Welcome to Foundation Flex for Designers. When Adobe released Flex 1.0 in March 2004, a lot of designers and developers who were used to working in Flash viewed it with suspicion. Where was the timeline, what was MXML, and how was it useful for designers? With Flex 2, the answers to those questions became a little clearer, and more and more web developers started to pick up Flex. With the release of Flex 3, it’s clear that Flex is now the tool for rich Internet application (RIA) development. It’s easy for developers to pick up and rapidly create RIAs, and there’s now more customizability available for designers to sink their teeth into.
This book deals with the designer issues of creating RIAs in Flex Builder 3. It covers such important issues as how to control the look and feel of an application through CSS and custom skins.
It also shows how you can create these skins using the familiar tools of Photoshop, Illustrator,and Flash, rather than having to struggle to learn a new interface. The book also explores using transitions and other effects to make applications more dynamic, visually interesting, and easier to navigate.
Don’t worry, though—we’re not here to blind you with science and turn you into hard-core coders. You’ll have to be familiar with a little bit of code to get the most out of Flex, but we’re here to help, and we’ll make sure that all the code is supplied for you so you can get on with the design. If, however, you want to delve a little deeper into the code, there are parts of the book where you can do just that and learn how to add complex functionality to your designs. If you want to go further still, we’ll recommend the best places to get that information.
We’re happy to have you along for this ride, and we hope you enjoy it and learn a lot from it.
Flex isn’t just for programmers; it’s time for designers to take back RIAs, and show what that “R” really stands for. The Internet is not just about collecting data; it’s also about visual communicationand giving people a rich user experience, and that’s what designers do best.
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