Adobe vs skinning components

Honest to God, this subject is embarrassing. Adobe just cannot pull off a set of components easy to skin, simple as that. They keep swinging from one method to another, only to go back to the previous one.

Now that Flash Builder 4 is in public beta and Flex 4 is on its way, guess one of the selling points? Skinning components. AGAIN? Yes, again:

I’ve spent the last couple of days getting up to speed with skinning in Flex 4. All I can say is that it is much easier than it was before

I'm not picking on Lee Brimelow (bless him, I think he's one of the best evangelists Adobe has), it's just that every time there's a new release of the components I hear someone from Adobe saying "this release is fantastic, everything is much simpler, previous version was rubbish". But I can't get bothered. Then, after 6 months you go to a Flash meeting where there's ALWAYS a session about skinning components and whoever is speaking always goes:

Yeah, version X was crap, this one is much better. Although.. you know... sometimes in Macs there's this weird thing, and also you have to first import this SWC, then deselect this option here and then compile. Sometimes you have to compile twice because the first one doesn't work.

There. You always have to do something weird, always something not quite working, always the speaker is not sure why something happens. And just for the record, I'm not talking about speakers that don't know shit, I'm talking about speakers at FOTB (btw, I'm in for this year). Plus, if they were actually that simple to skin we wouldn't need sessions about it on every single Flash conference.

Besides, for me, Adobe is getting this all wrong. I've said this a million times but because I'm obviously no Colin Moock (petition for a loader API in April > MovieClipLoader in October) nobody listens to me:

The components should be compiled in the player

Have you ever heard a HTML or JS developer even think about radio buttons, check boxes or combos available on the browser...? Nope, they simply assume they are there and that's it.

Skinning? Why would you want to do that? Modifying the look and feel of the controls in HTML is probably against usability and accessibility. Most likely you are going to overwrite user preferences just because you fancy.

I have to admit, though, that I always find people reluctant to embed the components in the player. For at least these 2 reasons:

- Weight. They will add up to the weight of the player. Ummm, ok, but how much? 200kb? Ok, fair enough but those 200kb on the runtime would save gazillions of kb that every Flash app with components sends to our browsers, I much rather get those 200kb only once.

- Maintainability. If components are embedded on the player, fixing bugs or improving them would be more difficult. This one annoys me very much. You are telling me that MS, Mozilla, Opera and Webkit are capable of delivering a bug free set of components and Adobe cannot?

The thing is that, same as in HTML, embedding the components on the player will not force people to use them, you could always roll your own if your project required it.

Anyway, don't know why I bother, I'm no Colin Moock!