Accessibility

Flex Article

 

Foundation Flex for Designers excerpt: Flex Builder and Flash


Flex for Designers

Greg Goralski

LordAlex Leon

Comments
Created:
9 June 2008
User Level:
Intermediate
Products:
Flex
Flash

Under the hood, Flash and Flex are closely related. Both work with ActionScript 3.0, both output to a SWF format, and both use Flash Player 9 to display their content. But they are very different in what they are good at. Flash started life as an animation program and developed more features as time went on, but animation is still one of its strongest points, and is more in line with what Adobe is intending it for in their modern suite of tools. Flex by contrast is really good at developing applications and the things that are associated with it—charting, handling data, and such. Sure, it can do animation, but the kinds of animation that Flex focuses on are things such as transitions that take place as menus expand, or items such as images scaling to different sizes in different states.

There are three major ways to integrate Flash and Flex. The first is to use Flash to create skins and component animations. The second is to bring in complex timeline animations. And the third is to bring in Flash MovieClips that can be controlled in Flex. We will be looking at all three in this chapter.

Flash animation playing in our Flex project

Figure 1. Flash animation playing in our Flex project

This chapter covers the following topics:

  • Using a loader to import Flash animations
  • Controlling Flash animations through Flex
  • Creating dynamic skins for Flex components in Flash

Requirements

In order to make the most of this article, you need the following software and files:

Flex Builder 3

Flash CS3 Professional

Sample files:

Read the complete chapter

Chapter 6: Flex Builder and Flash (PDF, 1.4MB)

Prerequisites

Some knowledge of Flex and Flash.

About the authors

Greg Goralski is an interdisciplinary interactive designer based in Toronto. He is an alumni of the Canadian Film Centre Media Lab and the Interactive Project Lab. He has won Gold at the National Post Design Exchange awards and has presented his work at numerous festivals, including the World Expo in Aichi, Japan. As a professor at the Humber College School of Media Studies, he divides his time among playing with technology, training the next generation of interactive designers, and being inspired by his students. Greg also drinks too much coffee, and should really be living on a beach. His website is www.greggoralski.com.

LordAlex Leon is an active member of the Flash community and a well-respected industry leader with over seven years of experience creating content and applications for the Internet and devices. He is the founder of LordAlex Works™ (LAW), a Flash platform consultancy firm based in Montreal, Quebec, Canada, helping new media and content providers deliver intelligent, rich Internet content and powerful applications based on the Flash platform.

LordAlex runs a personal blog dedicated to the Flash platform and related technologies that you can read at www.lordalex.org.