I’ve been playing with the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3, and it looks pretty cool. I have run into a couple of issues, however.

One issue has to do with the bounding box feature which - in theory - works as follows: When you create a new Flash CS3 file that is to be published as a Flex component, the Flex layout managers treat it as though it is the full size of the Flash stage (which still has the same age-old default of 550 x 400). In order to avoid this, you create a rectangular movie clip of the size that you want the component to be, and give it an instance name of boundingBox. However, in actual practice this does not work if your component includes GIF images that are larger than the bounding box: the portion of the GIF that is outside of the bounding box shows up in the Flex application. Not cool.

The other issue has to do with Flex Builder’s code-hinting and code-complete features. Even though my Flash SWC had all of the appropriate frame labels, Flex Builder didn’t help me out with any code hints for currentFrame. Call me spoiled, but I like it when the IDE helps me out with the spelling of arbitrary language and framework names.

In spite of these disappointments, I’m liking the possibilities here; it looks like it will help to build even cooler UIs. And according to Adobe it’s going to get a whole lot better with Flex 3 - but I’m not going to let myself get too distracted with Flex 3 until Flexmaniacs is over.

I’ve put together an extremely simple demo - simple enough that I think it should be self-explanatory. However, these things always seem simpler to the author than they do to anyone else, so feel free to post any questions or issues that arise. I hope to take the demo a step or two further, and will make the results of my experiments available with future posts.

• Click here to view the demo app. When it loads, right-click on it to view and download the source.