Pig Development

Column View File Browser

I’ve been starting and stopping this AIR application idea I’ve had for a while which is, in a nutshell, some sort of super local file manager. I’m always creating and moving around Finder windows to fit a specific need or project so I think it would be nice to have an app that will handle all of that in one application window. I’ve used SQLite for other AIR apps so adding ‘Favorites’ and ‘Preferences’ should make this application fairly decent. I’m sure these sorts of applications exist but I think it would be the perfect project to gain some more AIR skills.

Recently I decided to pick it back up and try to actually finish it. This time I’m starting over from scratch and hopefully I’ll remember all of the ‘gotchas’ when creating this in Flex that made me give up some many times in the past. The first thing I decided to do was to make a better file browser that will be used for the windows in my app. I’m not really all that happy with the packaged FileSystem.. Flex components so I decided to create one. I’m a huge fan of the column view in Finder on a Mac, so I decided to mimic this approach.

A snapshot of the component so far is above.

I call this ‘part one’ because I have not gotten too much into skinning etc on this one, but I plan on doing that next. I can already see the cool things I’ll be able to do with it now that the base functionality is complete. I’ll be using icons for the files in the lists as well as image, video, and sound previews in the file info columns. Should be pretty fun.

Do I dare create a Cover Flow version as well?? Eh, sounds like a pain in the ass.

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