You??™ve learned that creating Flex applications revolves around the use
of components that are stacked on each other as opposed to being created from scratch. The layout
that is created can be seen in the two related views in the MXML Editor, Design and Source. The
Source view shows the MXML as code that can be directly modified, while the Design view shows the
MXML visually. Any changes that happen in one view affect the other.
You have also seen that working with Flex is done through a relationship between the designer and
developer. In the next chapter we??™ll start to control the look of our applications through CSS styling.
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INTRODUCING FLEX AND FLEX BUILDER 3
What we??™ll cover in this chapter:
Using the Flex Style Explorer
Modifying component aesthetics through Cascading Style Sheets (CSS)
Files used in this chapter:
AtomReader-BeforeCSS.zip
AtomReader-CompleteWithCSS.zip
CustomStyling1.css
Now that we have built our first application in Chapter 1, we can use it in this chapter
to explore changing the visuals. By default, the components have a certain visual
look to them, as we saw in Chapter 1. As nice as the folks at Adobe make these
default settings, they will always look, well, default. Thankfully, there are some very
powerful ways to change the look of a Flex application so that you can create that
beautiful, clear interface that you imagine for your applications.
There are three major ways to change the look of a Flex application.
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