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Seems like every time I want to use Flex there is something that prohibits me from doing it. Today I was trying  to make a website using papervision3D; what I want to do is use a grid of video planes. So each of my plane has a MovieMaterial Movie has a FLV embedded in it. Well the thing is that you cannot import FLV files in Flex. So it makes it just more complicated in this case to use Flex and Flash together instead of just using Flash. Oh well, no profiler for me this time either.

Slow days at work means I get to experiment and search the web for new ways to develop. I did a lot of research today on Flex until I stumbled on this presentation on the beedigital blog. It’s a very nice presentation on how to integrate Flash and Flex in your workflow. That’s exactly what I wanted. After see it I tried to do some test projects in Flex. Most of the time I do every thing in ActionScript so I thought this wouldn’t be too difficult. The trouble is that most of the time I also use the Tween and Easing classes from Flash. These classes come in the fl.* package and this package does not compile in Flex. I searched a bit how I could make these classes compile but I only found complicated methods of doing so. I tired also to use the Tween classes from Flex, but in order to use them you have also to include the Flex framework which adds 100k to your project. My simple solution to this problem; using Tweener for my tweens. Tweener only adds 10k to a swf file compared to the fuse engine (which is not in AS3 yet). It’s not so bad, it’s only a 8k difference to the Flash Tween classes (2k). Also using it a bit, I might have misjudged Tweener a bit because it works very well. I might in the future redo some example using Tweener instead of the Tween classes.

I went on the blog of Samuel Asher Rivell, the author of the presentation I spoke of earlier, and found some other interesting things. First there is the Montreal Game Summit that’s going to be held on November 27th and 28th. I live in Montreal so I’d be pretty happy to go there, at least on the first day. It has some interesting conferences about Flash that I’d like to see especially the one given by Samuel Asher Rivell on Advertgames.  The second nice thing I found on his blog is the powerpoint presentation of one of the conference he gave on blitting. I had seen the technique some time on the web but never knowing what it was or how to do it. His presentation is a good introduction to it and I’d be really interested in hearing his speach about it. There might be more on blitting on this blog since it looks really promising.

Yesterday I got my hands dirty with Flex and I found out that I would need much work to do what I wanted. I guess my first application will be buggy. Well I actually did a store-locator in Flex for the website vichy.ca. I programmed mostly not knowing what I was doing but the result is ok, not great but ok.

What I can’t get in my head is where to put the ActionScript and how multiple views can update global variables. What I want to do is a five step process and each step build a piece of a xml that describe a picture. I want to be able to move picture and rescale them also. Well, I bought the book, I guess I’ll have to wait until then.

Also today I watched this presentation about what framework to use with the Flex framework (you read correctly) that I came across reading this blog. It’s pretty interesting, a lot is said about design patterns. They bash a lot on cairngorm which I had started reading about but just couldn’t figure what it was about. I guess I shouldn’t have dropped that design pattern class in favor to an Astro-biology class.

I never really gave much attention to Flex. Mostly because it’s not beautiful enough in the sense that now the design of the website is so important that the platform you end up doing it on has to be very flexible to accommodate it. It’s kinda ironic to say, but I don’t find Flex that much flexible, design-wise.

But now I have an idea for a rich internet application, so I said to myself, why not try Flex, this application needs more usability than design. Well it isn’t as easy as it sounds. Flex is a whole new paradigm from Flash even if they share ActionScript 3. I’m kinda lost here and I don’t know where to start to get my application going. I guess I’ll have no choice but to buy the book. That’s what I’ll do right now.