Comments on: Why the new components in Flash 9 will rock or “Styles are evil and must die. Long live skins!” (And yes, this is the longest blog post title ever, so sue me.) [Please don't really sue me, it's not nice and I was just kidding, and anyway, I'm sure that someone, somewhere has written a longer title for a blog post. Right? I mean they must have. Surely!]

By: Heartburn Home Remedy

Heartburn Home Remedy — Wed, 15 Apr 2009 11:31:05 +0000

I read your posts for quite a long time and should tell you that your articles always prove to be of a high value and quality for readers.

By: aral

aral — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 21:53:09 +0000

Hi Ian,

I believe there is still a lot of missing documentation and examples. A friend of mine was using them recently and ran into issues with that and wasn’t able to get her issue resolved through support from Metaliq. From what I understand, Grant was very responsive when it was brought to his attention and helped out greatly.

By: ianm

ianm — Sat, 21 Oct 2006 11:16:35 +0000

Were all the support and documentation issues ever sorted out at Metaliq. I remember looking at the components, but thinking it sounded just a bit too hard to implement. Perhaps it would be easier in Flash 9.

By: Manish Jethani

Manish Jethani — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 23:49:37 +0000

Styles vs. skins? Umm……

When you say skins are better than styles, what exactly do you mean? A statement like that baffles me. To me it sounds like “a car’s wheels are better than its steering wheel”. Sure, your car can move with just four wheels, but then it can only go i…

By: aral

aral — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 21:54:44 +0000

LOL! Don’t crawl into any holes! I was trying to say (in my usually succint manner) that styles make perfect sense for HTML and that I agree completely with you that we need even better CSS and HTML support — but for text, not for styling the visual elements of components. The latter can easily be handled by bitmap/color transformations if absolutely necessary, it doesn’t require multiple Ks of framework space. (Or by designers who can just as easily create those transformations in Photoshop and export the graphics. This doesn’t even need to be a manual process as they can use actions to automate it.)

By: christoph

christoph — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:48:16 +0000

Oh! Um, good. (…crawls back into hole…)

By: aral

aral — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:43:54 +0000

Hi Christoph: Styled *text*, yes. Styled *components*, no. Big difference! :)

By: christoph

christoph — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 20:09:02 +0000

Hooray for lightweight, skinnable components, but HTML/CSS support should be updated, not discarded.

There are an infinite number of good reasons to display styled text in a Flash app; why invent your own custom markup language and interpreter when HTML/CSS is already so good for the job? (And we’re all so good at using it.)

It’s especially useful when your CMS is feeding the same styled text to other, non-Flash front ends.

Or am I missing your point? Or is Apollo where all this is headed? (Flash PDF HTML…)

By: Brandon Ellis

Brandon Ellis — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:27:37 +0000

“They require programming skills. This means that programmers end up implementing styles, not graphic designers or illustrators.”

And at this very moment I am porting a designers styles into a Flex 2 app. I think a big part of the problem is getting folks to seperate Applications and web pages. They are not the same. The architecture is not the same, the need is not the same and the output is not the same. Styles work well in the web page arena and have a place (currently) in Flash/Flex but I think you’re 100% right – skinning is the way to go.

By: Arpit

Arpit — Mon, 16 Oct 2006 19:19:46 +0000

I agree with the other commentors here. I think its important to note that styling and skinning have very different goals. Sure, you can create a new skin to match a new style but most of the time I would just rather put in a couple of numbers and theme my component.
Styles do work, for example, when you want to carry the feel of another application but not the exact look. For example, in a number of projects I work on, the visual brand of the company needs to be carried through even in products that arent directly related to the company. Do this end, we have created widgets (not components) that are stylable but not skinnable.