It seems you view yourself as an interaction designer, so I can see
where you're coming from. As a developer (coder), I find these design
views to be a flawed concept the minute I exit the realm of trivial
applications. Why? Because in serious applications most of the
displayed objects are generated dynamically. There's no way a design
view can predict what and where they will be displayed. Imagine for
an instant that everything is localized (internationalized) in your
application. Well, then everything is generated on the fly from the
contents of some text files. I can tell you that in the latest
application I worked on, the design view was so confused that it
generated a total mess, and only the background graphics was
recognizable.
Of course, I need to present mock ups before coding. I simply use
Balsamiq Mockup. It's good enough to communicate the general ideas.
What do I use to polish the look? Well, too bad, nowadays I really
have to use the design view. But it generates a mess in the presence
of a full fledge application. So what I do is I create small
independent FB projects wherein I replicate small parts of the
application and hardcode everything in them. And I use design view to
tweak this stuff. I say that it's what I'm doing 'nowadays', but in
the olden days we had something much better. It was called
Flex3StyleExplorer http://examples.adobe.com/flex3/consulting/
styleexplorer/Flex3StyleExplorer.html#. If you could replicate
something like that, I would be very thankful to you. I suppose
nowadays it should be called FlexSkinExplorer.
Yvon
On Oct 7, 2012, at 8:52 AM, Sebastian Mohr wrote:
Hi there,
because, it is probably easier for us to have something on the
table, rather
then just to talk about it, I have created a small prototype with
Flash Catalyst
CS5.5 and Flash Builder 4.6. This proposed Design Tool [1] - codenamed
Thermo MK2 - should be seen as a hybrid of Flash Catalyst CS5.5, the
"Design View" of Flash Builder 4.6 and the Eclipse IDE.
Things you can do with Thermo MK2 so far:
- Switching Perspectives (see top-right)
- Switching between Source- and Design-Mode (see text editor in the
middle)
Things that Thermo MK2 should do:
- Thermo MK2 should detect [SkinParts] and [SkinStates] of
SkinnableComponents.
- Thermo MK2 should be able to draw graphics in a FXG 2.0 [2]
compliant way.
- Thermo MK2 should be able to import FXG files, Photoshop and
Illustrator files.
- Thermo MK2 should be able to communicate via a certain API with
Flash Builder 4.7 or other IDEs.
- Thermo MK2 should be able to visually manage and edit CSS files.
- Thermo MK2 should be able to visually link SkinnableComponents
with their Skins inside CSS.
- Thermo MK2 should be clever about screen sizes (compare with
Adobe Edge Reflow [2]).
The Data-Centric features are not necessarily needed
because other IDEs would be more appropriate for that.
That being said: These are the questions I have:
- Who could finance Thermo MK2?
- How many people are needed to build Thermo MK2?
- Which expertise is required to build Thermo MK2?
- When could Thermo MK2 be released (and sold) in its first version?
Hopefully, this leads the discussion into
something more concrete then it was before.
Sincerely Yours,
Sebastian Mohr
Apache Flex Developer (PPMC),
Interaction Designer & Musician
http://www.linkedin.com/in/masuland
[1] http://code.google.com/p/masuland/wiki/ThermoMK2
[2] http://sourceforge.net/adobe/flexsdk/wiki/FXG%202.0%
20Specification/
[3] http://html.adobe.com/edge/reflow/
