About themes

Themes are collections of styles and skins. The default theme for Flash is called Halo (HaloTheme.fla). The Halo theme lets you provide a responsive, expressive experience for your users. Flash includes additional themes, like Sample (SampleTheme.fla). The Sample theme provides an example of how you can use more styles for customization. (The Halo theme does not use all styles included in the Sample theme.) The theme files are located in the following folders in a default installation:

In Windows: C:\Program Files\Adobe\Adobe Flash CS3\language\Configuration\ComponentFLA\
On the Macintosh: HD/Applications/Adobe Flash CS3/Configuration/ComponentFLA/

You can create new themes and apply them to an application to change the look and feel of all the components. For example, you could create themes that mimic the native operating system appearance.

Components use skins (graphic or movie clip symbols) to display their appearances. The AS file that defines each component contains code that loads specific skins for the component. You can easily create a new theme by making a copy of the Halo or Sample theme and altering the graphics in the skins.

A theme can also contain a new set of style default values. You must write ActionScript code to create a global style declaration and any additional style declarations. For more information, see Modifying default style property values in a theme.

This section contains the following topics:

Flash CS3