Pretty good day if you want to know more about what’s coming in Flex 3 “Moxie” and “Apollo”. Ted is showing off some new designer-developer workflow features that we have in Flex 3. As most of you know, I’m a huge fan of Microsoft’s model where the designer and developer directly share assets and code between Blend and Visual Studio. Not all designers/developers seem to like it, but I’ve always thought it was an elegant way to go. With Flex 3, we enable that type of workflow more closely with some enhancements to the skinning. The developer can import skins created with Flash, Illustrator, Photoshop, or Fireworks and then right from Flex Builder define exactly where the styles are supposed to go and what elements they’re supposed to be applied to. There are also a number of design view enhancements which will let you control the look of your application much more easily as well as some enhancements that make it easer to find and manipulate CSS in Flex.
On the Apollo side, Kevin Hoyt has a demo that the HTML/JavaScript folks should find interesting. In Apollo we have support for system icons. That means that unlike Flash, where we have to guess the icon based on the file type, Apollo can access the exact icon directly. So if you have your MP3 files associated with Winamp, Apollo will see the Winamp icon for your MP3s. But Kevin takes it one step further. He’s created an HTML/JavaScript example of saving those system icons as PNGs so you can use them throughout your application. The cool trick is that he’s actually taking the raw bitmap data (those if you from the Flash world should be familiar with the BitmapData class) and dynamically rendering it in the HTML IMG tag. A cool example of how Apollo integrates with the desktop and makes HTML a true first class citizen for the platform.
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