Flash components received a major upgrade in Flash MX 2004. One of the areas that received a facelift is the skinning mechanism. Flash 8 introduces some changes to the workflow in the authoring environment and references to paths. If you have read the earlier version of this article on skinning the Flash MX 2004 component, this article will seem very familiar because I upgraded it to reflect the changes in Flash 8.
In this article, I cover skinning using the library and themes, and through code I explore skinning using the prototype method, subclassing a component class, and the initObject method. Armed with this knowledge, you will be able to take better control of your application’s look and feel and have a good understanding of how flexible the skinning architecture is in Flash 8.