Entrepreneur Geek

If you are building a Flex application, you may need a way to show messages to the user. The usual way to do this is via Alerts. Alerts can be quite distracting and generally avoidable. Another alternative is to have a status message area (like a status bar) and show messages there.

Growl

But an even more interesting idea would be to show notification windows / popups. If you have seen Growl on the Mac, you know what I am talking about. Heck, even Facebook and most instant messengers show notifications now.

So how would you implement this using Flex?

Short answer, don’t implement them yourself. There are two very good and free components available that you can use.

Flex Notification is easy to implement and works very well.

FlexGrowl looks and works excellent but needs Degrafa.

Flex Notification Component

Flex Growl

I used Flex Notifications in an upcoming product, but am facing some issues with focus loss when the notification goes away. Don’t want to add the download overhead of degrafa to my app just for notifications yet!

Was looking for ways to skin a combobox and found another gem! An auto complete text component for Flex. Now you may say what’s new about that? But this is really nice – shows auto complete, allows multiple items to be added (like tags), can show items horizontally or vertically, can reorder them and some more.

Checkout the Demo here, and download the source code if you wish.

Thanks for your work Hillel!