Flex Builder 3:George Comninos on Importing Skins
June 10th, 2007 by Lee BrimelowGeorge Comninos describes the new Skin Import feature in Flex Builder 3.
George Comninos describes the new Skin Import feature in Flex Builder 3.
This is great! This reduces the complexity one of the designer/engineer work flow issues that my team has struggled with in the past, downloading Moxie now.
This is super cool!
I recommend checking out iShowU to do the screen cast:
http://www.shinywhitebox.com/
While Flex Moxie has a lot of cool new enhancements for designers, and a lot of effort has been put into CSS design view & other skin/gfx import magic, there’s still a critical feature missing: Design Time CSS (just like in Dreamweaver).
As long as you don’t link to the same global gfx.css in the many mxml files a Flex Builder project can have, you won’t see the styles in action while developing a certain mxml file. You have to put in every mxml file in order to get the real WYSIWYG design view experience. A finished project just needs one link to gfx.css in order to get compiled, not in every mxml file.
I currently have a project with over 50 nicely designed mxml files all sharing one global gfx.css. The compile time & swf filesize difference is enormous between a project which only has one reference to or 50. The compile time can be up to 10 times longer, while the filesize triples, for no reason at all. The compile time in Flex 3 M2 doesn’t show any difference for this project.
My current workflow is therefor a manual hassle of adding and removing lines in the many mxml files, just to speed up and optimize compiling.
So, being able to just use a or multiple specific CSS file(s) during design view on a single mxml file or global Flex project, which will be ignored when compiling, is a much needed feature for designers/developers, in order to solve the above issues.
Go have a talk with the DreamWeaver team, they know exactly what I mean :).
Sorry, “mx:Style source=”gfx.css” got skipped a few times in the above post. Seems like Wordpress doesn’t like source code… Here’s the corrected version:
While Flex Moxie has a lot of cool new enhancements for designers, and a lot of effort has been put into CSS design view & other skin/gfx import magic, there’s still a critical feature missing: Design Time CSS (just like in Dreamweaver).
As long as you don’t link to the same global gfx.css in the many mxml files a Flex Builder project can have, you won’t see the styles in action while developing a certain mxml file. You have to put “mx:Style source=”gfx.css” in every mxml file in order to get the real WYSIWYG design view experience. A finished project just needs one link to gfx.css in order to get compiled, not in every mxml file.
I currently have a project with over 50 nicely designed mxml files all sharing one global gfx.css. The compile time & swf filesize difference is enormous between a project which only has one reference to “mx:Style source=”gfx.css” or 50. The compile time can be up to 10 times longer, while the filesize triples, for no reason at all. The compile time in Flex 3 M2 doesn’t show any difference for this project.
My current workflow is therefor a manual hassle of adding and removing “mx:Style source=”gfx.css” lines in the many mxml files, just to speed up and optimize compiling.
So, being able to just use a or multiple specific CSS file(s) during design view on a single mxml file or global Flex project, which will be ignored when compiling, is a much needed feature for designers/developers, in order to solve the above issues.
Go have a talk with the DreamWeaver team, they know exactly what I mean :).
I was excited to see this video but I could not really see the details of what you where doing due to the way the video was posted. I would really enjoy seeing a more detailed article or video on the steps taken here in the video.
Thanks for the info. I will look into this more.
-Matthew
Peter, thanks for that feedback, I will definitely pass it on and make sure we take a look at it. Also, I was on the Dreamweaver team for 6 years so I’m familiar with the CSS features
Matthew, I noticed that too when i saw the posted video, unfortunately I didn’t know they would compress it so much, I would have at least lowered the resolution on the computer. There will be plenty more opportunities to see these features, we demoed them at Flex Camp last night, there is 360Flex, as well as MAX coming up.
-George