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December 12, 2007

Flashing Flex Talk and Examples

As promissed in my session at FOTB here is the presentation and the examples that featured in it (right click for source). Any questions, please post in the comments and I will do my best to answer them.

Flashing Flex
As Flex/AIR becomes increasingly popular, its becoming more important for applications to look and feel less like the default produced by the framework.

The ability to implement custom designs and transitions is an ever growing request by clients, and knowing the best approach to achieve the desired result is key.

This session will take a look at the various ways this can be achieved providing information on styling, skinning, preloading, and transitions.

Flex is Flash. Release the inner devigner!

Presentation

Preloader Example
Styling Example
Programmatic Skinning Example
Flash Skinning Example
Custom Styles Example
Custom Skin Example
Move Example
Flip Example (this post may also be interesting)

I do hope that people found the presentation useful, and although we didn’t have time in the hour slot available to look at all the code in great detail, making the code available so that you can go through it in your own time will help out people who attended. You’ll need flex Builder 3.0 to run the files.

Yet again this year FOTB was a blast and I’d like thank John Davey, all the other speakers and everyone who attended.


One of the things that did come across at the conference was how many people felt that AS 3.0 was too big a step and much more complicated than AS 2.0. I’m not really sure about how that can be resolved. The technical sessions were always less attended than the creative/inspiring session which doesn’t really make sense if people need to learn AS 3.0 and are struggling. I think its more about people aren’t not giving AS 3.0 a chance. It’s easier to me entertained than to try to learn something. Also to learn somthing you to have a decent crack at it, like we all had to do to learn AS in the first place. I think most will find that AS 3.0 will slip into place if they just give it a good go.

I also noticed that most of the creative/inspiring presenters were pretty much against Flex, most having little dig at it, yet none of the technical presenters had a dig at the creative stuff. Most of the creative/inspiring presenters advise people should do more experimentation ‘like we used to’ as if they feel somewhat threatened by Flex, yet the confence in itself had very few Flex sessions and definitaly a more creative overtone. The market for people who can build well structure sites and applications far outweighs the experimental/installation market, and putting the audience off from looking in this direction is not great advice.

For those that attended the techinal sessions and didn’t find them exciting, they weren’t meant to be. They were there to learn from, and learning is the key to lots of locked doors in front of you.

There was also a guy I was speaking to Tuesday evening very drunk but we never manage to get to the point. I did see him briefly a couple of times on the Wednesday, but was busy trying to sort things out. Sorry I can’t remember your name, but if that was you, please get in touch by leaving a comment.

Here’s to next year, and hopefully I’ll be back on the list to speak again.

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