360Flex is coming to the big peach, home of the Dirty Birds, and Sherman’s backyard BBQ – you history buffs will get that one.

The hosts Tom and John sent a call out for badge designs so I thought I’d toss my own in, again.

Right-click to view source

You may be wondering why I chose that particular photo as the background. Well, so am I. That’s because the photo is downloaded from Flickr.com using their API. So it will change over time depending on photos uploaded recently and their tags.

Essentially I created a simple MXML component that you can pass your Flickr API, theme – search terms for Flickr images, and the city/dates. It then searches Flickr, places the image, does a little resizing and masking, blah, blah, blah.

Please forgive the rough edges and lack of comments in the code. I tossed this together in a few hours this morning because I can’t sleep.

Sources used for this project

I used a bit of this code to draw the rounded rectangle.

Here’s the bit about making dropshadows on text from the Flex Cookbook.

Thank you, and goodnight.

Addendum

I think it would be cool to load multiple images – like 10 or so. Then rotate through showing them every few seconds. I’ll work on that tonight if I can’t sleep. Unless someone else does it beforehand.