You should take a look at the UIMovieClip code. In it you’ll see there’s an enterFrameHandler. Basically in the Flex world, we have this nice contract of invalidation/validation and notification of when my size changes (you call invalidateSize()). However, in the Flash world, this doesn’t exist, so every frame UIMovieClip is asking: “hey, have you changed size?”.

I’ll look at how this process can be improved in the future to better optimize these scenarios where you want lots of these flash components. Part of it is that the Flex Component Kit for Flash just wasn’t made for having so many of them at the same time. For now, I’d say you should monkeypatch UIMovieClip.as. Then, modify the file to either set trackSizeChanges to false or to remove the enterFrameHandler all-together.

Hope that helps,
Ryan

First place in undoubtedly the best!

Thank you
-Jim

How do I take advantage of these within the Flex Builder? I’ve imported them and the SampleTitleWindow.xml cannot run do to a missing html file. I’ve searched your site but I have not found any instructions.

Thank you
-Jim

Yeah, all that was generated during the workflow of bringing artwork into Flash Catalyst from Illustrator. A lot of what you see in there is “duplicate code” for graphics used by Illustrator to interpret the graphics and render them (I think). You could literally delete a bunch of the MXML at the bottom of the file and the file would work fine in Flex, but then Illustrator couldn’t open it (I think). There may be a lot of ways the code that Catalyst generates will be optimized in the future, so we’ll see.

As far as pros and cons go, I wonder if in many cases you won’t even need to look at the skin MXML files, kind of like the way you would get PNGs or a SWC from a designer. The benefit over the PNGs and SWCs though is that you can go in and edit them and they aren’t static. On the other side, it can be a lot of code to wade through to find what you want. I experienced this during the presentation. With all the generic ids I couldn’t find the exact chunk of MXML I wanted to swap out. Then again, I was rushing

I’m withholding any hard judgements with the understanding that this is an early beta release of a 1.0 release of a “whole new” application. That said, I look forward to seeing how concerns like yours are addressed.

Juan