Designing for Flex by Rob Adams

Designing for Flex by Rob Adams

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"Motion has been a key element of Adobe Flash since its very beginning. The ability to animate objects on the web is integral to the technology and was originally one of its main selling points. Flash originally used its animation capabilities to tell stories, whether to teach, to sell, or to entertain. But with Flex, the Flash platform has moved into application design, bringing all the communicative power of its motion technology with it.

Unfortunately, due to some high-profile mistakes, motion has received something of a bad reputation in application design and development circles. I say "unfortunately" because, when used properly, motion can be a powerful tool for making applications more useful, usable, and desirable. Using motion, you can eliminate the jerky jumps from screen to screen that disturb and deeply disorient users. However, improper use of motion will distract and annoy users, impeding them from reaching their goals.

The Designing for Flex series surveys new possibilities, techniques, and challenges designers and developers will confront when designing Flex rich Internet applications."

My fascination for design was yielded with Flash. And what a metamorphosis ! when flash-MX became Flash-2004, I was shot sure, Macromedia is upto something as the software was opening up for major AS programming. That's when Flex came into arena. Flex was a kind of doubtful kid when it was born, and now everyone wants it. Fortunately, I am with flex now :), flexing rich internet apps as client wishes.

>> An excellent series on designing for Flex by Rob Adams