CFObjective() 2008 - Day 3 - Prototyping Apps with Flex

WireFrame Viewer/Editor 5.0 from RIA Forge - Pretty good wireframing tool, but it requires Fusebox 5. Still though, this could be really big for us. We might want to try it out.

Styling vs. Skinning Flex apps. Styling will keep them looking like Flex apps. You can, however, completely skin Flex apps by using the skinning features built into Flex Builder which integrates into other Adobe products. You can use Flash, Illustrator, Fireworks, or Photoshop. Flash and Illustrator would be best because they create vector graphics rather than raster images in Photoshop. You can create a skin in Flash and have Flex Builder simply import it completely into your Flex app. Skinning via Flash will gain a slight advantage in file size, but it's not as robust.

Applying the Flex 3 skinning extension to a C3 product will give you access to every element (with state) available to a Flex app. You can skin any of it.

Flex Builder 3 has much better CSS editing and skinning than 2. If you style a component in Design mode, you can create CSS from those styles. Change the style on one button and use Convert to CSS in order to get all your buttons with the same style name (class) to look the same.

Everything you create in your Flex prototype can be used in the actual product... if the final product is Flex app!

scale9.com - easy Flex skins for download

All of this assumes that your final app is going to be a Flex app. :( I was assuming that we were going to talk about using Flex Builder as a wireframing tool for traditional apps. That's where the first half of the presentation was leading, and then Scott suddenly assumed that your final app was going to be in Flex. I asked it he would recommend using Flex Builder simply as a rapid wireframing tool, and he said no. I sort of thought that was the whole point of the session. Oh well, there was still a lot of neat info about Flex skinning.