tutorial

With the advent of Flash Player 10 at the end of 2008, Adobe opened up a new generation of image processing techniques using the Pixel Bender system. In its simplest form, Pixel Bender allows the Flash or Flex developer to run mathematical algorithms used for image processing (and in fact other tasks) at a greatly increased rate. Flash Player does this by offloading those calculations to the computer's graphics processing unit (GPU) which is often faster than the main CPU.

This tutorial demonstrates the use of the Pixel Bender system in Flex Builder 3.

Adobe have signficantly changed the skinning system in Flash Builder 4 to give the developer greater abilities to create custom skins for existing and custom components without having to dive into Flash or any other graphics application.

This tutorial takes you through the basics of skinning a Flex 4 component.

As promised, here's an example of the business/presentation abstraction in Mate.

Unlike Flash movies, the Flex framework provides a preloading graphic free of charge. Whilst useful to give the user some feedback that there's nothing to see until we're fully loaded, most application developers will want to customize this. Read on for my tutorial.

Flex 3 brings to us powerful skinning abilities. In this post I'll show you how to create a simple skin for a Flex button.