Look at building Windows apps--you can use C, C++, MFC,
Visual Basic
All of which takes place in a single IDE: Visual Studio. Where is "Flash
Studio"?
To build HTML Web Apps you might use all or a mix of Dreamweaver,
Fireworks, Photoshop, JSP, ASP, CF. Etc.
Or you might just use Visual Studio, if the design team delivers
finished assets. The catch being that the finished assets in Flex are often
Flash files, which require code that the designers often can't write, so you
need to be able to modify them. The overlap is larger than I think Adobe
realizes.
As we release Blaze and we have AS3 in both Flash and
Flex, it will become easier still to integrate the two, and you will see
more and more focus on workflow over time.
I look forward to this, because this workflow integration is essential
to many of us, where the roles may not be as clear cut as "designer",
"developer", etc. The power of Visual Studio is that layouts put together by
a designer generate code that developers can modify directly. I can't count
the number of times I've had to completely rebuild design assets that were
handed to me in a Flash file because the designer couldn't write a line of
code and did absolutely everything with the timeline..
In fact, back then, I was running the FreeHand product line at
Macromedia (among other things)--should we have said, why
add another vector graphics tool to our product line, lets just
add a timeline to FreeHand? It would have been a frankenstein.
I think the same is true of FlexBuilder and Flash.
Frankly, I think the fact that you see those as anologous may be the
fundamental problem. FreeHand produces static output, more like photoshop,
illustrator, et al. Both Flash and Flex produce interactive content, and
are in no way comperable to FreeHand; Flash is more like AfterEffects than
FreeHand. Saying that there is "some" overlap is vastly understating the
facts. The bottom line is, the designers who work in design departments very
often can't write an if...then statement, and don't want or need to learn
how to. But basic Flash assets can't be developed without code, which means
developers *must* get involved. Your vision of segmenting the workflow is
ruined by the very fact that Flash is so powerful and flexible: the
developers *muist* be involved in the design of assets regardless of whether
it is a small company, one- or two-man team situation, or a large-scale,
multi-team situation. Why does Dreamweaver have a "designer view" and a
"developer view", but each has access to the features of the other? Why does
Visual Studio allow a designer to lay out an app and then let the developer
come in and add the code that makes the assets do their thing? These are
both clearly because the teams must overlap, and forcing designers and
developers to use different tools would be enough to drive many users away
to other tools that implemented both. I would happily move to a code-only
development paradigm, but my clients and their design departments won't let
me, and I think that problem is only becoming more widespread as the
"fundamental trend" of RIA development continues.
Just my $0.0015 (adjusted for inflation ;-) )
ryanm
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