Video: Transform Effects in Flex 4

Flex effects: a transforming experience......

Transform Effects in Flex 4, the next episode in the gripping and suspenseful series CodeDependent, is now available from Adobe TV.

This show covers the new "transform effects" in Flex 4, which allow you to move, rotate, and scale Flex objects (components and graphics objects). Similar effects (Move and Rotate) exist in Flex 3 already, but these effects were completely overhauled in Flex 4 to make it easier to get them to do the right thing.

One of the problems with the previous implementations of Move and Rotate is that they would sometimes clobber each others' results. If you think about it, both effects are affecting the (x,y) location of an object, so if the effects are giving conflicting advice, you may not get what you really wanted. For example, a Rotate effect in Flex 3 would rotate around the center of the object by default, meaning that the (x,y) location of the object would change as it rotated around that center point. Meanwhile, a Move effect on that same object would be giving conflicting advice on how to move that (x,y) point. The results tended to be unpredictable at best.

In Flex 4, we've combined Rotate and Move, along with the new Scale effect (essentially a replacement for the old Zoom effect). Now, instead of separate effects individually setting overlapping properties on the target object, they all combine internally into one single "transform effect" instance and combine their operations into a single transform operation that sets the location, rotation, and scale of the object.

And of course, the effects also benefit, like the other Flex 4 effects, from the ability of the Animate effect to target arbitrary target objects (useful in the world of Flex 4, where we may have graphical objects in our application instead of just UIComponents).

Here's the video:

Here is the demo application:

And here is the source code.

Finally, here's where you can find the CodeDependent videos on iTunes.

My favorite part of the video: I got to use the words "junta" and "cahoots" - how often does that opportunity present itself?

Enjoy.