Nathan Levesque

I had an interesting thought tonight that I thought I’d share. Most of the recent Flash/Flex website fall into three primary categories in terms of interaction: applications, web page emulation or the ever-loathed eccentric designs. Obviously, applications are Flash sites that behave much more like traditional desktop applications. However, the other category is usually seen when someone is making a flash site in lieu of an HTML site, so we get a design that has behavior similar to HTML pages. Click button (Request), go to “page” with content (Response). “Page” transitions are pretty, but the use of these transitions usually add an extra unnecessary 200-300kb on the download. We’ve all seen our fair share of these sites, some hit some miss. The last category is the eccentric design category. These are the Flash sites you go to and spend 5 minutes trying to figure out how to navigate (or read instructions) and when you do, you get an experience worse than category 2.

Everyone hates the last category, tolerates, the second, and are usually very accepting of the last (only for those applications that follow typical application behaviors). There has to be some middle ground between the second two. Interaction that is neither entirely Request-Response nor eccentric. What would that be? I think what I’m looking for here is a paradigm that allows for standardized navigation but also asymmetrical flow of information. I’m not saying it would work, but it would certainly be worth exploring. Possibly some type of AI could be used that acts as a broker between the user and the content. How’s that for out of the box? An AI driven website?

I plan on doing some videocasts in the near future. I’m planning on primarily focuses on Flex/Flash but wouldn’t mind delving off into other topics. If there are any special requests any readers have feel free to comment or send me an email through the contact section.

Just though I’d share with you a humorous thought I had today, I find these are the kinds of thought that help me survive even the worst weeks. I’ll try to make this a weekly thing.

I was browsing the web and came across Adobe Edge’s February publication. There is an article for BlazeDS, including discussion of AMF on it and for some reason despite this being the 100th time I’ve seen the acronym spelled out, it finally hit me: Action Message Format Man would be a great Superhero name.

Now what would his costume look like…?

Yesterday I had the opportunity to pitch Flex to a few of my college professors with the potential of it becoming an advanced course offering. To give you an idea of the demographics I was working with, all of the professors here have had experience with web design, and a couple have worked with Flash traditionally in the past. I worked on a Flex project independently this past Fall, so they had been seeing me come into class excited about something I had done the previous evening. Needless to say, they were curious about what this technology was, so it was decided I was to give them a presentation to show them what Flex could do. I jumped at the opportunity to get others excited about Flex, particularly because I would love to see my college pick it up as a course.

I started off by showing a few examples such as Buzzword. I also gave a brief rundown of the history of Flex, so that they could understand where Flex is, where it had been, and where it was going. I also briefly touched on. Next, I introduced them to Flex Builder. I showed how the design view works and the code that was generated as a result. Custom components were briefly touched on. I also showed some of the data-related features such as binding, HttpService, and data providers.

To show the visual side of Flex, I loaded up Illustrator and showed the skinning extensions for integration into CS3 that are coming out with Flex 3. Lastly, I teased them with screenshots of Thermo and explained how it will put power into the designer’s hands for UI design.

Their responses were pretty much the same: “Wow.” One of my professors commented that she now knew why I was so excited about Flex. In fact, doing this presentation had the effect of imbuing even more excitement into me. After several minutes of excited chit-chat and Q&A, we came to the inevitable question of: “What next?” They’d just been shown an amazing technology that is changing the web development world dramatically and now understood why.

We decided that next Monday I will be doing a more extended presentation by programming a complete, but simple, application for them live. I’m looking forward to this very much and will probably do a dry run this weekend. I have yet to draft what I’m going to do, but my priorities are to illustrate data services, ActionScript vs. MXML coding, and a more in depth introduction to working within Flex building, possibly showing things such as debugging. I would like to integrate application structure into it, but due to the short time frame, I will code only the simplest MXML and ActionScript.

Keep an eye out, I will post about the results of this next week and probably include the sample application I develop.