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Skinning Flash Components

Flash Components are used when and where Flash is applied. Flash has good amount of components for many purposes varying from buttons to datagrids.

To make these components look even nicer according to your needs and theme, you can skin and style these components.

Skinning is basically changing the look of the component. From Flash CS3, its became even easier to change the skins of the components.

For example, we will skin Combobox to check how to skin it.

Normally a combox looks something like this:

Skinning this component means we are changing the look at different states of this component. We are going to modify the component skin at different states.

To view the states, just double click the component on Stage in Flash Authoring environment. You will see different states and how the component looks in those states.

The states above are the default states of ComboBox Component. To skin this component as per your needs, just go inside all these states by double-clicking that state and change the color and shape of the objects.

For example, if you want to change the look of 'Up Skin', just double click that state and go inside that state until you reach the shape. Modify the shape, fill color etc of that shape to reflect that change to that state of that component.

Inorder to change the skin, i have done some changes to the UI of the skins like 'Up Skin', 'Over Skin', 'Down Skin' etc as follows:

With these changes, the component will look something like this:

This is a very basic technique of skinning the components. You can still change all the remaining states of the component to change its look completely. Its not only that you can change the color theme of component, but we can modify the shapes and icons of a component as well using this method.

Its all upto user on how he wishes to show up his Flash  Components.

Try it out on all the remaining components...

 We can also skin the components dynamically, which i will talk about in my next post...