This is a post I stumbled upon only a couple of weeks ago and really just want to point to it again and reiterate ALL of what is said here.

Coming from the dynamic "language" ColdFusion into "semi strict" AS2 and now AS3 it seemed at first that the compiler was NOT my friend. I have now come full circle and absolutely love the "strictness" of AS3. Sure you write more code but the pay off IS worth it.

The compiler certainly is your friend and should NOT be kept in the dark by using Object as "Data Buckets" etc. (See Paul Williams post Compilers have feelings too) Do the extra "leg work" and make you own data types (VO's etc) and cast anything that returns an Object to that type.

This for example

where model.currentProduct is of Type ProductVO and the returned value from selectedItem (Object) gets cast to ProductVO now the compiler is your friend

I have always liked the way that the Apple iPod scrolls labels that are too long to be read. Flex components have tooltips which do this job admirably but in the interests of getting my head around extending Flex components I thought this an easy yet useful experiment.

View it here

Source here

Question: I want the "truncateToFit" boolean (inherited from mx.controls.Label) to false in my ScrollingLabel constructor because I never want to clip the text and add the dots to it. How do I set up my component do that and no longer show the "truncateToFit" in code hints in Flex Builder. It is irrelevant what the developer wants to set it to because I always set it to false.

It just occurs to me that this may be a sign that I am doing this all wrong.

This is part four in a series. You can read the rest of the posts here, here and here.

Phase three of the application is here.

Its amazing what a bit of outside input can add to these experiments. After a long conversation with Chris Power at Six Degrees Creative we removed the pop up window mechanism of the last version and redesigned the layout. Chris, if he has the time, may help steer this baby to completion design wise.

The other advance is my custom scrolling label to display text that doesn't fit. Flex has Tool tips that appear but I love this functionality on the iPod and wanted to try to recreate it in Flex. Extending the existing label control to add the functionality I wanted was not to hard at all.

I will post the code for my ScrollingLabel component soon.

This is part three in a series. You can read the first, posts here and here. You can see phase one of my application here

Phase two is here.

Phase two utilises the Flex Scheduling Component to show the movie sessions in time and space. Clicking the movie launches an overlay displaying the movie details, preview and ticket purchase form.

This is really my first foray into trying out the Flex effects in an attempt to give some "style" to the application and move away from the vanilla Flex components.

As with other Flex projects I have undertaken my biggest concern always revolves around UI design and once again I reach for my "Designing Interfaces?" book.

P.S. - The movie schedule is totally random in that it is built internally from an XML file containing movie meta data including the movie duration. Therefore you probably won't see the same schedule even when you revisit the same day. Obviously a real life application would load real data.

This is part two in a series. You can read the first, brief, post here. You can see phase one of my application here

My first shot at this doesn't really have much going for it UI wise and obviously a lot of the functionality of the existing html Cinema application is not there.

The big thing to take into account is that it was quite literally less than a couple of hours work. That includes building even this demo on Cairngorm.

I spent more time finding , downloading and encoding the trailers into FLV format.

Version two of this application will use the Flex Schedule Framework to layout the timetable and I spent Friday afternoon digging into that code base and building my own renderers etc. Stay tuned