Jul 172007
Last year I wrote in a comment that Flex is proprietary. One of the new features of Flex 3 (currently in beta) is that it will be Open Sourced, see this (old) press release. I think this is great news, since the degree of penetration of Flash on the desktop is extremely high, and the GUI’s you can create are stunning nonetheless. Have a look at what Laszlo already did by integrating Flash components into their AJAX framework, now Adobe makes its move!
So, I take back what I said about Flex. Flex is great. I’ll see whether I can whip up a demo on my server (if I can find the time, so bear with me)…
While people indeed make the most amazing stuff with Flash, I strongly feel it’s more often than not completely out of place on the web. It’s really good for games, or specific apps requiring more advanced on the fly graphiics, or animation. But most sites (ab)use Flash purely as a gimmick, a lot of hooplah adding nothing to the site’s readibility. In fact, if I hit a site opening with a silly Flash Intro, I am usually gone before the intro ends. All that said, the fact there now is an open sourced variant available is a good thing of course. Just hope the fad will die out soon and people go back to making useful stuff instead of fancy-schmancy no value gizmos.
Flex is not used by itself, it is to enhance pages. For example to replace a text-field with a auto-complete text-field, to give the user a better experience.
Flash by itself is overly used. Intro pages: they suck.