Chakra Media blog

Speed on my macbook? Love it. Redesigned palettes? Nice.  New icon? Brilliant.  The whole new icon set is great in my opinion.  Bold, simple, intelligent, and usable.  The color wheel representation is great too... very fitting for Adobe and it's publishing background.  (It's also interesting to note that Flex is at the epicenter of it all.)   A lot of people seem to be complaining about them, but I don't see how they are any worse than a feather or a butterfly.  If I had never seen an icon for photoshop or illustrator and was asked to choose which icon represented which app, I'd have to say this new set would do a much better job of getting the point across.  Ai? Adobe Illustrator.  Ps? PhotoShop. Ae? After Effects.  ... this i can figure out.... but, a flower and a feather?  wtf?   Macromedia's icons made sense and influence is obvious here.  It's about usability.  Studio 8's icons stand out much more than CS2's on my dock.  I think they did a great job.

OK, so i recently built my first Flex app and was surprised at how simple it was to create a blog reader. (example was direct from the tutorials)... what I really find interesting (and look forward to learning) is the ability to blend both Flex and Flash content for truly amazing, immersive, high performance experiences. Flex offers a richer experience than a traditional page-based model, but it can still be somewhat ugly.... especially since it's geared towards developers who are less 'design' oriented. I think Flash designers/developers have a great opportunity to become the bridge between design and technology and continue to push the web in a forward direction. Flex offers great tools to interact with data and I think the fun part is learning how to 'flex' your Flash muscles to express the capabilities of this new development model... It's an exciting time to be a Flash/Flex developer and I hope more Flash designers will make the leap and explore Flex.

I wanted to share an example of a 'brochure-ware' template I've developed and used many times over the past year or so. I've updated it to work with SWFAddress instead of the custom back button solution I had done a while back. This example does not use the main timeline but instead uses movieclips on a single frame. It's essentially a light-weight skeleton or 'framework' (i use that term loosely) to load in content into various screens or sections. I was going to explain how everything works a little more thoroughly, but instead I'm going to do that in a future post that will explain how do to deep linking with dynamic products (or images) using the same template. (Bonus: includes SWFMacMousewheel support)

View the example

Download the source

*** UPDATED: check out the new AS2/AS3 versions here