2010-02-19

Change mouse cursor on a Label control

Since I was using a Label control to display some HTML text (monetary amount with its appropriate currency symbol), I also wanted to use it to display a detail pop-up window. Easy enough just need to code a handler for the click event.

However there is no visual cue that tells you that the Label is click-able, like the mouse cursor changing to a hand. But there is a way, you can make it do this automatically when someone hovers over the Label control. Its not obvious, so here are the 3 properties you have to set:

<mx:Label buttonMode="true" useHandCursor="true" mouseChildren="false"/>

2010-02-16

Ottawa Flash User Group meeting

The Ottawa Flash User Group is holding their next meeting in a couple weeks; specifically on Wednesday March 3rd @ 7:00 PM EST. So if you are from Ottawa or the neighboring region (like Montreal for me), you should consider attending the event. I have in the past and you can see and learn some interesting things.

Full details and registration here.

2010-02-13

French accent characters in Flex

Just this past week we added support for the French language (fr_CA) to a Flex application we are building at work. Nothing complicated really, just had to make use of resource bundles as described in the Flex livedocs.

However we did notice that when running the Flex application, certain French characters that contain accents (ex.: é - ALT-130) were displaying as little empty boxes in the UI. Found the answer to this problem on this website. Basically the encoding for our french properties file was incorrect. It was using ISO-8859-1 instead of UTF-8.

To resolve this problem, in Eclipse, perform these steps:
  1. Right-click on your french properties file and select "Properties"
  2. Select "Resource" from the left side panel
  3. Change the "Text file encoding" from the default to "Other" and select "UTF-8"

2010-02-07

Flash Player truly brings web sites to life

I find as I browse the web everyday, it is sometimes easy to forget that the Flash Player is what breathes life into web sites all over the world.

On one website, I see an silent teaser playing for a upcoming movie. Turn on the sound for the teaser and you are transported to a fictional world, but only for a few seconds. Goto Youtube.com and the whole experience revolves around the Flash Player, enabling the user to view a music video he hasn't seen in years, watch a clip from a favorite movie or watch a short funny movie created by a friend.

For myself, I am big NFL fan and I love going to either nfl.com or espn.com and watching a pre-game show debate about my favorite team's upcoming game (Cowboys in case anyone in wondering) or watching a post-game review for that matter. Furthermore, because not all the Cowboy games are presented on a national cable channel, I have a way to watch those games on my computer via the web because of the Flash Player.

So next time you are browsing some website, look around the page, you won't see just static data like it used to be just 15 years ago, but a portion of it will be dynamic and that is thanks to the little plug-in that could.