Thanks for the reply, Mike. And your patience with a newbie. To answer your questions: 1) what am I attempting to do - I would like, in the first instance to set up a portfolio, separated into various sections, and to be able to navigate - say from a video piece to an illustration or animation with linked/counterpointed theme, thus creating discrete narrative paths. Maybe Flex isn't the best way to manage this? I thought that it would make a good wrapper for Flash, and enable some added functionality... 2) Have I read any books? Some. Sets of tutorials - 'Total training', 'Flex in a week', stuff on Degrafa, and others - explored FlexExamples, Flexbookmarks and similar sites - and read chunks of the adobe live docs, as well as 'Learning flex 3' by Alaric Cole (which doesn't even list the word resource in its index) but has been useful for mxml, and css styles. Not enough obviously. Can you please recommend a good book, where there is some emphasis is on graphics and design/styling? That said, I have become interested in the possibilities for interactive/responsive art pieces built in Flex, while trying to learn the app. From what you say in your reply it seems that what I have been doing (using HttpService to load assets via an xml file) is adequate - and all those other ideas, remoteObject, databases, etc. stem from not realising that I should be calling my assets "resources" as opposed to "data". Duuh. You have helped a lot simply by clearing up that syntax. By searching on-line with those parameters, I immediately found Greg LaFrance's post 'Multiple VideoDisplay and playback controls for each using repeater', which is a big help. ( I think. I should be able to manage adding some more controls to it and set up a Tile List component with button-enabled thumbnails...) Previously I was planning to use the Adobe video gallery as a basis, re-jig it and load it into Flex as a .swc.... It is entirely possible that I made some other mistake with the Adobe video gallery tutorial ( with paths, or loading parameters) that prevented it from functioning well. It worked fine locally but was extremely slow to load when I tried to use it on the web, even before I had tried converting it to a .swc.
I was next planning to use states with custom transitions to move from one section/gallery to another, before I heard about modules and was lured by concepts of frameworks, ( e.g. Mate event mapping) which I believed might be better for updating and re-configuring. Is states the right way to go, or would I be better off with a Mate-style configuration?
