Juicability

Flex Strangeness - Part One: Setting openDuration to 0 on Menu will break Alert.show()

After getting some complaints that the tween effect when displaying a menu in Flex looked ‘flex-default-n00bish’ I went on a quest to remove it.

I found out that I could set the duration of the tween to zero by doing a menu.setStyle("openDuration", 0) - thus removing the effect. That worked fine, but later I noticed that an Alert in my application didn’t show anymore. It turned out that it was the style change on the menu that caused this.

What happens is that the whole application is blurred - but no modal dialog is shown. So, the whole application is freezed. This is how it looks on my machine:

Check it out for yourself here (source view is enabled btw). Just click the menu button, and then select any menu item.

Welcome to my blog :-)

Here I’ll talk about Adobe Flex, usability and juice. Perfect combo huh?

I recommend listening to my feed to get an update when I publish something, since it’s probably not going to be regulary ;-).

If you’re just starting out with Flex I recommen these resources:

• Flex 2 Language Reference (API): http://livedocs.macromedia.com/flex/2/langref/index.html
• Flex Cookbook: http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/communityengine/index.cfm?event=homepage&productId=2
• Creating a simple layout (tutorial): http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/quickstart/creating_states/
• Flex Development Center: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/?tab:quickstart=1
• Flex 2 Sample Applications: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flex/index.html?tab:samples=1#adobesamples

Also, for inspiration check out the flickr page with screenshots of flex apps - and have a test-run with the Flex Style Explorer and the Flex Component Explorer.