Flunking Flex

1. Degrafa (Yay!) Using Degrafa in CSS to specify gradient fills and selectively round corners (makes life incredibly convenient)http://www.mikehuntington.com/?p=31 [Advanced CSS with Degrafa]

2. fontWeight on Button: You embed a font and then apply it to a Button and a Label. It works on the Label but not on the Button. Why so? Perhaps you embedded a normal weight font, but did not specify fontWeight:normal on the Button. Since, the default fontWeight on your button is bold, and your embedded font isn’t, you need to explicitly add fontWeight:normal to your Button style. Damn! hours wasted on this. [http://viconflex.blogspot.com/2006/11/deal-with-embedded-fonts-buttons-and.html] and more hilariously[http://polygeek.com/496_flex_issues-with-embeding-fonts-for-buttons-in-flex]

3. TabBar extends Button: You create a TabBar and gave it a nice new font. It doesn’t work. You scroll through your CSS and see you haven’t declared a style on the TabBar any-fucking-where. After an hour of trying stuff that even you know is inane, and deleting several parts of your CSS – you find a style declaration you had given in the beginning of the project : the Button component. Turns out the TabBar extends the Button component and this style will override a fontFamily applied to the TabBar separately.

4. Disappearing Flex Builder: Flex Builder 3, Project > Properties > Flex Build Path = Empty Screen in Vista x64. http://bugs.adobe.com/jira/browse/FB-12239

5. Hope this isn’t true: “Scale 9. As I wrote about in Introduction to Flex 2, the big difference between skins and background images is that you can use scale 9 on your skins to let one image work in many different sizes without looking awkward. But for whatever reason, and nobody ever tells you this, you can’t use scale 9 with assets embedded from symbols in SWFs. It just doesn’t work. Regardless of whether you build the guides in Flash yourself, or write them in the embed tag. If you want to use scale 9 in your skins, pull them in as PNGs, and use the all-but-hidden embed “grid” attributes:” from [http://dispatchevent.org/roger/flex-3-tips-tricks-and-gotchas-a-series/]. yflexskin.swf seems to work okay – so I’m hopeful.