One of the many ways of getting information in Flash and/or Flex is using FlashVars which can be passed in through the embedding mechanism. This method is used for many different things. It can be used to pass in a video to play or a simple parameter you don't want to define at compile time. You can see examples of this all over the web in places like Google Finance and YouTube.

Just the other day a commenter on our Flex tutorial about TileList Selection Indicators had a question about how to change something about the selected item. In this case it happened to be about how to change the transparency of images that are in the list. Now instead of actually handling this inside the list itself we are going to write an ItemRenderer for this, you can check out our other tutorial on ItemRenderers for more specific information on the subject. Our ItemRenderer will check to see if the data being rendered is also the selected item of the list.

So not too long ago we received an E-mail asking a question about Flex DataGrids. The E-mail was asking the best way to get to a DataGrid that is being used as a item renderer inside another DataGrid. Today's tutorial is going to show how to do this and use XML as the source. By the end of the tutorial I hope everyone has a better handle on DataGrids and item renderers.

Well, its been a couple of days since we had a tutorial come out of the doors here, which we apologize for, but hopefully as a big project we are working on finishes up the tutorials will start pouring out again. This tutorial is going to go over how to use the brand new Yahoo Maps API. The API is very easy to use and should be a lot of fun to make applications to mash up different services. Yahoo provides a bunch of examples for using the maps here.

So to get the the new year started off I decided to write a quick tutorial about two items that almost any Flex programmer can take advantage of. One is how to change the icon on a button at runtime and the other is using symbols in a flash .swf file for those icons. The major advantage of using the symbols is that you can use a single flash file to hold all the icons you need for your application. And what application wants to have completely static icons on their buttons? Ok, probably most, but we will ignore the naysayers so that we can have some fun.

This weekend I needed to encode a rather large image as a jpeg using flex. And you know what I found? It was slow. And cpu hungry. While this was not entirely unexpected, it was disappointing. I could have dealt with the program being slow and unresponsive during the time it took to encode the image, except for one problem - after about 15 seconds, the flex app would run up against the script timeout error. You know, the error that goes along the lines of "A script has executed for longer than the default timeout period of 15 seconds." And because of this, the jpeg encode never actually finished.

Shadows are all the rage right now in user interfaces - Vista and Leopard both have shadows underneath opened dialogs. They provide a really quick way to give your flat application the feeling of depth. Apparently the makers of Flex knew this, since they made adding shadows to pretty much anything very easy. By the end of this tutorial you'll know how to add drop shadows to Flex components and how to configure their appearance.

Recently we were using a TileList to show a group of images and we wanted to completely change how the selection indicator looked. We wrote the item renderer to handle all of the selection code and the only thing left to do was remove the selection indicator from Flex's TileList control. To our surprise, however, Flex doesn't expose a style or property to do this.

When using Flex you often need to transfer data to a backend server, and one option to do this is to use XML; this tutorial is going to explain the basics of sending XML data to PHP. I am going to show how to build XML data using Flex's built in classes and then we will send the data over to PHP to be handled however you would like. The code for this tutorial is arranged slightly different than earlier tutorials, all the ActionScript code is in separate files that are included into the mxml. This technique is very similar to one used for ASP.Net pages (basically a code behind) - and helps to separate the logic code from the display.

After a small discussion about actionscript tweening with one of the other coders here I decided to write up a small tutorial on some basic tweens. Now in the last Flex tutorial we used effects to enhance the visuals of our state transitions, but today we are going to use effects for something different all together. I am going to show how to use a couple of the many available effects to animate an object around the screen.