“Introduction to Flex 2.0 for Flash Developers” - Tink

First session after the keynote speech and Tink had a big turn out for the Flex introduction.

He had a lot of ground to cover to introduce the product. I found about the first half you can learn yourself from the introduction to Flex in the FlexBuilder help files. But once he got onto the more complicated stuff, it was much more interesting and whetted the appetite for the later Flex sessions in the conference.

Here's what I noted down about what he said:

• Flex SDK - its free and you can use any text/XML editor (i.e. FlashDevelop)
  
  
  
  • Or get FlexBuilder


• Components
  
  
  
  • Styling help - go to the Flex 2.0 Style Explorer on the Adobe site - makes it easy to create css - v cool


• Metadata tags
  
  
  
  • i.e. [Bindable]


• Events - if (text == “tink”) ? CustomEvent.Match() : CustomEvent.NoMatch()


• Intelli-sense will pick up your own events etc - finally!!!


• Started a bit slow but as he passed the basics its got more interesting


• You can embed a specific symbol from a swf using the [Embed] tag
  
  
  
  • Allows you to use swfs as asset repositories


• Everything in Flex (in the MXML) is public, no private or protected stuff


• Flash Player 9 is required - so imperative of the client is relevant here.


• AS2 components are useless - all legacy components will need to be re-factored


• Skinning - every skin has a class which can be customised to have custom graphics


• General flow - roll with Flex - if you fight it its just painful


• Don't be fooled into thinking everything needs to look the same in Flash - it can be dynamic

Files for the sessions examples can be found at: www.tink.ws/fotb.zip