There has been much said about Flash on Apple's iPhone/iPad and Flash in general. As a Flex developer, which uses the Flash player, I have a real interest in this.

From personal experience, the Flash experience on Apple products is very fustrating. Is it Adobe's fault? I do think they need to take partial blame but I think the majority of the blame lays with Apple. I will stop just short of saying Apple tries to sabotage the Flash experience on OSX.

This whole argument between Apple and Adobe is about more than just Flash however. This war has been coming for many years. 2-3 years ago Apple, without warning or reason, removed support for Flash in Quicktime. This directly affected a project I had been working on for 2-3 months, all that work, just gone. So like I said, this isn't new, this is just more overt and in everyone's face. I have to think the real motivation is nothing more than money. I don't know what Apple hopes to gain overall. Is Jobs really that concerned about our internet experience?

Why do I use Flex and Flash? Well, I used to use HTML and CSS and Coldfusion. And here is what most average user doesn't understand. When you make a web application with such technologies, I am not talking a video player here, I am talking real web applications. You run into issues when using HTML/CSS and Javascript. How things look and run varies depending on the browser. I used to build basically, not to get overly technical here, 3 different pages depending on the browser (sometimes 2 just for IE, Firefox, Safari). I have introduce Flex to a number of developers who have used Ajax, HTML/CSS, etc and the common theme with using Flex, was how nice it was to make once, deploy everywhere and the experience was the same, didn't matter what the browser was. The hours wasted tweaking applications not built in Flex/Flash, to work and look properly in every browser flavor is staggering. My application was originally built with these other technologies and I spent almost as much time tweaking it to work in IE, Safari, Firefox as I did building it.

If you think Flash is nothing more than playing videos, heres one of my favorite Flash applications, Aviary.

Flex was my savior. I now produce a product 1000 times better. I produce it quicker, with a slicker interface, with more features. To give you an example, my first application took 3-4 years to get to the same level of completeness that my latest application took me a month and a half. Thats why I use Flex/Flash today.

Now for some quick hits:

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For a free First Person Shooter, Americas Army is awesome. I have played the game since the first version and continued to play up to 2.4 or so. With version 2.x, the hackers seemed to be everywhere and we sort of lost interest in it.

Then the announcement for AA3 came out and it was using the new Unreal engine. The excitement was back!

June 17th, AA3 was released to the public.

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I downloaded the FB4 beta today, excited to see what new goodies I was going to be able to play with in the up coming months.

First the Good:
I like the data services and how you can connect to your services and get your database queries. Its pretty easy to put into a datagrid and create a view of your data.

Now the bad:
FB4 for me goes away from what I liked about Flex. I am not a designer. I don't work with designer (not out of choice, just most clients won't pay for pretty pictures when all they want is data). Flex allowed me to quickly, easily and without grief to create business applications that still looked decent.

Now comes Flash Builder 4. In their haste to seperate design from development they have made it so convulated that I can't even figure out how to put a friggin canvas on the page and change its background color. FB4 doesn't even have a CANVAS item to drop on the application. Now you got skinnablecontainers and groups and no explanation how these bloody things work. What if I just want to build something f'in QUICK AND SIMPLE! Add a little color, maybe round some corners.

Now this goes back to to 1 of my BIGGEST beefs with Adobe and Flex. I work for a living. I also like to enjoy some free time gaming or messing with my dog. Why is it that I have to spend 100s of dollars buying books, and spending hours looking for information just so I can use an Adobe product? With Flex 4 I feel like am back at the beginning lost with no information once again. Not 1 friggin sample from Adobe on just some f'in basics of FB4.

Its been a fustrating day. :)