As you know I've taken a new strictly interface design / creative director role at a Flex-based Cloud computing company.

And, as you know, I like to rant on Adobe for making Flex and Flash so different with no real good workflow between the two.

I decided to give Catalyst a chance and abandon Flash completely and stick to drawing in Illustrator for the design of this application. And so far I have to say I think Adobe has finally done something right for designers working with Flex developers. I can draw everything as vectors and define them as reusable graphics in Catalyst for the Flex guys to write code around. It uses the FXG graphics format. Their current application currently uses PNGs all over the place so suffice it to say it's huge. My job is to fix it all.

Anyway, I have to be positive when I see something good and I'm enjoying what Catalyst provides me from the design side. Making SWCs in Flash to give the Flex guys just wasn't working very well and Catalyst and FXG has answered all my questions very well.

But don't think for a second this new thread will surpass my ranty one. lol

Nice work Adobe on Catalyst.

watch your color space and test in 16 and 32 bit.

just sayin.

explain

everything is HEX

So, in FlashDevelop.....does anyone know how you view inside the SWC to check the contents? FD lets you open the SWC in a Tree View and you can see the AS Classes and the MCs inside.

How do I do that with Flex? I've gone Mac now and I'm reluctant to Bootcamp over just to use FD. I'm trying to learn more about Flex but I can't 'open' the SWC to view.

Sorry. I have been getting bit depth errors in 10.2 with some graphics. I have no idea why. it's ticking me off.

also i thought a swc is just a zip file.

Granted, everything should be set as Hex so maybe designers don't know to switch to Web Safe in Illustrator. That would cause a problem. I never thought of that. I'm not sure why 10.2 is now an issue.

SWC is a container. But Flex doesn't let you 'look inside' for all the contents. FlashDevelop does. When you make components for Flex, they have to implement certain classes that aren't needed in Flash for the compiler. It's weird, so what I liked about FD was that you could tree view and SWC to see everything that got compiled into it.....everything. The SWC will contain more classes if you use the Flex Component Kit command menu in Flash than if you right-click in the Library and say 'Export SWC'. You can't just use SWC Exports from the Library in Flex so it's nice to open up SWCs in a tree view to check out how the SWC was compiled. Or at least I haven't figured it out yet. Flex just shows your SWC like a locked storage container as a resource. Some code-hinting works for the classes inside it but some don't and I was struggling because I assumed that class was in the SWC but Flex said it wasn't. I get confused a lot in code worlds. I'm definitely not as persist-level.

I think you could create a tool for this, for instance hxswfml reader can essentially get all the info out of a swf, if you want to unzip it as well then maybe FileFormat zip reader. I think it may take me some studying to fit it all together, but essentially you could write a parser in haXe flash ( neko maybe faster for parsing ). Then you could just write the data to a simple txt file, I have experimented with writing to textfiles using php haxe but the neko approach i learnt from is here neko writting to file. If you treat it all as if your just coding as3 then it problably is not difficult, as the clever bits have already been worked out for you, you won't need a server running so no issues with getting mod_neko.ndll for your platform, so it should be like writting as3, the basics are probably simpler to use than looking at these links may suggest, and you can actually inject any missing classes into your code but that's probably more tricky. But must admit I have not made the time to really try this sort of thing.

Actually it's simpler than that... although you would need to send me a flex swc to test it on... but I think you can probably install haXe and use a single command line to generate the hxclasses for the swf then you will have essentially all the info you need.

1) Install HaXe http://haxe.org/file/hxinst.dmg

2) open terminal and unzip your swc ( use the commandline it's more likely to work ), the generate code may work with swc's directly you can try.

3) write CD on the command line and drag your path from finder to the terminal so your in the correct directory

4) assuming yor unzipped swc is called in.swf you can create a directory of haxe class definitions for your swf.

haxe -swf-lib in.swf --gen-hx-classes --no-output -swf-version 10 -swf output.swf

You will find these tell you essentially all you need to know about the classes in your swf ie the public methods and class names, ignore haXe Std classes which will be in the root of 'hxclasses' directory with some of your classes and ignore the haxe folder and the flash folder there just generating stuff for use with haXe which you don't need, all the rest will be the classes from the swf with all the flex bloat in, and it won't show actual code just enough info for haXe to type it, obviously Number will be Float and Boolean Bool but I am sure you can figure out that ;J

I know I am keen on haxe but it's got some powerful stuff, and the gen should help you look inside your swc's fairly easily. If you get stuck pm me a link to a swc and I will give it a go and see if it works well, I know flex has some weird stuff in so it may mess up.