ScaleNine

The Flex Show is the host of weekly semi-weekly podcasts about what’s going on in various areas of the Flex community. Jeff Houser and Ryan Stewart do a great job of putting together a synopsis of the weeks highlights.

ScaleNine was a topic of discussion on The Flex Show – Episode 4 (at the 6:32 minute mark).

The Flex Show is available through iTunes here, download it from the site or listen to the podcast right on the site. Yes guys, I’m listening. Thanks.

Things are getting busy for me lately and it seems it’s going to be for a bit. Rather than let ScaleNine sit idle I thought I’d create a series of pure CSS themes for Flex 2. They’re quick to make and can be just as effective for a quick theme solution.

Moxy is the first in the series and took nothing but some time with the Flex 2 Style Explorer (some CSS tweaking required) and a search for the background image at stock.xchng.

Try Moxy by using http://try.scalenine.com/moxy/moxy.css in the source attribute of the mx:Style tag in your Flex 2 app MXML.

In case you haven’t seen the sample themes that come with Flex 2, look in the Flex SDK 2 > frameworks > themes folder of the Flex install folder (at least that’s where it is on my Mac ) for themes called Ice, Smoke, Institutional, Wooden and others.

A lot of great resources, information and articles have popped up since I first started ScaleNine a little over a month ago. Some of the points brought up in some of the articles below are exactly why I started this site.

Articles
http://kuwamoto.org/2007/02/05/overcoming-design-laziness/
http://www.onflex.org/ted/2007/02/gradient-20-and-picnikcom-photo-editing.php

Training – Learn to create a visual experience in Flex 2
http://www.adobe.com/support/training/instructor_led_curriculum/program_visual_experience.html
http://www.totaltraining.com/prod/adobe/flex2_avp.asp

Along with all that there are more great looking Flex apps bubbling to the surface. Picnik has been getting a lot of well deserved attention for what they’ve done visually with it. They have also shown that creating a unique interface and user experience goes beyond something that’s visually appealing, it adds value with something a user is going to remember and want to come back to.

Examples:
http://www.picnik.com
http://www.flip.com/flipbooks

If you haven’t already check out Ted Patrick’s Flickr compilitation of other great Flex apps.

These are all great links I plan on adding to the ScaleNine resources page and homepage for future consumption.