Tariq Ahmed

One of the great things about Flex is that you get to spend most of your time working on the business logic and workflow, and less on the cosmetic aspect. This is because the Flex default's look-and-feel is great! The only problem of course is that most people won't spend much time customizing the look, resulting in many Flex apps looking the same. In Flex 1.5 many folks customized the color scheme, but few ventured into modifying the actual skins of the components.  The designer approach would be to modify the graphical aspects of a theme, a laborious process of editing many items in various Flash source files ("FLAs") using the Flash Professional IDE. The second approach let advanced Flex programmers create extremely customized interfaces; however this approach made it difficult for designers and developers to hand off the graphical "assets" of a project. In Flex... (more)

Rich Internet Applications

You read the blogs, see a couple of articles, and hear all the buzz about Flex 2 and how it can really transform how your users can fluidly interact with information and the business in an exciting and efficient new way. But at the same time you're under tight deadlines, you're an expert in the technology you're already using, and are able to maintain a certain pace and deliver projects within a predictable timeframe. You want to learn, but don't have the time to scour through thick technical books (which at this time this article was written didn't even exist for Flex 2). And ev... (more)