The Flash MX 2004 7.2 updater, code-named Ellipsis, was released today. The update incorporates both new help content and is coordinated with new DevNet articles. Chafic and I were very pleased to be involved with the updater and provided updates to the styles and skinning documentation and Chafic wrote an article for DevNet on skinning.

The doc updates include both a major re-write of the Using Components > Customizing Components chapter and updating the table of supported styles and skins for all components in the component dictionary. Some notable additions are the discussion of customizing animations and a new entry in the Component Dictionary on Rect Border.

One of the nicest additions is five interactive SWFs that are used to demonstrate some areas that are not easy to explain fully in text. For example, there is an interactive swf that shows the over 100 different button state combinations and one that shows the 98 different border property combinations, shown below.

Along with the documentation updates Chafic has a great skinning article on DevNet, Skinning the Flash MX 2004 Components that talks about the skinning architecture and gives examples of different approaches to skinning.

Download the updater.

View updated LiveDocs.

Read Chafic’s “Skinning the Flash MX 2004 Components” article.

During the course of the updates we also found some useful information that didn’t quite fit into the documentation format and style and will be posting a lot of it here in the next few weeks.