Something that could be very frustrating for a Flex developer is the Image component.

In AS3 you can simply smooth an image when resized, in Flex you can’t : this feature was not added to the component, so when the Image is resized it gets pixelated.

This is even more frustrating when you know that the component share the same low level class than the AS3 equivalent.

There’s a solution : extend the component to access the bitmap and activate smoothing while initialization (component init for Embeded images and loading end for loaded ones).

For my own needs, i have done the following “SmoothImage” component using this solution :

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Image xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" init="updateSmoothState()" initialize="updateSmoothState()">
	<mx:Script>
		<![CDATA[
			private function updateSmoothState():void{

				if (this.content is Bitmap){

					var btmp:Bitmap = this.content as Bitmap;

					if (btmp && !btmp.smoothing){

						btmp.smoothing = true;
					}
				}
			}
		]]>
	</mx:Script>
</mx:Image>

And voila, this is a present.

For your convenience i have built a SWC that you just have to put in your Flex project’s “libs” folder to get a new “SmoothImage” component.

It works exactly like “Image” … with smoothing.

SWC and source code are available on Google code.