Flick & Flack: The Flex Talk Guys

Columnists: Alex Harui and Gordon Smith

The Trouble with Embedded Fonts

Flick & Flack help out Deeptika, a Flex developer whose font is not behaving consistently. The font is used by a chart in the application, and when the font is embedded in a module together with the chart, the font doesn't work; it does work if everything is all together in the main application. What exactly is involved in embedding fonts, and how can you avoid the pitfalls Deeptika is facing? Flick & Flack's discussion will teach you a lot about Flex's font infrastructure.

Read the Introduction to "The Trouble with Embedded Fonts"

Master of Your Application Domain

Ryan has a Sprite that loads from a different SWF file which implements the IFlexDisplayObject interface. However, in the loading application, the expression mySWFLoader.content is IFlexDisplayObject returns false instead of true! How can that be? Flick and Flack to the rescue! Watch these two sleuths solve the mystery, delving into the ApplicationDomain class and how Ryan's application was affected by changes in the ApplicationDomain.

Read the Introduction to "Master of Your Application Domain"

Published in Flex Authority Volume 2 Issue 1

Ten Commandments of Component Layout

Flick & Flack discuss laying out your components biblical style! Will Flack's Thou Shalts and Thou Shalt Nots survive Flick's sharp critique? In this discussion on why some code did not render properly, Alex and Gordon delve deeply into how the compiler lays out and measures components, Flex and Flash APIs, and other rules that most Flex developers have to learn the hard way.

Published in Flex Authority Volume 1 Issue 2

The Component LifeCycle: Custom Component Recipe

The tough Flex questions have already been answered.. but finding those answers and understanding them is not easily done. Enter Flick & Flack. Alex Harui and Gordon Smith take an important question from the Flexcoders list and expound upon it, to your advantage. Their meandering conversation takes the subject to places, and explains it in ways, that you would never expect. In this issue, they cover the order in which Flex creates, validates and displays components, and how to use that to your best advantage.

The orginal Flexcoders question, from Amy Blankenship, can be found here: http://tech.groups.yahoo.com/group/flexcoders/message/110818.

Published in Flex Authority Volume 1 Issue 2