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Chafic Kazoun
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Benefits of the New Skinning Architecture
- Understanding the New Skinning Architecture
- Skinning Without Code
- Skinning with Code
- More Advanced Skinning
Skinning the Flash MX 2004 Components
The Macromedia Flash MX 2004 components have come a long way in functionality from previous versions. One of the areas that have been completely re-thought is the possible skinning mechanisms. Although the new components offer many options and are more flexible than in previous versions, it hasn’t been easy to realize the benefits.
In this article I explore skinning components using the many skinning options
available. I cover skinning using the library and themes, and through code
I explore skinning using the prototype method, subclassing a component
class, and the initObject method. Armed with this, you will be
able to take better control of your application's look and feel and have a
good understanding of how flexible the new skinning architecture is in Flash
MX 2004.
Requirements
To make the most of this article, you need the following:
Macromedia Flash MX 2004
Flash MX 2004 7.2 Updater (Ellipsis)
- Download the 7.2 Updater for Flash MX 2004 and Flash MX Professional 2004
Sample files
- skinning_code.zip (ZIP, 412K)
About the author
Chafic Kazoun is the founder and Chief Software architect at Atellis, and is widely considered one of the world's top experts on Flex (outside of the Adobe Flex engineering team). He has worked with Flash technologies since 1998 and with Flex since its inception, and he has a deep understanding of the internals of the Flex framework. He maintains a busy speaking and consulting schedule. When he's not busy developing solution-based applications, Chafic is actively involved in the Flash community, delivering presentations at numerous conferences including Adobe's MAX, Flashforward, FITC, Spark Europe, and MXDU. He is also the contributor of numerous published works and is the author of Programming Flex 2.0, a book recently released by O'Reilly Publishing. He is also an Adobe Community Expert, and shares his thoughts on his blog.
