A Desperate Plea & Petition For Easily Skinnable Flash Apps

Can someone at Boonex Please, Please, Pretty Please With Sugar on Top, get somebody to work on flash apps that we have some remote chance of skinning?  PLEASE!

This is something that just can't wait another year or two while Dolphin 7.1 fades into existence.  Working with the Flash source files that we have been provided, is a painful experience.  If it weren't, you would have seen a variety of flash skins in the market.  I have no doubt that Rayz, has the one and only development environment set up to work on this stuff, but for the rest of us, it is nothing less than an adventure in frustration.   Sure, there's a set of black flash skins in the market, and I purchased them a long time ago.  I thought I'd try my hand at creating a dark flash chat skin myself, with the intent of just giving it away.  I can get only so far with it.  There are problems with characters within text strings disappearing.  The white background behind the user block in the list of users in a chat room, is impossible to change.  The white outlines around everything in sight, are a nightmare to get rid of, or to change their color.... which makes a dark skin look awful, and amateurish.  These are all problems that exist even with the black flash skins in the market.  Now I know why the developer didn't change them... it's impossible. (Maybe not impossible in the strict sense of the word, but you'll damn sure be pulling your hair out)

We desperately need a way to easily customize the look of flash apps to match the rest of our sites.  White chat rooms, and white media players, look absolutely awful on dark websites.  It's not a professional appearance, and we all hate it.  By today's standards, the Boonex flash apps are in the dark ages as far as customization goes.  Will somebody please take initiative, and do something about this.  I have repeatedly asked for flash apps that can be skinned via xml, for about two years now.

I'll even make an architectural suggestion, that might help someone visualize this.

1. Imagine a /templates/base/flashApps directory

2. Further magine sub directories for all the flash apps

3. In each sub directory, visualize a params.xml file, and an image directory

4. Imagine using the params.xml file to specify the color, background color, and border color, etc, of everything in the flash object.

5. The image directory will contain button images, icons, smile sets, etc

6. Finally, imagine the joy of thousands of Dolphin site owners, when they can simply place a copy of all of this, in their tmpl_xxxx/flashApps directory, and use a customized version in place of the default skin when templates are switched.

7. Imagine the joy of all the Dolphin template designers, when they can painlessly change the look of all the flash apps to match their template.  Especially when they will be able to sell the flash skinning as an extension of their main template, for more money.

I Petition That We Need this Now

Sign Below if You Agree