Hot on the heals of Part5: Designing Content Displays, Rob Adams has just posted up the next chapter of his excellent designing for flex articles, titled Part 6:Guiding with motion to the Adobe Flex Developer Center: Flex Interface Guide. If you have not read the other five parts, check them out first.

This chapter covers:

• The differences between motion design in Flex applications and motion design in other mediums.
• How to use motion to leverage users’ instinctual understanding of the physical world to enhance your application’s usability.
• How to use screen to screen transitions to help guide users to the next area of interest and make it clear how to return.
• How to use motion effects to provide feedback and focus your users’ attention.

For More Information

• Flex Interface Guide
• Flex Developer Center

The default Flex 2 Aeon theme looks fairly polished and showing it to clients in the early stages of a project can have it’s disadvantages. For example a client may believe the project is closer to release than it is or if you use Adobe Flex for prototyping may believe that the default theme represents the final look and feel.

If you intend to customise the chrome of a flex app, showing a client the default look and feel not only leads the client into a false expectation of the finish product but, if the app is purely a prototype, may make a case for it being used for the foundation of production code or prevent an further exploration in to the visual design.

Ted Patrick has provided an excellent technique to overcome this.
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Hi All,

Just a quick post. Rob Adams has just posted up the next installment of his excellent designing for flex articles, titled Part 5: Designing Content Displays to the Adobe Flex Developer Center: Flex Interface Guide. If you have not read the other four parts, check them out first.

For More Information

• Flex Interface Guide
• Flex Developer Center

Back in September, Adobe released a new section to the Flex Developer Center, called FIG or Flex Interface Guide. This is an excellent resource for anyone involved in the Interaction Design (IxD) or User Experience (Ux) of RIAs or any developers who want to make more user focussed apps. There are several articles still in draft about designing for Flex. One of the upcoming articles that will be particularly of interest and relevance to the new possibilities of designing RIAs is the use of motion, as a tool to guide users.

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Adobe have today announced that they will be offering Flex builder 2 as a free download (at no cost) to education establishments and students. Not only a welcomed announcement by the community but also this shrewd move will mean more institutions teaching Rich Internet Application development, and more graduates ready to tackle the next generation of web applications and satisfy the growing demand for Flex developers. (Hopefully in time for the impending Rich Internet Application boom?)

For More Information.

• Adobe’s Announcement

I was pleased to hear the announcement that Doug McCune will be writing the upcoming Flex 3 for Dummies with Deepa Subramaniam. I am looking forward to seeing this early next year. What I am most excited about however, is that Doug has posted a sneak peek of his excellent TileUI Flex App to promote his announcement.

Doug McCune’s TileUI.

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Following my previous article I discovered Chatopica an excellent chat widget, you can integrate directly into your blog. Current topics are related to programming and design but custom topics are coming soon.

Chatopica is created by Tom Bray and Robert Cadena of SearchCoders, Tom being the presenter of the excellent eSeminar on an Easy MVC approach to developing flex apps, I blogged about.

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Like many others, I have been struggling to fully get my head fully around the Cairngorm Micro Architecture, and even with the excellent Cairngorm Creator, I find it a little overkill for many Adobe Flex projects I am involved with, in fact, so does Steven Webster (one of the creators of Cairngorm).

So yesterday I sat in on an excellent Adobe eSeminar, presented by Tom Bray of SearcherCoders who presented an easy / simplified Model View Controller architecture based on Cairngorm.

To demonstrate the need for these frameworks, Tom started with an excellent example of an application based on a simple chat client. Inspired by his excellent Chatopica perhaps?:
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Buzzword is a revolutionary Rich Internet Application that allows anyone with a browser access to a powerful word processor that gives Microsoft Word a run for it’s money. Virtual Ubiquity the developers of Buzzword (which includes well known Flex blogger David Colletta) has recently been acquired by Adobe Systems.

Although Buzzword currently has a comparatively limited feature set, it gives you everything you need to produce professional and striking documents that can be printed directly from Buzzword or exported as Microsoft Word .doc file or Word 2003 .xml file.

Virtual Ubiquity / Adobe’s Buzzword.

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Yahoo recently released a new Flash framework for use with it’s Search, Weather, Mapping, Upcoming and Answers APIs called ASTRA (ActionScript Toolkit for Rich Applications). As the documentation is still a little sketchy in places I thought I would write a quick getting started tutorial on using the ASTRA framework with Flex 2 and Flex Builder.

Yahoo Maps Flash Component

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