I’m here at the 360Flex conference right now and having trouble getting any Degrafa code to work on Ubuntu. I just sat down with Juan Sanchez and he helped me write a very simple test that should work, but doesn’t. So we’d like to know if this is some issue with my particular setup or if it’s something with FlexBuilder alpha 4 for Linux or even the Flash Player.

So if you have Ubuntu it would be great if you could try to duplicate this sample for us. You’ll need to get the the latest Degrafa SWC and drop it in your libs folder of your project.

Here’s the code:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
                layout="absolute"
                backgroundGradientColors="[#333333, #222222]" viewSourceURL="srcview/index.html"
                xmlns="http://www.degrafa.com/2007">

	<Surface>
		<GeometryGroup>
			<Ellipse
				width="100" height="100">
				<fill>
					<LinearGradientFill angle="90">
						<GradientStop color="#FFFFFF" />
						<GradientStop color="#123456" />
					</LinearGradientFill>
				</fill>
			</Ellipse>
		</GeometryGroup>
	</Surface>
</mx:Application>

Note: Something wonky was going on the first time I tried this and it turns out that this is very easy to do without extending the ComboBox. Lesson learned: if you really, REALLY think something should work and it doesn’t then reboot and try again.

You would think that if you make a Flex ComboBox editable then it would be easy to get the value that the user typed in, right? I mean, why else give a ComboBox a property of editable. It’s one of those things that seems so obvious that I spent an hour running through the debuger looking for the value I had typed in that I thought I must be missing something.

If I’m missing something I’d appreciate it if someone would point out to me just how you can get the value*. As it turned out it was very easy to do by extending the ComboBox and overriding the textInput_changeHandler method. As I was trying to find an obvious way to get at the data I kept thinking, “Just override the frakking ComboBox to get at the data.” I should have listened to that inner voice sooner and saved an hour of frustration.

After lots of searching about the only useful post I found was this one by strikefish at UniversalMind. They’re ComboBox-lookAhead is really cool. This is where I figured out to override the textInput_changeHandler to get at the data I needed.

I’d appreciate your comments if you can think of ways to improve this approach.

*Note: guessing that if it can be done Tink will be the first to comment the solution. Don’t let me down Tink. :-)

I set up a Twitter account - aTwitrTale - and wrote the first 140 characters of a story.

U tel me,what hapns nxt?

Just @aTwitrTale to add your 140 characters worth.

Post publish note:

I misunderstood how Twitter works with what you can see. I thought that any user would be able to go and see what everyone has posted to date - read the story up till now - and then add to it. But no.

When I have some time I’ll create a site that will act as the reader/editor for this story. And then maybe we can see where it goes.

My wife and I are huge Battlestar Galactica Fans. And the discussion we have the most often about the show is, “Who do you think is the fifth Cylon.” We’ve gone back and forth on this. So what do you think? Chime in with your vote and comment below if you’d like.