2011-03-17

Flex is sexy

This week I got called into my President's office to talk about the new web application I've been building over the past few months. He wanted to comment on certain elements of the UI, some of which are little changes that totally make sense to me and that I will certainty do.

However he got me at the "it's not so sexy". He tried to explain it to me, but he couldn't find the correct words to express what he meant by that. So I tried to ask him various questions, such as: is it the colors? Do elements look floating in space? Are elements misaligned? And he would always answer with "it's not sexy". He then went about telling me how the first 9 children (applications) I had built were sexy and how this one was not. How it wasn't very Apple-like. Then it hit me, the first 9 applications are all Flex based! And this last one was purely done in HTML.

This reminds me of how the Flex engineers are always fond of saying how alot of Flex applications use the default theme, and that skinning is not done as often as they would like. Of course they were saying that about Flex when it was version 2/3, and hence we got version 4, were you can skin everything about it to your hearts content. Needless to say, I use the default theme, cause skinning is just not a priority for us.

So now I have to go make little visual changes, meaning make changes to the CSS, and possibly even add some gradients here and there to give it more umph! Not to say it's not possible, it totally is... just that... all this to say... with only that default theme... Flex is sexy :)

4 comments:

yanli said...

Of course, default theme are classic. So what is your point that new theme in Flex 4 are easier?

I have been using Flex for 3 years, experiment various script to make Flex faster but it still look a lot like Flex because people can "right-click" and know what technology is it.

I would also suggest you to disable the right click menu which work across all browsers except Opera, this will further impress your boss! True, enable right-click can ruin the whole thing too.

Dimitrios "Jimmy" Gianninas said...

The point was that The default theme in Flex makes your application look great. In HTML, you have a lot of tweaking to do to get the same sort of look.

jlafferty said...

Nice post :) As a member of the Flex team, I hope you do your next project in Flex 4 and then ask your boss for a raise for bringing the sexy back.

Dimitrios "Jimmy" Gianninas said...

@jlafferty: Hehe, thanks for advise, I'll keep it mind :)