Today is Flex day, can you tell? Jeff asks:

I have been reading all of your recent posts regarding Flex and I have a question for you. Everytime I have seen a flex app, it always looks the same ... i.e. the greenish background with the silver boxes. I would assume the user interface could be designed differently, but I have yet to be able to find an article or any information on "skinning" a Flex app. Is such a thing possible or am I just looking for the wrong thing?

I call it the "Flex Look". It's nice... but boy do you see a lot of examples with it. Does that mean Flex can't be customized in terms of look and feel? Heck no. Consider this screen shot: (Click for larger image)

This is a screen shot from an application my company built using Flex 1.5. I can't share the URL as it is in a private network, but as you can tell, it looks nothing like a "default" Flex skin. (By the way, I did the code for this tab. It was fun and challenging but not nearly as hard as I thought it would be.)

So keep in mind that I'm still a Flex newbie. It is my understanding that you can customize Flex apps with style sheets and custom components. Components being the UI elements like buttons, etc. So you could build a form control called the Ray if you wanted. I think normally the thing you would tweak the most is the style sheets.

You can do a lot with the styles as evidenced by the screen shot above. From the livedocs for Flex 1.5 I found:

Using Styles and Fonts
Using Themes and Skins

The docs above are for Flex 1.5, so you would probably be better served downloading the docs for Flex 2 and reading the relevant chapters there.

You can also play with an online Flex style explorer. I used this when playing around with ways to improve my CFLib demo.

I know I'm just scratching at the surface, but I just want you to be aware that you definitely can get away from the "default" Flex look.