MadComponents is an AWESOME ActionScript 3 library for mobile UI design and App development. It is really lightweight, fast and doesn’t use any of the FLEX framework*. MadComponents provides all the tools to make really nice functional mobile apps with Flash. One can choose to use pure ActionScript or use a combination of AS3 and XML. The XML implementation with MadComponents provides a clean method to populate and define the UI. If one comes from a background in Android development this will look very logical.

Daniel Freeman, the library author, has a nice collection of tutorials on his blog: http://madskool.wordpress.com/ I’ll list them in this post and attempt to extend them in subsequent posts.

Tutorial 1: FB 4.5 Hello World – done the MadComponents way

Tutorial 2: Images, and Nine Patch Images in MadComponents

Tutorial 3: Lists and Pickers

Tutorial 4: Building a mobile twitter client

Tutorial 5: Deploying to mobile devices

Tutorial 6: More MadComponents

Tutorial 7: MadComponents AMF Service Test Drive for Mobile

ExtendedMadness. More components and charts for mobile developers.

*I’m no zealot, but my experience with Flex on mobile has been a bit troubling. Number one, it is an extremely large library and has a lot of reported performance issues. I’m sure performance will get better as time goes on, as Adobe is working hard to fix this. Number two, MXML compiles down to AS3… so my thought is why waste time with MXML and just use AS3 from the onset, especially when Adobe asks you to code certain aspects (item renders) in AS3 anyway.