With finals over with I have dug in the last two days to try and deal with some of the major obstacles I've had learning flex. I decided to make a list and perhaps, if I figure out how to get around them there will be answers.
FLEX Skins
I have been playing around trying to make my own FLEX skins. While researching the subject I discovered that Adobe has made it much easier to play around with your own design. There are quite a few sites out there written by people who know much more than I do about FLEX and ActionScript, so I won't go into details. I have been playing around with the extensions that adobe provides for Flash, illustrator, and photoshop. The extension basically provides you with a basic template to start from, with pre-made symbols and naming schema. It also adds a convenient export option that makes the .swf or .swc file that you can then easily import if you are using Flex builder. Following are some links that have been helpful to this point.
Adobe PDF explaining how to import .swfs
Blog with links to download extensions
A simple tutorial on Yahoo!
Some cool examples of what can be done and some instruction
I have been successful in designing a a simple button and other minimal components. Design isn't my strong point, but it's been fun playing around. I have had trouble getting the Panel symbol to work right. It wasn't sizing right, meaning that it wouldn't expand or shrink right as well as putting the label for the panel too low blocking access to some functionality of other parts of the application. I finally got around it a little by adding padding to the top, bottom, and sides to get it all to fit right. I also removed the white 'text' area which was really annoying. I'm still working out design issues.
Another semi design related issue I'm working out right now is putting my own application icon on the application. When I run it from flex builder the AIR icon is the default, but when I install the program it is just the lame 'general' icon that windows uses. From what I've read it might be quite involved as operating systems handle these different from each other.
Foreign Language Support
Since the program is for the Humanities department which includes foreign language classes I've been trying to read about 'globalizing' the application. In other words making it compatible with other languages and their character sets. I haven't made much progress on this point, there is little information, put it does appear it is supported.
Certificate Recognition
I'm also working on getting the right kind of certificate so that I can sign the application and it will be recognized as a friendly application and won't throw errors.
HTML 'Control'
I'm also working on working with HTML within the application. Pretty sweet functionality. I'm trying to figure out if I can get it to navigate to a web page if a link is clicked on with out navigating int he HTML component I have in the application as well.
If anyone happens to read this and has suggestions or knows of a site I can go to for more information I'm more than happy to receive feedback.
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