Since subscribing to the adobe cloud products I decided to relearn flash. But I noticed they have a new flash builder based on the Eclipse framework. So I started taking the 5 day tutorials. After day 1 I was able to move around in the flash builder tool and create a basic site/segment using the builder tools. Things are not as intuitive as building a site in dreamweaver or flash 1.0 but the concepts are similar. It takes some getting used to the syntax and where to write code vs using the gui to add the code automatically. Formatting of CSS styles is a bit of a challenge until you figure out the differences in elements and tools.
Example a GROUP has different CSS features than a SKINABLECONTAINER.
This tool is more of a site layout and authoring tool rather than a flash graphics builder. It compiles your design into a SWF file which can be embedded into a standard HTML page. It also supports desktop applications via Adobe AIR. You still use Flash if you want motion/interactive graphics. It can link to serverside data and update information without refreshing the page similar to what I do with Coldfusion/Ajax or HTML/Asynchronous Javascript in the old days.
more to come…
