Just got back late last night from Flashforward. Quick impressions:

• Huge attendance — I don’t have exact numbers but I hear it was ~1400?
• Loved Erik Natzke’s talk. Very inspirational. Wish I’d been able to see Grant’s talk as well, but I had a meeting.
• Talked to lots of people about Flex. I was pleasantly surprised by the enthusiasm.
• I had a few people say to me, “I don’t get it.. is Flex an easier version of Flash?” This is obviously not what Flex is, and I think this means we need to be clearer in how we talk about it. During the keynote, I emphasized how easy it was to put an application together, so I can see how you could walk away with that impression.
• Had an interesting talk with Moses Gunesch about tweens. I wish I’d been able to stay to hear his session.
• Found out what shots of Southern Comfort and lime taste like (thanks, I think, Chafic)
• Really enjoyed David Schroeder’s talk about sound design. Made me think about sound in a whole new way.

All in all, a great experience. I’ll post notes and slides soon.

I’ve always been frustrated by the way HTML applications use pull down menus. How many times have you had to pick a country out of a huge pull down menu? Do you use the mouse to scroll down to the country? What about using the keyboard? You have to keep hitting the same key over and over. Neither approach is easy.

Meanwhile, text fields that offer completion hints are starting to become standard for Flex and AJAX applications. Typicaly, these are used to let you quickly pick things that you’ve already typed into the box. They are not used for picking, say, a country from a list of countries.

I believe text input fields that offer hints for possible completions should be used instead of combo boxes 95% of the time. Down with combo boxes!

1) When you want to use the mouse, it is just as simple.
2) When you want to use the keyboard, it gives you better feedback on what you have typed already.
3) It gives you an obvious affordance to “start over” when you’ve made a typo.
4) It gives you more immediate feedback.

Here is a relatively simple version of a text completion control for MXML. Unlike most versions of this type of control, this is also optimized for the above case: picking from a list of predefined strings.

[Sample removed. Please download the new version instead]

When you want to pick from a list of predefined strings, just supply the list of all strings as the dataProvider of the control (just like how ComboBox works), and set the “mustPick” flag to true.

Let me know what you think. Are there bugs? Do you think the heuristics are wrong? Is this a good idea in general?

P.S. I’ve also had to include some other random classes as part of this. I plan on officially distributing these classes and other classes once they are more baked.