Brian Crescimanno

For the first time in a long time, I feel like it's actually for me to start blogging again--it's not that I have some conceited notion that the world actually wants to hear what I have to say.  It's more that after moving to AutoTrader.com in November, I feel like I've really found some direction.  All of my previous attempts at starting a blog focused (at least, in my mind) on my own design abilities.  Having found myself at ATC, I've come to accept a pretty sensible truth:  I am not an artist.  

Certainly I have some Visual Design skills; but they are not my strong suit.  My focus has always been on User Experience an Interaction Design and the best way for me to achieve those goals is to focus on User Centric development practices as an extension of User Centric Design.  It's with this mentality that I've chosen simply to install Wordpress, grab a theme I thought was nice, and get to the more important aspect of writing a Blog--actually writing it!

I'm back in Atlanta this week after attending the O'Reilly Web 2.0 Expo in San Francisco April 22-25.  The Expo was, for lack of a better description, a mixed bag.  Duane Nickull and James Ward of Adobe opened the conference for us on Tuesday with an Adobe Flex Boot Camp session which set a rather high bar in terms of conference sessions. Needless to say, after seeing the potential of Flex first hand, I quickly downloaded the Flex Builder 60-day trial and have been running through tutorials since I got back.   As my colleague Neil Green put it to me, "this shit sells itself"--and he was 100% correct.  When we look at Flash version penetration numbers, what we see is that over 98% of systems have Flash Player 8 or better.  What does this mean?  In the simplest terms:

• More people have Flash than have Javascript enabled
• More people have Flash than use any single version of any web browser
• More people have Flash than use any version of any web browser

In my opinion, those are some pretty staggering numbers.  Factor in that the Flash Player will render these SWF files identically on the 3 major platforms--under any browser--and you have a very compelling argument in favor of Flex-based development for the front end.  Especially given that my primary role at ATC over the past 7 months has been as an Ajax developer and my continuing battles with multiple browsers' disparate support for CSS...you get the picture.  Technology like Flex looks pretty good in the face of all of that.

What have you heard about Flex?  What do you see as the advantages and the drawbacks?  Are you looking at implementing it in your organization?    Basically--I've been sold on the idea of Flex; but I'd love to hear the downsides that I'm certain I'm overlooking (and let's try to avoid the "more obvious than obvious" things like "it's proprietary" and "it requires a plugin").  Thanks--that'd be great!

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