Front-end Developer, Designer and Consultant

Skinning Flex with Degrafa and FXG

For my session at Flash Camp Birmingham I wanted to introduce people to declarative skinning within Flex. I was skinning Flex applications back in Flex 2 and to get the right visual appeal it was quite a tricky thing to get right. There was a reliance on heavy external assets brought into Flex and scaled using Scale9 techniques. There were many times I wanted to have better control of the UI I was creating through not only a more advanced CSS capability but without having to resort to creating skins from scratch directly with the Flash drawing API.

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Flash Camp Birmingham write up

Flash Camp Birmingham (UK) organised by the Flash Midlands user group. After a very good Flash Camp London it was always going to be interesting to see how the format would work outside of London. The answer very well!

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Start using the Pomodoro technique

Having been in an agile working environment for the last few years, I’m certainly becoming more aware of how similar techniques can be used outside the office.

I have recently come across the Pomodoro technique, it’s an interesting take on how to improve your personal productivity. As I do a lot of work outside of the office on personal and freelance projects I have struggled to get focus sometimes, this is where the Pomodoro Technique can be applied; to get your focus back on track. I have seen it referred to as one technique for a solo scrum.

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Flex resources

Adobe Flex is a great platform to work with for creating rich engaging applications of all sizes for the web and now the desktop with AIR. Now we are at Flex version 3 and the next version Flex 4, which is the SDK, and the editor now called Flash Builder are just around the corner.

There are a number of resources, guides and articles that I use regularly when building Flex or AIR applications. This is a growing resource so bookmark the page and feel free to suggest anything that I may have missed.

Here we go then:

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Flash Camp Birmingham (UK)

Here we go it’s Flash Camp time again but in my area of the UK the Midlands!

There is a great mix of sessions to be had by some fantastic speakers so there should be something for all including designers, developers and general others. There are some great sponsors too so come down on the 16th June but remember to register today as places are limited. Also did I mention it’s FREE!

I’m excited to be giving a session on Flex UI skinning. Always a hot topic and with many ways to enhance the engagement and appearance of your Flex applications I will cover techniques you can implement today with the fantastic Degrafa framework. While taking a peek at what will be arriving in Flex 4 and Flash Catalyst with FXG. Oh yes baby!

So please come and say hi and collect a Moo card, I’ll be happy to help with any AIR or Skinning questions you may have or even just to talk about the weather.

Yes there is life outside of London in the Flash, Flex and RIA community. So sign up now for a hedonistic day of Flash Platform activity, cool sessions and the chance to meet other great people. I’m really interested to meet others from the Midlands area who are working on interactive projects using the Flash Platform. There appears to be quite an underground scene going on with many small agencies and freelancers that I’m only just discovering on my doorstep.

Register now at Flash Camp (UK)