Ben Pritchard has posted a great article on using reflection with ActionScript 3 for Flash CS3. This is not only easy to do (using the included source code he provides) but generates that “WOW” factor that is all so important sometimes. I highly recommend reading his article at:

Read it here

Yes, that is my new toy

For Flex developers, there is a Reflector class that has been around for quite a while which I have used in a few applications and received great applause. More information on the Flex Reflector class is available here.

The MAX 2007 North America (Chicago, IL Sept 30 - Oct 3) early bird special is ending on July 23rd so you have only a few days left to take advantage of this. Sign up now as this years MAX is shaping up to be a whole new beast with speakers who have never been a part of MAX in the past due to conflicting ideals on what MAX stands for. MAX has gotten a face lift thanks to Ted Patrick who has been working very hard to change the face of MAX to once again be focussed on the community as it once was when it began as Alaire’s DevCon.

Remember, please be sure to check the box on step 3 and enter my name
“Rich Tretola” in the community leader text box. Please see the image below.
Click here to register.

There has been some confusion over windows within an AIR application. The original alpha had a class named NativeWindow that is in the flash.display package. The sample code to create a NativeWindow looks something like this:

If you look at the function above you will notice that the component I added was a simple flask TextField from the flash.text package. This is noteworthy as because the window is a NativeWindow it can include components from the flash namespace but not the mx namespace. So, I could not put new Button() within the newWindow.stage.addChild() method and expect it to work.

So, with the AIR beta came the Window class which falls under mx.core. So, what does this mean? You guessed it, you can now easily include components from the mx namespace in your AIR windows. Here is an example of a file named MyWindow.mxml:

Here is the code to create an instance of the MyWindow class.

Keep in mind that the NativeWindow class is still very useful and is lighter weight than the Window class. I hope this clears up any confusion. If you find that something I said here was incorrect or have something to add, please comment.

As promised Jens has posted the WSPatterStyleGenerator to transform background patterns to a CSS style for use within Flex applications (See my Pure CSS Flex Backgrounds post for more information).

So with my little testing of this cool utility, you can create a CSS style for any image that is less than 250 x 250 in size and has 16 or less colors. The WSPatternStyleGenerator can be see here.