep the tradition alive.

All in all I think it was a very good week. I'm learning quite a bit already. The most obvious change aside from the new office and people is the new laptop. I've made the switch from PC to Mac and so far I'm loving it. More about that in another post perhaps...

Another thing I've been learning is Cairngorm. We didn't use it at Crowe so I'm not too familiar. I started doing a little reading and watching some videos (davidtucker.net has started a fantastic series on Cairngorm that has been very helpful). So far I like what I see. I still haven't seen a full Cairngorm implementation but some of the design patterns I've looked at so far seem to make a lot of sense.

Anyway, I'm back at it tomorrow. God willing, things will continue to go well and I'll continue to learn a lot, and hopefully, get better at foosball...

I need a new phone

A few months ago the company I work for bought a Treo 700wx for me to use. Unfortunately when I did that I signed a 2 year service contract w/Verizon so they would get a good rate on the phone. Now I'm leaving my job and they want their phone back which leaves me stuck with a 2 year contract and no phone :(

Anybody know where to get decent phones on the cheap? I'd like to get another "business class" phone (Blackberry, Treo...) if possible but I don't have much money to blow on this.

A New Path

After a little over three great years with Crowe I've decided to head down a new path. In about two weeks I will be starting a new job at a local software studio called Knoware Those of you at MAX may recognize that name as my buddy Joe presented his AIR iPhone application at the Ribbit Inspire session on Monday. Unfortunately my timing is crap and I'm not able to attend MAX this year because I'm "in between" jobs. Oh well, there's always next year in San Francisco!

Dave Ramsey My TMMO Site Follow-up

After my post about the Dave Ramsey site using Flash/Flex I received a few comments from some of the developers on Dave's team. They pointed out that they are indeed using Flash/Flex and Coldfusion but what I thought was even cooler was the new fpuonline.daveramsey.com site. This is the complete Financial Peace University course offered online. The video player is built with Flex and it's pretty slick. Check it out, you can view the first lesson for free on the site.

Great work guys! If you're still watching, I responded to a couple of the other comments over at my TMMO blog.

Dave Ramsey Uses Flash/Flex

The wife and I are starting the Dave Ramsey Total Money Makeover program today to try to get ourselves out of debt and on the right track financially. I joined his website today and found something kind of cool, he uses Flash video for his video tutorials and intros which isn't too out of the ordinary but it looks like the online budgeting tool is built using Flex. I thought that was kind of cool, but then again, I'm easily amused.

If you're interested, I'm blogging our Total Money Makeover experience here.