I was a huge Flex fan on Flex 3.
Expected a lot on 4, but adobe only disappoints…

Flex 3 was so simple to skin. Really HTML like, using fireworks, images, css, piece of cake.
It was friendly….
Now the spark “innovation” is unnecessarily complex.

Skinning is another Flex 4 fail.
Why haven’t they kept the MX way of skinning for Spark and add whatever the complex stuff they like??

In Flex4, it actually requires a developer to add the functionality in.

I don’t think it’s better for ‘designers’ at all, it’s better for ‘designs’ though, because it’s about 100% more flexible…

What I’m saying though, is this issue is really a red herring.

Code duplication should not be an issue within a single project, as long as you architect your skins in a smart way.

Across projects, there could be a ton of code duplication, but inheritence would not help you here anyways…unless you’re working off of one conslidated global classpath, which in my shop is a major nono, each project needs it’s codebase to be standalone and portable.

So again, please give me a use case. I would love to hear an explanation of why you would ever need “10 buttonSkins” as Velo infers…

I completely agree, we’re all just voicing some of the concern we see from a development perspective. From a design perspective things are 100x better. I don’t think anyone here will deny this framework is much more robust for control and design. I also don’t think anyone here is saying that Flex 3 is better, just having a hard time understanding the new component model. There are things that will most likely shake out as more of the community starts embracing the new model and finding its strengths and weaknesses. If we don’t voice it though, there’s nothing Adobe can do to help us.

Almost feels like the jump from 1.0 to 2.0. There was challenge, but much more benefit. Learning from frameworks like degrafa and competition from silverlight are moving the Flash platform in the right direction for sure…

note on your code duplication… I’m not sure from your conversations whether your more design oriented or development oriented, but OOP design lives and breathes getting rid of code duplication with inheritance and composition… It’s one of the top goals of OOP design. Code duplication leads to buggy & inconsistent spaghetti code. The design world doesn’t really concern themselves too much with duplication of art. It’s just a different way of thinking. I imagine it’s as hard to ask a designer to componentize art as it is to ask an OOP programmer to copy and paste (technical challenges aside)… Both would say “huh, why the hell would I do that…?” For skins this really isn’t a huge problem, since there’s nothing that can really break in a skin, but for developer efficiency, especially shops where the design and developer are one, efficiency is key to meeting business goals and Adobe should be doing everything it can to make sure that doesn’t suffer.

Unless you’re referring to duplication between projects??

Skins are flexible/powerful enough (with the ability to read properties and styles from the hostComponent), that you should never need to create more than a couple similar types in any given project…

So, no control at all, and 80% private function/properties which can’t be overridden… is somehow preferable to a system which gives you complete flexibility and control?

To me it’s not even close, the benefits faroutweigh the negatives.

Is much easier to do… but you end with code duplication. Then you have to fix something on a button… the problem is you have 10 more clones around there, which you have no idea existed, and you obvious didn’t touch any of this extra class… then QA go check what you did and you fixed only one place, but kept it broken all over….

Was a pain to put a close button on TabNavigator, but once it was there I knew I only have to check it. Not a bunch of classes…

Obviously Flex 4 is much better on the designer perspective which obviously I’m not.

VELO

In all fairness, I do believe this situation is easier to do in Flex 4 than Flex 3… Trying to get a button to display 2 or 3 icons in Flex 3… ugh.

Yeah, that is the “best” way right now

But then I need a button with 2 icons, with 3, w/o background….

And buttons are as simple as labels… imagine more complex components like datagrids or trees…