Using skins without embeding in css doc and swf in flex

Question

The issue I am having is creating an application with nearly every component skinned using CSS. The majority of the components are skinned using: Embed(source="file.png"); method. The problem I am running into, is flex trying to compile all of the embedded assets into the final swf. As it stands now, my compiled swf stands around 16mb!@@ OUCH. It is a very large application, but not that big. Any ideas on how to load the assets into the application at run time, or on request maybe?

Answer 1

AFAIK there isn't an easy way to load skin assets dynamically at runtime. Most likely the problem is that the PNG's aren't optimized well. You can manually optimize them before you use them in Flex. Or you can try Joa's Apparat tool that automatically optimizes the images in a SWF. Or probably a much more painful option is to switch from bitmap to vector art.

Answer 2

Thanks! I did go through and redo many of the images. As it turns out, I was importing multiple swc files for other vector skins. Flex did not like this a compile time, and kept spitting out an "out of memory" error. In addition, I was also using two unnecessary name spaces for components, which is now cleared up. The compiler is now working well, and everything is running smoothly. Thanks for your help!