SuperPanelPlus: Resizable Flex Panel Component with Accessible Styling
The SuperPanel is an excellent component created by Wietse Veenstra. The styling is all hard-coded, and I need to be able to change this. It also hard-codes the event that is triggered on close, and I wanted to be able to control this. So I added the appropriate meta-tags and properties to enable these options. Here is the result, link to the source is at the bottom:
Updated: Continuous scrolling image thumbnail and slideshow component for Flex.
I've updated this component to allow for keyboard and forward/back navigation. I'm still improving it, refactoring, but it is almost finished.
Here is the original post.
Refactoring: Improving the Design of Existing Code
My code smells bad. There is no doubt about it. As soon as I read that metaphor my head was nodding with understanding. This book is a classic, and I recommend it to anybody that wants to improve their coding habits and create more flexible applications that don't make you sad and angry.
It is a thick volume, but 2/3s of the text is the catalog of refactorings. This makes the text describing the concepts of refactoring a relatively short read. Mr Fowler guides you through the process, providing a simple example and clearly explaining the thought processes involved. The catalog covers a wide range of common approaches to refactoring an application.
Continuous scrolling image thumbnail and slideshow component for Flex.
I've been working on improvements for this thumbnail/slideshow component. The way the continuous scroll flows is very nice. It provides a very fluid feel. I have it reading XML from SlideShowPro director. SSPD simply gives a structure of albums and images, so the component should work from essentially any XML source as long as it follows the same schema:
1 2 3 4 5 6 | <gallery> <album id="0" description="DESCRIPTION" title="TITLE" tn="PATH" lgpath="PATH" tnpath="PATH"> <img src="FILENAME" /> ... </album> </gallery> |
There is still a good bit of work to do. Right now the slideshow is coupled with the thumbnail container. I think that should be seperated, because I can see various uses for thumbnails outside of a slideshow. It needs style and event metadata so that it will function as a proper Flex component. I am also going to roll it into mediated PureMVC components for inclusion in VE:Session.
