kuwamoto.org

I had an odd thought earlier today after reading some news about a Yahoo project that brings the concept of Unix pipes to the Web.

A lot of the value of HTML is that it is a machine-readable format. This is the reason why we all care about “separating content form presentation”, right? Microformats takes that to the next level, as does RSS and other XML-based approaches to structuring content.

IMHO, this whole movement toward more machine readable web formats is one of the most exciting things happening right now. Now how does Flex factor in?

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Why is it that so many of us make Flex applications that look like this:

I mean.. The default look for Flex applications looks fine, but it’s kind of like making an HTML app that looks like this:

I suppose the answer is that many of the folks playing around with Flex these days are developers, but that doesn’t mean we have to settle. I think there are two factors at play here:

1. The default HTML look is pretty ugly, which forces you to look for an alternative.
2. HTML has been around for longer, so more people know the tricks you need to know to change its look.

To counteract this inertia, maybe we should have made the default Flex look be an obviously non-production look, like Elyon’s napkin skin (which is wonderful, BTW. Yes, that is a real screenshot of a working datagrid) In a funny way, this would have forced people to develop their own look while at the same time opening people’s eyes up to the vast styling possibilities of Flex… Hm…..

I’ve been poking around at a new photo application called picnik and I have to say that it is really, really, cool. It’s beautiful, fast, and useful. It feels intuitive. It doesn’t clutter your interface or use gratuitous animation. And using it gives you a feeling of joy.

What I love about this application is that it opens your mind to what a Flex application can look like. It looks deceptively simple, but there are some interesting UI thoughts behind this app. One innovation is that the navigation area serves double duty as an editing bar, saving screen real estate. Another is that they have really paid attention to how you can get your work done without losing data. If you leave the app and come back, you will end up in the same state, editing the same document. If you go into “creative tools” mode, you get multiple steps of undo.

I love seeing this kind of experimentation with Flex UI. Remember that HTML became what it is today after fifteen years of innovation. Flex 2 has been out for less than a year. These are still the early days. Those of us in the Flex community don’t yet know what this technology is capable of.