Comments on: Fan 4.0 alpha: Anatomy of a kick@$$ Flex app

By: Personal landmark moment: My first patent: on the design of Comcast’s Fan Player | code zen

Sat, 11 Jul 2009 04:04:37 +0000

[...] with the application more. The square view was extended even further in Fan 4 which was also written from ground up in Flex 2. Porting the circular view to Flex 2 was an interesting challenge and I think we did an amazing job [...]

By: Comcast Interactive Media’s Flash/Flex Team is blogging… : code zen

Comcast Interactive Media’s Flash/Flex Team is blogging… : code zen — Tue, 08 Jan 2008 16:34:29 +0000

[...] 2008 began with on a great note for CIM. For the last few months a group of developers here, myself included, have been trying to be a little more vocal and public about the stuff we do and how we do it. I have done it on this blog a bit with entries on how we adopted Flex to build the next generation of video experiences on Comcast.net. But as of this Jan 1, CIM officially has developer blogs (applauuaseeee). The Flash team’s blog is available at http://teamcim.comcast.net/team/flash. Stay tuned as we start talking about the Fan, which I think is one of the most complex Flex applications out there, as well as our in-house tools that we are going to release under open source. Suggestions are welcome either as comments on this post or the one at Flash Team Blog Spread the word: These icons link to social bookmarking sites where readers can share and discover new web pages. [...]

By: code zen » Blog Archive » The Fan, Comcast’s Flex based video player: SHIPPED !

Fri, 24 Aug 2007 21:00:50 +0000

[...] WooHoo !!!! The Fan, Comcast Interactive Media’s flagship video application, which I worked on as main architect and lead developer, was deployed to production this week. The Fan is currently one of the top 10 online video destinations and the new version adds a LOT of cool features to the application. I have already talked about developing the Browse view using the Flex out of the box components and then later writing a component set for the circular view, which HAS to be the most interesting UI for a Flex application . [...]

By: code zen » Blog Archive » Fan4 Beta: Thinking Flex out of the box !

code zen » Blog Archive » Fan4 Beta: Thinking Flex out of the box ! — Wed, 01 Aug 2007 02:17:04 +0000

[...] I had already talked about how and why we built the alpha version with Flex in a previous post. I was pretty surprised by how many people picked it up. As of right now, the mode is still featured on scalenine.com, a site archiving some of the best skinned flex applications out there. However, while the page view of the alpha release was very well skinned, the basic interactions on the application such as drag and drop playlist controls and data bound UI components were still fairly out-of-the-box Flex. The circular view of the Fan is however anything but traditional and so we ended up writing a lot of custom components to get the look and feel of the application right. [...]

By: FanLover

FanLover — Tue, 17 Jul 2007 20:23:56 +0000

Now they have a circular version up there too! Checkout labs.comcast.net

By: » Comcast jumps into Flex 2 for media content | The Universal Desktop | ZDNet.com

Tue, 22 May 2007 22:49:38 +0000

[...] If you're interested in why they chose Flex, code zen has a big write up on the project. [...]

By: code zen » Blog Archive » Talking Flex with the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group

Sun, 06 May 2007 18:22:34 +0000

[...] Comcast Interactive Media (CIM) is hosting the next PFPAUG meetup and I will be talking on how we use Flex here in applications that immediately appear in front of millions of people. My recent blog entry on how we used Flex to develop the next version of the square view of the Fan got quite a bit of attention in the blogosphere and I think we did a fairly good job of developing a Flex application the way adobe has envisioned. I am thinking this will be a mid to advanced level talk on Flex and we will cover things like skinning, debugging and our build system using Ant. If you are in or around Philadelphia around May 31st, come on down to 1500 Market Street. There will be food and we will also be giving away some goodies. [...]

By: Ola Muldal

Ola Muldal — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 22:32:25 +0000

@ the depthmanagement issue

I ran into the same issue, being used to put content on various depth from 1000 to other crazy depths like 50000 in AVM1. Even though i haven’t been quite comfy with the method, it annoyed me a bit when i couldn’t do it anymore.

Anyway, my solution was to extend Sprite and create my own multidimensional controls to create and manage different “levels” i need. Then i override the addChild to never go above these levels. So far it works like a charm and seems like a much more proper way then the old depthmanagement. When the class is made it is just as easy to use as the old way.

Im coding pure AS3 though, im not sure how it applies to Flex UIComponents, might be abit more tricky… or not

By: Ryan Stewart - Rich Internet Application Mountaineer » Why They Chose Flex - Comcast Interactive Media

Sun, 15 Apr 2007 20:59:29 +0000

[...] I just wrote a post on The Universal Desktop about The Fan, a new application that came out of Comcast Interactive Media Labs page. It’s a pretty nifty little application and there’s a lot of content that I hadn’t seen other places. But while writing the post, I found something better, a full breakdown of why the Comcast Interactive Media team chose to use Flex (It looks like this hit pretty big on MXNA, but I missed it). [...]

By: Juan

Juan — Sun, 15 Apr 2007 17:56:29 +0000

Getting the Tabs to bleed into the content area shouldn’t be too hard, but it can depend on how you put the component together and I’m not sure how you guys put it together.

The way I typically do it is use a TabBar with appropriate skinning for the Tabs and slice the continuation of the Tab graphic and make a background graphic to use for the ViewStack underneath. If you’re talking about the Tabs at the bottom of your app you might need a background graphic for behind the “Search” Text Input and have it continue behind the Tabs.

I have a couple skins that utilize this technique on scalenine.com. I think the WMP11 skin does this. However, you may have tried something like this already and it may not have worked or maybe your creating the Tab skinning programmatically.

If you want you can shoot me an email and give a little bit more detail as to what problems you’re experiencing. I might be able to help you out.

Nice job!