Flex components galore…they just keep coming….
Wow the past few weeks have seen all sorts of component releases and cool demos. I guess everyone had a chance to play over the holiday period. What is really encouraging is that most are releasing the source on something that they arent ever going to release and support.
One Set of really ecouraging components that is going to go comercial and be supported is Michael Schmalles set. He hasnt released all of the components yet as he is working hard on getting everything up to scratch in terms of support and documentation. I have been keeping an eye on FlexComponets list and I see that he is putting alot of work into intergrating them into the flex core. He even has a desktopesk group of components that I love the look of, but go check out his blog to see some of the cool things going on
James Ward and a couple of mates have shown how to use a framework called Turbo Gears. Its very Ruby on rails like but in Python. Was an interesting watch. They created a Conponent using Ely's DisplayShelf comonent. How cool would it be to see that as iChat using streamed video!!
Check out his blog post for more details on how he went about building it with a crowd of spectators watching thier every keystroke lol.
Code Zen posted an article that got me interested with using a nicely rendered TileList. He also have a few other good posts there one of which showing how they completely covered someones office in TinFoil (thats Kiwi for Aluminium Foil).
Then Tom Lee broke out a pearla of a post in textHighlighting. I love this one as I use this all the time in FireFox. Nice work Tom!
And they kept coming with a post from ScaleNine showing a vista theme for Flex. Uber sexc!
Finally the flex team release a new component….or rather a set of components for having dockable control panels. There is also a nice flow Container in the source aswell. The dockable control panel can be moved around in a toolbar or dragged out to be its own panel.
So I thought I would just highlight these few things and show some pretty pictures. Im really excitied about what I think will be a great year for the Flex framework. If you have seen any other cool things in your travels please leave a comment and point me to it.
I’ve been considering releasing a new web site to support Flex components, based on CFLib. I really think we need a nice place to aggregate and store these, focusing on just the ones that are open and free.
“How cool would it be to see that as iChat using streamed video!!”
A while back I pulled some YouTube videos into Ely’s DisplayShelf:
http://www.jamesward.org/youtubeWidget/youtubeWidget.html
There are a few bugs, but if you have plenty of bandwidth it usually works, even playing a video on a titled pane. Not quite iChat, but still fun.
-James
Hi,
Ray, I have read a lot of your posts and since you posted this here I just want to say something.
Sometimes I feel as a ‘commercial’ flex component developer I get discriminated against. What I do seems not to ‘benefit’ the community because I am not giving it away as open source.
For the record, this is the way I look at it. You consult for money I assume, I consult by selling very robust and functionally supported flex components.
I am in my late 20’s an by no means have made it by the standards of, open source is a road I could actually take right now and support my self as a component developer. Thats right, I want to be a component developer not an application developer.
It just seems there are not enough places where people can read a line from me saying, “I love helping, even creating frameworks for others to use, but commercial flex components is a viable consulting route that has it’s purpose.”
Rambling aside, I wish I had time to donate time I don’t have right now to open source projects and make myself look humanitarian, but the fact is what I do counts no less then a flex consultant or a flex developer making a good living at what they do well.
Peace, Mike
Mike: I love the idea that your components will be comercail because that means they will be well supported documented and have continuing development. And a brothers gotta get paid for that! And the money of the components is far cheaper than reproducing them from scratch so it all works out.
Ray:Yeah I see the Adobe boys and girls push the exchange as the place to share these sorts of things….but really I like to see big demos and and I think the exchange isnt that well suited for browsing and looking at eye candy. Why focus on CFLibe based components to (I realise why but I am more suggesting go for a wider view).
Mike – good point. You know – the size of such a library would be a bit small now so maybe it does make sense to include all. I’d just like to have some kind of obvious filter in the search for example so folks can quickly filter on free stuff.
Campbell – Yeah, I’m not a big fan of the Devex. I stopped using it like 5-6 years ag when it got way too slow to be useful. I disagree though about components being too small perhaps. I think a site focused on them could be very useful.
Btw – I found a pretty bad bug with this site. I provided a bad CAPTCHA (my fault obvious). I got a JS alert and I was then sent to the blog home page. I wasn’t offered a chance to fix it. Thankfully I had my comment in history so i didn’t lose it.
Ray,
Just to be clear here, I wasn’t really talking about not being included in an ‘open source’ web site. I mean, that really doesn’t make sense. If it’s aimed at open source, how many people are going to go to a site like that and want to buy commercial components?
It’s my job in the near future to create a place like what you are talking about for commercial components and help other component developers like myself. While at the same time enabling them to get their works of art out that pay the bills.
What I was really referring to was some comments I have gotten in the past 6 months about me not ‘donating’ code to the community. Thus, when potential customers read comments from others that truly do not understand what the commercial market place is for and who see open source as the fix all for humanity, it is misdirection relative to my own efforts.
Anyway, open source is great and having it all together enables learning, this I know. Most of the time I am not into it because I feel guilty about using it and not contributing.
Peace, Mike
To be clear Mike, I’m definitely _not_ in the “OS is Gold” camp. I think anyone who says they use OS only because it is OS is someone I wouldn’t want to work with. You should _NOT_ let folks give you flak for not OSing stuff. It is a personal choice someone makes, and shoot, OSing stuff can lend to a lot of work (support) which can really drain your time for paying work.
So it sounds like we both may make a site.
Which is cool I say. Nothing like having multiple options available for folks.
Ray-why not just add this functionality onto RIAForge?