machine501

Someone in our chat pointed me to this great article by Yakov Fain, of Farata Systems. This is a must read for anyone evaluating Flex, either as a developer or as a product manager. Here is the article in summary:

1. Flex 2 is not a RAD tool
2. The pool of Flex developers is still limited - retrain your developers
3. Check the credentials of the vendors you hire
4. Be careful with frameworks - use components
5. Architecture - Avoid monolithic applications

I want to add another point: Think about user experience.

I get the feeling from talking with many developers, clients, and prospective clients that they think adding a little bit of Flex will compensate for the poor look and performance of their existing site. I recently had a potential client ask me to help re-write a web application that was not performing well. They felt that certain features were being underutilized because the existing HTML-based site made it hard for the user to figure out where to click, what to do next, what was available to do at the time.

They thought Flex would be able to solve this. But when I saw the initial design for the Flex rewrite it turned out to be very similar to the old HTML app. Sure, Flex offers new affordances and UI elements like transitions and effects to guide the user’s action through a complex form, but can this overcome a confusing information architecture? Why jump right in and recreate everything from scratch? Take incremental steps instead. Figure out what can be changed on your site/app to make it easier to use, easier for the user to figure out what actions are available to them. If you’re starting from scratch, Flex might be the way to go. But, take some time first to evaluate the pros and cons in terms of development and user experience.

Check out my friend Matt’s screencast of his recently launched startup, Rollbase. This is a service that lets anyone create business applications without having to write one line of code. Developers and users can publish their application to the Rollbase directory so that other users can immediately install it and customize it for their own needs. Modifying the app looks very easy, just drag and drop components around a page, pick the fields you need, and click save. You can also integrate the application into your own publicly facing web site, either via RSS or directly into the design of your site. It looks extremely flexible and has support for some advanced features like workflows, which are actions that get executed when the user makes a change to a field or record.

One interesting thing I look forward seeing is if and how they will allow developers and app publishers to make money from the apps they publish to the directory. There might even be a bit of a side business in providing support for Rollbase apps.

Check out the screencast for yourself:

http://www.rollbase.com/betademo.html

They are looking for an IT engineer. So, if you’re a smart IT Engineer looking for a cool startup to work for then head over to their employment page.

So I saw the Adobe Thermo stuff at Adobe MAX 2007 and it looked really cool. Basically, it lets designers turn a PSD, or some other asset, into a working RIA. It looks very easy, you just take a PSD and import it into Thermo, then start turning parts of your comp into common RIA components like lists, input fields, etc. It’s great because it will take that text field you drew in Photoshop that has a certain font, with a white border, and a semi transparent background, into a Flex textfield that looks exactly the same as the field you drew!

One of the cool things that you can do is to prepopulate a component, like a list, for example, with dummy data. Well, while we were in the Flex Chat, João Fernandes suggested that it would be great if you could tern an AS class into a Thermo dummy data var. Basically, take a VO and turn it into a dummy class that populates your component. I thought this was a great idea, almost like a Java Bean. Here’s how it would work:

Say you had a Customer VO with “firstName”, “lastName”, “phoneNumber”, “id”, etc. A designer opens up thermo with their comp, drags and drops an AS file into thermo, and you get a list of properties, named after the settable fields in your class as editable properties, a-la JavaBeans. In this case, you get “First Name”, “Last Name”, “Phone Number”.

Now the designer is playing with the data, getting more involved in the process of creating the app, working with the actual data the backend programmer needs, and structuring the UI with the fields that already exist. Thermo is really really cool. Tom said: “thermo will sell a billion copies.” I don’t doubt it.

Hey everyone, Tom and I are demoing our SearchCoders/Dashboard app at max. We are one of five winners of the Adobe AIR derby and so we have a booth in the community pavillion where we’re showing the app. There are other derby winners, like Ed Finkler, demoing their apps here too.  So, come by and say hi.   We’ll be here tomorrow and we’ll be in the chat all day.