From Flash to Flex

Just over a year ago I started learning ActionScript. At the time it was actually to develop multi-touch applications for the table I had made. Back then, I did everything in code, and there was no real interface aside from the black background. For this, flash was great, I just did all my code in a document class, and it worked very smoothly.

Well nowadays Im building AIR applications and have been using flash for it. Building an interface in flash it like doing it with cutout pieces of paper. Seriously. But like that, you can never get everything in the perfect location. It drives me crazy coming from a web development background. Things in flash have no structure. Things can easily overlap. If you move one element it does not affect the elements next to it,  meaning you now need to change all of them. And there is no super simple way to do it numerically (all done with the mouse), making it even harder. (if you change the size of a movie clip you stretch it’s contents so you can’t just readjust size from the info box)

So the company I am with just bought Adobe Flex  and I am starting over in it. I really like building interfaces in it a lot more than flash, except coding in it is not as easy. This is what I find really funny. Adobe creates a program for flash developers, who want to just code everything. But in the end, you need to do a lot more before you can start coding.

Someone at adobe needs to take a closer look at how javaScript works. Let me have my interface in one document, and my code in an other. Let me name elements and directly talk to them from code. In flex, you can do either one of these, but not both, and that’s not cool. Even flash let me do that, and you claim it is for designers. Well I guess that’s it. I am a designer, but I also like hard structure.

Then again, I have used flex for 1 day. Give me some time.

But if I had to say, I still think flash is the worst applications from adobe now. It tries to be like illustrator, but does not act the same. The key combos are not the same as all their other applications. And it wont behave in the OS like it should (mainly hiding).

My first class

My favorite blog right now is by David Walsh. A post David made a few days back was about a writer making a cool function to restyle drop down menus, and he took it and made a Mootools class of it. I was inspired and took something I made for bildrCode and turned it into my first Mootools class. What I made is an OSX like drop down box that works as a confirmation. The class allows the user to set a function to fire when the user clicks on cancel or confirm, and even determine the text for each button as well as add custom html to the box itself (here seen with an input box).

Works really well.

At work? Im working on something really cool, but Im not sure I can share yet. I can say that Adobe Air is really cool.