I remember when I first got my hands on Flex (not the dev version of 1.5 that would never be anything that I could deploy to production because of the insane COST) – it was game changing. I could finally stop worrying about all of the annoying things (like laying out controls and giving data to components…and even dealing with components themselves) and could really focus on making truly awesome and polished apps (with all this new time I found!) I remember the absolute joy of coding actionscript in eclipse and what it was like to finally have things like code completion and decent formatting. I thought, “Man, the things I’m going to do with this new found tech…I can finally change the world! Finally!”

But something changed. I don’t know if it was me, I’m not sure if was the tooling or if anyone else even feels this way but…I lost something when I started using flex. I lost something and I want it back.

I was looking through my collection of old fla’s on my hard drive…some of them are quite crude but they have something that it seems that none of my flex apps have. They’re fun. They look nicer, they’re simpler…it’s almost like I’m looking back at a time of creativity and glee. Seriously, “G-L-E-E.” I used to try and design things. I had to, I couldn’t just throw a whole bunch of controls and MovieClips on the stage and leave it as it was. I think the change is that Flex encourages you to look at your code. In the flash IDE, you tried to make the code look “nice” but really, who cared? I wasn’t building enterprise grade apps back in the day…I was building widgets, I was making cool things, I was having fun. I used to think about motion, I used to think about really doing something cool, coming up with things that people hadn’t seen before. Now I think about libraries, and class structure and frameworks. I care about memory optimization and say things like “I wish I could overload methods in actionscript, mang” when I used to say things like “I love Flash, it makes me feel like I can do anything.” I was one of those people that defended the presence of the drawing toolbar in the IDE and I got really good at using my tablet to make all kinds of crazy art with the tool.

But Flex changed that. Yes I could still use Flash and make swc’s and go to “Commands” and “Convert to Flex Component” but in reality…I dunno…it seems to make the magic feel far away. I’m realizing that the last time I made something that I actually wanted to show to people was when I created Dropping Joes which brought me back to the creative suite and closer to “designing an experience” rather than “crafting some code.”

I don’t know where I’m at with it all yet…I do know that I’m probably going to start spending more time in CS4 and less time in Flex (Flash) Builder. I’m trying to find something witty to say to end this post of whinging about Flex but I got nothin. I’m just looking forward to having fun again.