Wanna know how Virtual Ubiquity created Buzzword? Come to 360|Flex Seattle

We're still working out all the details on the speakers and their sessions. This one though is something a lot of us wonder about. I know when I saw Buzzword for the first time, I thought, "How did they do that?" Well, Virtual Ubiquity is going to come and explain it to us (see description below).

These are the kinds of sessions we have in the works. If you're serious about Apollo and Flex, you need to get yourself to 360|Flex Seattle.

Here's a rough description from the Buzzword team:

Topic: How the Heck Did They Do That in Flex?

Our team has built a full-featured, fun-to-use, word processor built
from the ground up in Flex. In this talk, one of the developers takes
you on a whirlwind tour through the internals of this application,
including at least some of the following topics:

- custom components and programmatic skins we built for our
formatting bar, ruler, comments, input controls, and document organizer

- our high-performance page layout engine that reflows the document
in real-time on every keystroke

- an ActionScript-based automated test harness, built as a separate
module that loads into the application, that can put the word
processor through its paces programmatically to verify document
content, layout, and functionality

- the mysteries of the Flash TextField, and how we built a fast
scrolling rich text display with microspacing and pixel grid-fitting
to ensure full fidelity between the on-screen and printed versions

- interfacing with JavaScript and DHTML to permit Flash to read and
write rich text to and from the system clipboard, work around control
key and mousewheel handling problems, read and write local files in
IE and Netscape (for testing and debugging only)

- how we used the recently-introduced support for Modules to segment
the application into separate SWFs that can be loaded on demand,
providing not only a more responsive user experience, but also faster
build times during development