We have all seen the examples of just video in full screen using the flash player, and isn't it pretty!

After reading a story over on Techcrunch I saw a button on a video player, clicked it and thought…. this is cool.

Check out this beatboxing video tutorial over at http://www.5min.com and click the smart player Button. The player steps up into full screen mode, but not with the video full screen (but there is another button to do so). There are tools there that are simple to understand and use which relate to the sites purpose, of people learning from videos. From zooming on an area, frame stepping and even slow motion.

The only thing that really lets this player down is that the icons look like they were grabbed from Windows 95 then enlarged.

A few weeks back I posted an example of a mac style popup done in flex. I was soon told that the effect was called Cocoa Sheets. I is learned now

Since then I have had numerous people gently reminding me that I was going to publish the source (you know who you are), so here it is.

First off I want to describe the way I tweened the placement of the component as a lot of people didn't seem to know about it. I used the built in AnimateProperty class built into flex. This allows you to animate pretty much any property of a component.

<mx:AnimateProperty easingFunction="{Sine.easeOut}" id="dropIn" property="y" duration="500" fromValue="{this.y}" toValue="{(isApplication)? 0 : 103}" target="{this}"/> 

You then just have to call dropIn.play();

Easy peasy! and you can use this in actionscript aswell like I did in the CocoaPopUpManager class. Its very handy.

Now onto the manager. I started by building my own PopUpManagerImpl class to replace the system singleton, but as expected hit a lot of road blocks  once I stepped into the mx_internal namespace. So I just made the Cocoa version a sort of proxy to the PopUpManager. Works for now but you may find limitations. Please feel free to contact me with any improvements you might make.

The new example with view source enabled is HERE and SOURCE IS HERE

If you use it and make it look cool please leave a comment here so I can see your works of art