Flex 2.0.1 and Flash CS3 will drastically improve the designer and developer workflow

Flash is for designers, Flex is for developers.

Its a nice thought, but as everyone who has ever created a sophisticated web app or website in Flash knows, its just not true. Getting Flash content into Flex is currently an exercise in frustration, not to mention the performance and even feature limitations.

So when I watched this presentation, my jaw dropped. Apparently these cats at Adobe actually mean it when they talk about integrating the designer and developer workflows. The source of my (and I’m sure many other technologist’s) excitement is centered around a new extension for Flash CS3, called the Flex Component Kit for Flash CS3. Ironically enough, the actual update is an extension for Flash CS3 but its the Flex users that will be getting the major work flow improvement from it.

From a technical standpoint, the biggest and most noticeable addition is that you can now link Flex states and transitions to frames on the timeline of your component in Flash CS3. If a designer creates several animations detailing the transitions of the component, so long as those sequences have a frame label for them, the programmer can access those frames as states and transitions once the component is brought into Flex. So, components created in Flash, on a timeline, with frames can be treated in Flex EXACTLY the same as components that were created natively for Flex. Also, events can be dispatched on specific frames in Flash, and they can be caught natively in Flex. Code hinting, which is a developer’s best friend, will also be supported here. A class can be created for this Flex component and any public methods or properties will be accessible in Flex. This means that all events that are declared in your component in Flash CS3 will be visible and captureable in Flex. You can also dispatch these events anywhere on the timeline, and Flex will catch them when the timeline plays over that point.

Its not a perfect work flow yet, programmers and designers will still have to coordinate throughout development on states, transitions and locations of event dispatches, which I would argue isn’t such a bad thing anyways. The programmers will also likely have to create custom classes for the components in Flash. Still, its a serious improvement from the previous work flow, which basically consisted of the designers getting booted out of the process as soon as the first animations were done.