You are a hella funny writer just like in person. I have been in the teo.labs for about 5 months ignoring about everything that moves dealing with Flex (flexcoders..blogs).

This is where eventually people will see value in rock solid 3rd party components that ‘extend’ the flex framework and add all those benies you talk about.

Thanks for mentioning me in your malaria infested jungle. Most of the time I just like to think of it as life (judah informed me of your colorful blog post).

Your title should have been…

When You Hit a Design Brick Wall in Flex… Find a bad ass Flex component developer and stick with them. ;-)

haha oh… wait flex component developers are considered white trash, useless money grubbing bastards that are considered the Application developers illegitimate child!

Times will change… BTW, components will find there niche in Flex 4(or companies will get smart enough to find those that truly save them huge amounts of development time and money).

Peace, Mike

PS Oh yeah, I’m not talking about another revamped color picker or scroll bar here, I’m talking monolithic components that we will be offering in 2008-2009.

I have run into this problem in almost every project i have done. The solution depends on how close you can get to the comp with Flex alone… you know you can nail it in Flash but you know you are asking for trouble.

I lay a good amount of blame on the Flash and Flex teams not thinking enough about how these two platforms can work well together. It’s most evident when you take a look at the list of Flash components and the list of Flex components and wonder why there are so many that do exactly the same thing but yet don’t share any code.

And sure, Thermo looks great. But Flash should have been Thermo from the beginning of Flex. Instead it’s yet another development environment to learn.

We did, however, manage to subclass TabBar and get the behaviour we wanted. It involved overriding getChildAt, getChildIndex, removeChildAt, createNavItem and hiliteSelectedNavItem and storing the tabs in our own array. Basically as far as the underlying flex framework was concerned it was still dealing with the depth of the tabs but actually we managed the depth ourselves and allowed it to use what it thought was the depth for it’s horizontal layout purposes…

Nasty solution to a nasty problem!