Posted by brandonthedeveloper at February 24th, 2007

The always awesome Ryan Stewart had a couple of really good articles this week over at www.digitalbackcountry.com and www.zdnet.net discussing a stigma in the RIA community right now – developers and designers have to stop thinking about design and usability of browser/desktop RIAs as if they were web pages.

This is proving to be an enormous speed bump for a lot of us. Visualizing data in that way for an RIA UI makes no sense. Flash/Flex offer a number of ways to group and contain data so its relevant and available if the user wants to see it and out-of-sight if they don’t. These are display ’states’ of information, not pages. We have the ability to keep our apps clutter free and easy to navigate but mostly we just stack information in a ‘top down’ format ala web page.

I know this is a pretty lame example but look at a tool box. It has drawers, compartments, shelves that contain all the different tools we use. Now look at a chest. It could easily hold all the items in our tool box but would they be as easy to find with out the individual containers? (Sorry, I know that’s lame)

This is also something we need to communicate to our team members – especially between the developer and designer. If only half that team is thinking ‘this is an RIA not a web page UI’ its not going to be easy coming up with a usable solution.

RIAs do not serve the same purpose as a web page either, In my experience, while a web page can hold pretty much anything, an RIA is a display of data. That is the big difference that needs to be realized.

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at February 20th, 2007

Took me roughly twenty mins to go from cd in hand to having XP loaded on the G5 under Parallels. Then I installed VirtueDesktops so I could have the cool desktop to desktop transition. :)

So far it runs fantastic. I can’t tell any performance differences. Even Flexbuilder 2 runs faster under Parallels than on regular old Windows. The only thing I might have grumbled about was that it defaults to an 8 gig Virtual Machine. I can always make it bigger but I guess I wish that had been an option upon VM creation. I love how you can have mac windows floating over Windows (windows) and file sharing was very easy to set up.
This works out great now. My beefy PC rig will go back to being strictly a testing environ running win2k3 server and I’ll have all my creation tools (Flexbuilder, Studio 8, SEPY) running on the mac. It will be nice to have everything in one spot. :)

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at February 14th, 2007

I’ve got a Flex 2 app that contains an Accordion. The Accordion has two children. One contains a DataGrid and the other a TabNavigator with three children. One of those tab’s child is *supposed* to contain a SWFLoader component that calls a swf containing a YAHOO map and is communicating with the Flex app using Local Connection.

If the SWFLoader component is not inside the TabNavigator child (Canvas), it works like a champ. If I put it in the Canvas component in the Tab and compile/view, I end up having to ‘Force Quit’ Firefox. Not only that, Flexbuilder crashes and the project will no longer work. At this point, I have to delete the project and then recreate to get Flexbuilder not to crash. Then I have to replace the code in the file with code from the ‘Local History’ to try again.

I’m using FB 2.0.1 on mac g5 intel core 2 duo iMac

Anyone else had this kind of experience?

Posted by brandonthedeveloper at February 13th, 2007

The folks at Adobe Consulting and posted a new version of the Flex Style Explorer available for handy on line use or downloading.

This is the one Flex app I’ve bookmarked and found myself going back to when I need a quick ‘can I do this’ kind of answer about Flex component styles.

Do yourself a favor and bookmark this app.