Adam,
I hear what you're saying. It is frustrating to have to shell out money
for two different products.
Here's the history. The Flash IDE has had numerous workflow problems,
intrinsic problems and limitations in the language (prototype based),
slow engine (in comparison to fp9) and other subtle but nasty bugs.
Flash started out and was an animation program that has been upgraded
again and again with new features on top of the previous program and new
features added to the previous renderer. For example, AS2 is compiled
down to AS1.
Rather than built on a shaky foundation Macromedia realized the need to
create a new sturdy foundation and fix the problems that plagued the
original program and AS1 engine. So looking at all the things they
wanted to do and fix they created a new rendering engine from the ground
up and rather than reinvent the wheel, took one of the best development
environment of the time and built a new product called Flex Builder off
of it. They set the focus on making it create Applications for the web.
They set out and fixed a whole huge mess of problems for us. No more
having to built our own preloaders, awesome event handlers that bubble
up, great layout tools, new states and transitions with a few lines of
code, easy bookmarking in the browser and a whole lot of other things
they knew we would be using it for. Plenty of things were planned in the
design and implementation.
Most of the benefits are realized once you use it. It would not have
worked as well to have overhauled the Flash IDE.
A lot of people are trying to differentiate the two by saying one is for
animation and design and one is for applications and forms. Well yes and
no. You have to try it but I'm going to say you can do 90% of what is on
the web with Flex. I made this site in about an hour as practice to see
if it could be used for websites. Copying and pasting of course (sorry
it lost some formatting).
http://www.judahfrangipane.com/examples/main.html. Flex uses MXML and
ActionScript 3. You still have a design view but you can edit the html,
I mean xml, I mean MXML. So the layout is very powerful. I could easily
add smooth transitions and states to that site in about 15 minutes by
adding transitions tags. The same thing would have taken a lot longer in
Flash. The one main thing you do lose in Flex is the animation timeline.
So if you want to do animation with a timeline then you would use Flash.
So we come to now. Adobe has two products that output to FP9 player.
They both overlap in functionality and you now have two products to
choose from. The Flex Builder is not out yet so it's feature set is not
set in stone. Remember the Macromedia guys, who btw are very smart
blokes, have been in the lab two years scheming like mad scientists to
make the best new Flash / web content producing ide out there.
The only thing I'm concerned about is if they don't add in the features
in Flex we need because it is out of scope of "RIA" development. This
would be a drag. I plan to use Flex 2 for everything on the web. Not
just applications. Even if some aspect is a bit more work in Flex I'd
rather use it. HTH
peace,
Judah
Adam Pasztory wrote:
I am very frustrated by the IDE being split into two product lines. Like
many other Flash developers, I do both games and animation projects
and also
RIA projects, so it looks like I'm now going to have to invest two
products
from now on! This is just one reason why I'm shifting more and more
to open
source tools.
I also feel that Adobe/Macromedia has not done a good job explaining the
need for two products, or why I would want to use one or another for a
particular project. I mean, a deeper explanation than: Flash is for
games
and animations; Flex is for Form-based RIAs.
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