Fireworks is principally a layout and graphics tool in the Flex application
building process.
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CHAPTER 4
Summary
When it comes to the production process, Fireworks fits in best at the start of a project, when you are
laying out the space for the components. It provides you with the alignment and resizing tools that
make getting a tight, consistent layout easy to achieve. It also provides a good environment to make
image modifications that are not possible to do in Flex Builder.
Building the layout of a Flex application in Fireworks allows you to take advantage of Fireworks??™ more
advanced graphics capabilities, like alignment and cropping. Fireworks also lets you take advantage of
filters, blend modes, and Photoshop Live Effects. Any image manipulation that you do in Fireworks will
be exported as part of the original image. This means that browsers don??™t have to do any additional
processing to display the effect.
Fireworks makes creating Flex application layouts easy by including a set of the most common Flex
components. You can bring components such as combo boxes and panels into your design, position
and scale them to fit with the layout, and then export them as a whole to Flex Builder.
In the next chapter, you??™ll be working with Photoshop and Illustrator to create custom skins for Flex
components.
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FLEX AND FIREWORKS
What we??™ll cover in this chapter:
Bringing in Photoshop images as skins in Flex
Scale 9
Using Illustrator SWF features to simplify skinning
Files used in this chapter:
skinImages (Button_upSkin.
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