How to format Date object in a custom way or using locale

When you want to format your Date object in Actionscript instead of building string on your own (using getDay() and other functions provided by Date object) you can use Date Formatters. Unfortunately there are

Adobe AIR mobile app - how to get screen orientation?

In my recent project I had to get current screen orientation in my mobile app. How can you do this in Flex? I believe there are many ways to achieve that but here is my solution.

GraphUtil - class for setting brightness and grayscale in Image

Recently in one of my projects I needed to change brightness in image that was in Spark Image control. It got me some time to find the best solution to do that. Finally I made my own class - GraphUtil. This class use ColorMatrixFilter to do all the magic. This is

Wrapper class for RemoteObject

In my projects I use AMF connections very often. In my of my previous posts I showed you PHP class and some Actionscript code that connects to it (LINK). This code is fine when you have very simple application, but in bigger projects it's very handy to write a wrapper class for handling AMF connections. Let's start with

How to watch Bindable vars in Actionscript code

Bindable vars can be watched by the MXML components - but what if we want to see in Actionscript code if bindable var is changed? Is there any way to do that? Of course there is! The class we need is mx.binding.utils.ChangeWatcher. Unfortunately this class has many downsides and generally works worse than binding in MXML, but nevertheless it's still quite useful. As usual let's start with the

Quick way to invoke pop up window

In my last post (LINK) I showed you how to invoke a pop up window from your app. I did this by creating an instance of PopUpWindow class in my main app and then center it on current DisplayObject. I want to show you simpler and more robust way to achieve that.

Communication with pop up window (callback & custom event)

Pop up windows are very handy components, especially for showing some important information to user. But this is only communication in one way, what if we want to get data back from user? We can put some controls to retrieve input from user in pop up window (TextArea for instance), but how this data could be transferred to main application?

Skinning in Spark - how to get the default skin?

Flex 4 introduced Spark components skinning - very powerful but at the same time quite overwhelming capability. I think the best idea is to edit default component skin instead of creating your own from the scratch. The big question is - how can you get this default skin?