Designing for Flex – Part 1: Overview and introduction to Flex
Written by kiti SEO on 6.4.08Flex and traditional Flash
Understanding the difference between Flex and traditional Flash content created using the Adobe Flash authoring tool is often a challenge, mostly because they are both "Flash-based" technologies that are built on top of the same core technology, Adobe Flash Player.
However, Flex and Flash differ dramatically in their models for design and development. Flash designers and developers created traditional Flash content around a time and animation metaphor; they built narratives to teach concepts, advertise products and services, or simply to tell stories for their own sake. (The humor site "Homestar Runner" is one of the more popular examples of storytelling for its own sake.) As the interactive development capabilities of the Flash Player became more powerful, some Flash gurus were able to push the envelope of the technology and create larger, more data-rich Flash experiences that rivaled the complexity of traditional applications, and thus we coined the term "Rich Internet Application" or "RIA" to describe these experiences. However, due to the inherent limits of the Flash tools and technology of the time, building complex applications that supported many user flows, interacted heavily with large amounts of user data, and required the support of large teams for long-term support and maintenance was prohibitively difficult and expensive. Thus, most traditional Flash content has remained focused on media and storytelling on the web.
The Flex framework provides a more application-focused method of designing and developing RIAs that are deployed to the web or on the desktop. Unlike Flash, the primary organizing metaphor of Flex is not time and animation, but screens and states. Time and animation are still first-class citizens in Flex, but they are used instead to guide the user from one state transition to the next. Designers use motion in Flex to provide visual effects to improve user comprehension through feedback, not to organize the entire user experience as an interactive movie. Thus designing a Flex application is more like designing a traditional HTML or desktop application at the high level, but allows developers and designers to use the motion powers of Flash to make their application more fluid and seamless.
Despite these differences, Flash and Flex are both part of the same platform and thus are capable of interoperating. If sections of an application make more sense to build using the animation-focused approach of the Flash authoring tool, you can do this and integrate them into your Flex applications as first-class citizens. Whether you have existing Flash content you want to use in a Flex application or simply prefer the Flash authoring tool for the job at hand, this interoperability means that deciding on Flex doesn’t mean deciding against Flash.
With great power comes great responsibility
By now you have seen how Flex differs from the user interface technology mediums that came before it. You have tasted its power and flexibility (no pun intended) and seen how designing applications that target the Flex framework requires thinking a little bit differently than you might be used to doing when designing applications for other mediums. However, it is always worth remembering that while Flex opens up whole new ways to communicate with your users and assist them in accomplishing their goals, it also introduces new potential stumbling blocks to watch out for. It behooves all of us, whether we are designers or developers, to use the power of this new medium effectively for the benefit of our users and our businesses. The articles in this series explain how to do just that.
To learn more, read the next part of the series: Part 2: Planning your application.
This content is a public draft. Please give us feedback in the Flex Interface Guide Forum.
Acknowledgements
Although this article series has my name on it, many people contributed to its development. I’d like to thank my reviewers, Sho Kuwamoto, Phil Costa, Steven Heintz, Narciso Jaramillo, Josh Ulm, Jeremy Clark, Deb Galdes, Tom Hobbs, and Amy Wong for providing me with extremely helpful feedback. Special thanks to Sho Kuwamoto and Phil Costa for envisioning this project and pushing me to complete it and to my managers, Josh Ulm and Jeremy Clark, for finding the time for me to give it the attention it needed. Finally, extra-special thanks to Tom Hobbs, Narciso Jaramillo, Sho Kuwamoto and Peter Flynn for guiding my thinking on many of the topics that appear in the articles.
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