You can easily create tooltips that can provide additional info on any sprite you hover over.  In the example below we attached the tooltip directly to the widget, so that when the user hovers over the widget, a tooltip will pop up that says "This is a test".  Note that you can use a StyleSheet to customize the appearance of your tooltip text.

import yourminis.api.IWidget; var widget:IWidget; addEventListener("widget-loaded",onWidgetLoaded); function onWidgetLoaded(evt:Event) { widget.initWidget(300,250,0x000000); var tt:StyleSheet = new StyleSheet(); tt.setStyle("myStyleSheetName",{fontFamily:'Verdana', fontSize:'9px', color:'#FF0000'}); widget.addTooltip(widget,"<myStyleSheetName>This is a test</myStyleSheetName>",0x0000FF,0x00FF00,tt); }

Developers will often face a roadblock when loading remote data in their widget, because unless a cross-domain file is present, Flash will throw a "sandbox" security error.  For performance reasons, it is better if you rely on a cross-domain file being present, however if this is not an option you can use widget.newHTTP() and widget.newRSS() to create loader objects that will proxy your data in an accessible domain.  Both of these functions work in a similar manner, but newRSS() is meant for loading RSS feeds, and supports authorization.       

var rss; import yourminis.api.IWidget var widget:IWidget; addEventListener("widget-loaded",onWidgetLoaded); function onWidgetLoaded(evt:Event) { widget.initWidget(300,250,0x000000); widget.debugMode = true; rss = widget.newRSS(); //create the rss loader rss.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE,onRSSLoaded); //an event that is fired when //the load is completed var myurl = "http://feeds.feedburner.com/yourminis"; rss.load(new URLRequest(myurl)); //load the url //if you wanted to load a feed that required authorization, you would do the following: //rss.loadRSS("myURL","myUserName","myPassword") where //"myURL" is a string containing the URL you wish to load //"myUserName" is a string containing the username to log in with //"myPassword" is a string containing the password to log in with } function onRSSLoaded(evt:Event) { var loader:URLLoader = URLLoader(evt.target); namespace dc="http://purl.org/dc/elements/1.1/"; namespace content="http://purl.org/rss/1.0/modules/content/"; namespace geo="http://www.w3.org/2003/01/geo/wgs84_pos#"; var rssxml:XML = XML(loader.data); for each (var item:XML in rssxml..item) //parse out each item in the xml feed { widget.debug(item.title); //print out each title to the debug console } }

There are many parts to our API that you might not know about unless you were looking for them.  We will be posting code snippets regularly to help expose some of these features.

[NOTE: you can find out more detailed information about any of these functions in the recently updated online documentation]

Most web developers recommend using Firefox with Firebug for debugging, as there are not many good alternatives for debugging in Internet Explorer. You can print out messages to your browser's debug console using widget.debug().  This works in a similar fashion to the "trace" command in Flash CS3/4. To view traced messages in Firefox, click the Firebug icon in the lower right corner to bring up the console, Click the check mark next to "Allow Console Logging" (if its not already checked), then click on the console tab to see the traced messages.  Alternatively, you can use widget.alert() to bring up a javascript-style alert box directly into your widget.  Widget.debugMode must be set to true to see output in the console -- this is useful because you can set it to false to hide all of your debug messages once your widget is ready for production.  Note that you may encounter a bug when using older versions of our API that would prevent you from compiling when referencing the "debugMode" property, so make sure to grab the latest release here.  Examples of both the alert and debug functions below:

import yourminis.api.IWidget var widget:IWidget; addEventListener("widget-loaded",onWidgetLoaded); function onWidgetLoaded(evt:Event):void { widget.initWidget(300,250,0x000000); widget.debugMode = true; //allow debugging to appear widget.debug("Hello, debug console!"); //goes to debug console widget.alert("Hello, alert box!"); //pops up an alert box }