When I said I wanted to talk about cool stuff it was both companies and just things that are going to be game changing. One of those is Degrafa, a declarative graphics framework built by some very talented guys that opens up a ton of new functionality in Flex. I won’t give anything away, but the Degrafa guys are doing some very interesting things and they’re opening up Flex to a more creative class. As anyone who has seen the Thermo video knows, building great looking Flex applications is really hard. The best example I’ve seen is Juan Sanchez’s awesome skins.

Degrafa allows you to add some sophisticated stylistic elements to your Flex application in a way that makes sense from a development standpoint. The samples page shows you the kinds of things that are possible. They’ve completely overhauled the types of graphics and assets that are available in Flex and developers can now use those to get very creative in their Flex applications.

So why is this so important? Because Flex 3 made a lot of strides in adding very design heavy elements to your Flex application but it still isn’t quite there. Flex applications shouldn’t always have to look like Flex applications. Being able to declaratively define graphical assets in your application is going to make it MUCH easier to create a very custom experience for your users. Once word gets out about this and people figure out how it works I think this could be a big driver of Flex adoption and help the whole platform evolve.

[tags]Flex, Degrafa, Thermo[/tags]

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