Home Hardware recently launched the Beauti-Tone Paint Home Designer. You can now customize the look of dozens of stock photographs using Beauti-Tone’s large selection of paint swatches and coordinated paint palettes. Users have the ability to save their projects, email their projects to a friend, calculate the amount of paint they will need, save their favourite paint swatches, and even print their completed project.
Home Hardware also launched the Beauti-Tone Paint Colour Finder. This desktop application allows users to drag an eyedropper over any image on their computer and find the nearest matching Beauti-Tone colour.
We developed the Home Designer using Adobe Flex, Java and db4o. We developed the Colour Picker using Java. Congratulations to everyone at RenoWorks for bringing this project to life.
You can try these applications out for yourself at http://www.homehardware.ca/index/renoworks.
I just finished skimming through this book and have decided that every Flex developer should own a copy. I have been developing Flex applications for over a year now and I still managed to learn a ton of new things from this book. The authors have done an excellent job of formatting the book into problem and solution scenarios. Quick and easy answers. The book starts off with issues a Flex noob might encounter and then proceeds all the way up to issues a Flex pro might encounter. Each solution includes code and a discussion/explination. This book is not really a cover to cover read, but more of a quick reference that you want to have within an arms reach while coding. I still recommend skimming through it when you first get it, because I’m sure you’ll learn a bunch of new tidbits right off the bat.
You can get more info and purchase this book here.
While reading through MXNA today, I came across an article written by Peter Baird outlining new updates to the latest release of the Flex Style Explorer. This application is a huge time saver when creating CSS to control the look of your Flex applications.
Some of the new features include:
- Advanced Color Picker
- Export All CSS
- Support for StyleName Styles
- Text Formatting Styles
- Text-Entry for Slider Controls
- Inclusion on New Components
- Improved Navigation
- Indication of Components Edited
- Progressive Disclosure of Controls
- Improved Graphic Representation of Styles
- Improved Scrollbar management
To read more about the new Flex Style Explorer visit Adobe Consulting.
Try the online version.
“Adobe Systems Incorporated (Nasdaq:ADBE) today announced the availability of Adobe® Flash® Player 9 for Linux, the next-generation client runtime for engaging with Flash content and applications on Linux open source operating systems. Adobe Flash Player 9 delivers a consistent cross-platform experience and extends unprecedented performance and advanced features to the broadest set of developers and users to date. Additionally, Linux developers can create, test and deploy rich Internet applications (RIAs) on the Linux platform using the free Adobe Flex® 2 Software Developers Kit (SDK), Adobe Flash Player 9 and the free Flex Data Services 2 Express.”
Read the full press release
I have finally got around to learning Flex 2. I did play with it a bit when the Flex Builder 2 beta was released awhile back, but with the lack of good documentation at the time I decided I would wait for the full release. While writing the blog reader tutorial in the Flex builder help files, which connects to Matt Chotin’s blog, I came across a link to a very cool site called The Flex Online Compiler built by Ben Forta, Ted Patrick, and Ray Camden. It allows you to type MXML and ActionScript code right into the page and have the server compile it into a SWF below. This is a great way to see what Flex can do without having to install any programs onto your computer.
http://try.flex.org/index.cfm