General 17 Jul 2006 05:42 pm
[video] - Colin Moock interviews me at FiTC
While at this year’s FiTC conference I had the chance to sit down with world-renowned Flash developer and prolific author, Colin Moock, and chat about Flash. In our conversation, Colin and I discuss post-merger Adobe and how it has affected the Flash team, the Flash platform, Adobe Labs, and our plans around components in the Flash authoring tool and how we expect to integrate with Flex and other Adobe tools in the future.
Check out the four part interview on the Adobe Developer Center here.
on 18 Jul 2006 at 11:49 am 1.Mauviere said …
Very interesting, especially the last part, the discussion about the opportunity to integrate in Flash 9 authoring tool a lighter set of components than the Flex’s one.
I am developping (quite big) webmapping apps with Flash only from AS2 classes. What I need first is a fast, efficient AS compiler. Flash 8 is, as everybody knows, not perfect in this respect. So i am a priori the ideal client for Flex 2. But i don’t need a huge “framework”, i only need to use a light set of basic components (combobox, checkbox…)
I will never use Flex if, as soon as i need to integrate a combobox in my mapping app, my swf file immediately grows by up to 200 or 300 ko of Flex framework compiled code. Because Internet users don’t like fat applications.
Looks like you are only considering two groups of customers, designers-timeline’s addicts, and “RIA” developpers for whom Flex was designed. I don’t recognize myself in any of them.
So, please, let us enjoy the possibility to use together the power of AS and **different** sets of components, from the basic one to the most “enterprise services” one. Thank you in advance.
on 18 Jul 2006 at 6:03 pm 2.Justin said …
Thank you for the videos. The information was insightful and helpful. As one who uses Flash at work on almost a daily basis and is very interested in application development with it, certainly it would be nice to see components built into the API in the next release that would assist a bit more with this. Sure, Flex may do this and I understand that at some point one might just be faced with the reality of learning a new tool. However, for those who feel they are still very much learning, but have acquired some mid-level skill, to jump into a new program is just not very practical when it comes to answering the question, “How long will this take you.” from your boss. (I will preface that statement by saying one could learn fast and hopefully in the forthcoming days more info on Flex will help with this). It would though be nice to leverage the skill that one has already with Flash and be able to kind of spring board from that into the next release with more app related ability.
I can understand how you could get so comfortable with one program you don’t really want to change, but like Mauviere was saying above you can’t necessarily say that Flash developers are timeline folks that do animation and Flex developers build apps. That is much to small of a box I think. I myself want to get into building apps with Flash and so does my work. Why not use Flex you might ask? Well, it is hard to set aside knowledge that you have of one program for another instead of building upon what you have. If it is true that we don’t have to set it aside and learn something completely new then that is where I will end this and allow you to explain a bit more and hopefully bridge the “gap” you were talking about in the video.