I know this seems silly, animated gif support in flex - why not?
Personally i think they ring tacky. However, I work for a social
network and going through and bringing flex to the user-experience is
delightful but the animated gif have become common-place for people to
use, and I understand that, in the past, they were kind of unnecessary.
In flash if you had to use them you could just import the series of
pictures and make a frame based animation and voila.

Now we've seen the explosion of the social-networking era of "tacky"
do-it-yourself web design. The web has become the host to the "Profile
Page Gone Bad", where pictures of beer-mugs represent a person's profile
picture, cupids that attach to the mouse persist, and hide content
underneath, non-readable text highlighted over non-contrasting color
schemes and I'm not touching those flash slide shows with the falling
"bling bling" dollar signs! The popularity of these "design managers"
tools are part of the social network appeal and add that "personal
touch", although nothing prevents people from making bad choices with
'em and it's just part of the appeal.

What has become of any sense of style might be left on a few blog
templates but social network profile pages are usually bankrupt of
simple web-design 101 style skills, although we do list a a few nice
templates that you can select from nothing prevents anyone from
"customizing it further". The issue is that many of these templates
have animated gifs are the user's choice, and I hate to say it, but the
animated gif isn't dead yet, quite the opposite. I remember we had to
wait for gif support in flash for a long time, and now why is the
animated gif support still missing in Flex-as3? Especially, with the
advent of full browser flash, I'd love to make every tool utilize the
new power of flash and make our design tools on steroids, but I miss
that simple support and I don't want to see the e-mails that read "Where
are my dancing unicorns, they don't dance on me.com profile like on my
other profile page on myface."

Is there a way to support animated gifs through a work-around right now?

Patrick
me.com/patrickdj