The strange thing is that if you use the standard backgroundAlpha style and set it to 0, you still get a semi-transparent background.

After attending Adobe MAX in Milan, we tried some more tricks and finally we created a calendar that is transparent all the way.

1. First we created a new class that extends the DateChooser class.
2. Second, we create a new style setting so that it is easy to change the opacity of the background.
3. Third, we override the createChildren to use the new opacity for the background.

There might be a mush simpler way of achieving this (there should be at least), but we havent found it yet. If some of you know how to make it easier, let me know.

Here is a demo and here is the complete source: Link

And here is the extended class code:

// DateChooser extended class to make transparency possible
// Author: Camilo Tapia, Bronson ID
// Date: 2008-12-04
// Copyright 2008
package com.bronson
{
    import mx.controls.DateChooser;

    // create a new style setting
    [Style(name="calendarContentBackgroundAlpha", type="Number", inherit="no")]

    public class ExtendedDateChooser extends DateChooser
    {

        public function ExtendedDateChooser()
        {
            super();
        }

        // override the createChildren function to make the changes
        override protected function createChildren():void
        {
            super.createChildren();
            super.getChildAt(1).alpha = getStyle("calendarContentBackgroundAlpha");
            super.getChildAt(0).alpha = getStyle("calendarContentBackgroundAlpha");
        }

    }
}

So please join the group here.

Yesterday my college showed me the Pixelperfect plug-in for firefox and I wondered how I could have survived the last ten years without it. OK, maybe its a bit of exaggeration but its a tiny, super helpful plug-in.

That plug-in, together with a couple of others, are plug-in that we use daily in our work which greatly improve our way of work.

So, to help out others that might have missed which plug-ins might make their lives better, here is a list of the top 5 we find indispensable:

1. Firebug for Firefox. How did we manage before Firebug? This is by far the best plugin there. It’s a must have.
2. Web Develop Toolbar for Firefox. Same here. Indispensable and impossible to develop without it after trying.
3. Internet Explorer Developer Toolbar for IE. If you still are developing on IE as your main development browser, this is a must-have.
4. Firecookie for Firebug/Firefox. This plug-in monitors all cookies that are read or writen and shows everyhting trough the Firebug Console. Extremely useful for debugging.
5. Pixelperfect for Firebug/Firefox. This plug-in allows you to put an image as a overlay on a site you are developing and set a custom amount of transparency. Perfect when you are as picky as us when coding HTML and CSS.

So, there you have it. At least our top 5. There are plenty more such as ColorZilla, Charles/Fiddler (for watching all traffic between your browser and the server) etc, but the list only has 5 slots.

You are creating an air application, destined for both os x and windows. Everything works as it should and you are fixing the last functions. One of them is to create an email in your default mail application with a predefined subject and body.

Since it’s flex and cross platform compatible and all that, you create the email by using navigateToUrl in flex and opening a link with all content like this:

mailto:emailadress@theinternet.com?subject=hello&body=thisisanemail.

In windows, everything works fine and you are happy. You know that cross platform prolems might occur, but you hope that, at least this time, everything is ok.
And everything actually works fine.
That is until you put some special characters in your subject or body. Our application needed some those äöå so we had a problem.

In mac os x, the body and subject where emptied as soon as one single special character appeared. No subject, no body and nothing to do about it. We tried to urlencode, write unicode characters directly with \u etc but nothing worked.

We almost gave up and told our client that they might have to rethink their copy and try to avoid any special characters (which is quite hard in swedish).

But, as our last test, we tried to see if that problem occurred if we only had a html file with s subject with the same characters. That worked and we concluded that the problem had to do with flex and how it handles the navigateToUrl string.

So, to solve everything and make our client happy, we created a work-around, and here it is:
1. Create a HTMLLoader in flex:

var html:HTMLLoader = new HTMLLoader();
2. Create a HTMLHost in it:

html.htmlHost = new HTMLHost();

3. fill the html with an empty page but a javascript redirect to the mailto string:

html.loadString(’<html><script>location.href=”mailto:emailadress@theinternet.com?subject=Hello ÄÖÅ&body=This isatest ÄÖÅ”;</script><body></body></html>’);

Thats it. Very simple, works with both windows and mac and everything i solved.
here is the complete code for it:

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:WindowedApplication
xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml"
layout="absolute">    

    <mx:Script>

        <![CDATA[
            function mailto():void
            {
                var html:HTMLLoader = new HTMLLoader();
                html.htmlHost = new HTMLHost();
                var mailtoString = '<html><script>location.href=';
                mailtoString += '"mailto:camilo@bronsonid.com?';
                mailtoString += 'subject=tjenaÅÄÖ ÄÖÅ&body=HELLO BODY ÄÖÅ";';
                mailtoString += '</script><body></body></html>';

                html.loadString(mailtoString);
            }

        ]]>

    </mx:Script>

    <mx:Button label="click to mailto" click="mailto();" />
</mx:WindowedApplication>