I have many customers who use text entry very heavily. The users always ask for as little mouse use as possible when entering data into the application. To solve this, I have extended the TextInput and Button to listen for the Enter key and fire an event similar to a click of the mouse. There is a visual helper on the control taken from an article that allows the user to see very quickly what was not entered and what has been entered (as long as the developer uses a colored background).

The developer can now place these text input boxes all over the screen and when a user finishes entering into the field the enter key will cause the focus to change to the next box.

ExtendingControls Demo
Put focus in one of the boxes; Hit the enter key; You will see the focus change; Try not to use the mouse (hard for me at first).

ExtendingControls Source

You can also right click and View Source.

I hope this can help someone out.

Struggling with a datagrid in flex taking too much memory?
Your datagrid is too slow?
You thought you could just use any component container as an item renderer?

These are the gotcha's of the flex datagrid.

Here are two blog posts by Alex Harui from Adobe that explain how to make sure your datagrid does not get bogged down when creating item renderers.

Thinking About Item Renderers
More Thinking About Item Renderers

He put up source demos, but the source must be downloaded to view.
I have set up the examples with source for you. You can right click any of the examples to browse the source.
Item Renderer Demos

Hope this helps you as much as it helped me.

I had an interesting problem today.

Flex Builder 2 crashed while I was working on one of my projects using a custom workspace. Flex Builder will start then stop with an error to go look at the .log file in your .metadata directory in your workspace.

There is a handy .metadata directory with a .log file in it and it gives you all kinds of information about the problem. (this is an eclipse structure; I believe).
In this .log file I found an error:
!ENTRY org.eclipse.core.resources 2 10035 2007-05-24 19:44:08.812
!MESSAGE A workspace crash was detected. The previous session did not exit normally.

Now to solve the issue:
With a little luck and some guess work, I found that you can go to the directory for your workbench config files and fix the problem.
[workspace dir]\.metadata\.plugins\org.eclipse.ui.workbench

In this directory you will find a file called workbench.xml
Rename it to something else (because I like backups), then start Flex Builder again.
You should be able to open the workspace without a problem.

Good Luck!

I am always trying to find a good icon editor. Well now I do not need one.
An internet site will create one from an image file you have and download the created ico file.

I should have thought of this myself. I am going to blow their horn, because they beat me to it. Great Job on this one.

Free Icons