The Flex/Flash Platform get’s a new website
OK, I finally made an entire project in Flex Builder. For a flasher, using a framework feels like trying to assemble a watch while wearing thick woolly mittens, until you discover you just have to press the “assemble watch” button.
If you’re in any doubt as to which platform, Flash IDE or Flex Builder to use, here’s my take in a nutshell.
Flasher: “Anything you can do in Flex I can do prettier in Flash and it will only fill a tenth of your Flex program”
Flexer: “OK, but this needs to be shipped this week, bug free”
Flasher: “I can manage that, let’s take a look…”
Flexer: “It’s a simple database look-up that populates this datagrid, and then there’s a small text editior for editing entries.”
Flasher: (to himself, “Wow that looks bloody complicated!”) “Shouldn’t all those objects whoosh in from the top corner into a 3D matrix with little animated logo’s showing what type they are?”
Flexer: “No”
If you want to really make a graphical impact, Flash, Photoshop, After Effects, these are your tools. Don’t try wrestling with the Flex framework, it will make you physically vomit. You will experience it as “not working properly” as soon as you start to animate anything (even with the built in Tweeny things).
If your coming from Visual Studio, don’t open Flash. You will mistakenly judge it as crap and start learning Silverlight. Open Flex Builder on the other hand and you’ll be right at home no matter what the backend is written in.
Any if you were looking for the actual website…
