Comments on: Skinning in Beverly Hills

By: Juan Sanchez

Juan Sanchez — Fri, 26 Jan 2007 21:58:38 +0000

Jesse,

I hear you on the delights of skinning. I make all my skins in one swf (whether they’re vector or bitmap) from flash and call them out in a css file. Seems to work okay. It seems that’s what you do too.

I love the level of customization you can achieve with Flex.

John – That skin for the Volvo site is really nice.

You can see some themes that I made at http://www.scalenine.com. Let me know what you think.

Juan

By: John Shuell

John Shuell — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:58:58 +0000

Jessie, great observations and they match my most recent experience in designing a flex app using skins. I really wanted my skins to be all graphics, all Flash assets (or at least contained in one Flash movie, either as a bitmap or vector or both) or all done programatically. Unfortunately that was not possible. Flex is very well designed framework but the skinning portions of it seemed to have been tacked on at the end or at the very least given short shrift compared to the many other areas. I would love to see more work done on skinning in Flex and make it more consistent across different component types in the future versions of Flex.

For a view of the skin and application, take a look at http://www.sesivolvo.com/inv.cn?crt=pagekey=84%26startpage=1%26locationid=200012%26make=Volvo,%26type=N as you can see it is heavily skinned and I had to use alot of disparate resources to do it all. This way of skinning goes against my better judgement because of maintainence issues over time and a lack of good documentation due to the usual “no time for it” excuse. But even if I did have time for it, it rubs me wrong the fact that I need to document “how” I skinned something. As a web developer and designer I have never needed to go that far in documentation before. All of a sudden with Flex, skinning has become part science and part art and very difficult to convey.

John Shuell

By: Austin

Austin — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:50:22 +0000

Hey Jesse, great article. What is your thoughts on creating a skinning architecture where you use something like FZip to zip up all the images and then load it into flex at runtime and then skin these ontop of the flex buttons.

Just a thought — im trying to get away from the flash ide to just have everything as little jpegs that get zipped as a package. I dont know if its worth it though.

By: Ben

Ben — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:25:04 +0000

Hey Jesse,
Maybe at some point when you have some free time you can do a little example of taking a design from photoshop and incorporating it into Flex?

Still being a Flex newbie I would love to see the process in action from someone who has done it.

Thanks,
Ben

By: flashape

flashape — Fri, 01 Dec 2006 20:03:32 +0000

hey man, I am right by beverly hills. Would be cool to meet up for a quick hello, maybe a few beers? give me a shout if/when you can, i’m good for whenever.