by David LeMieux
Lets bridge the gap, people.
I am amazed at the divide in the Internet development world between designers and developers. Flash and Flex, two powerful RIA authoring applications, are essentially the same thing but each is geared toward a different set of people. Flex is geared toward developers. Flash more toward designers (though, due to the change to AS3 Flash, according to some, has taken a more developer friendly approach as of late).
I am not bothered so much by the fact that Adobe has release two similar-purposed products targeted at different groups of people - that makes sense. Some people are very code-centric, developer-minded people while others are very graphic-oriented, design-conscious people. But instead of making it easier for both groups to create similar products, instead the divide makes it so that we have a lot of powerful Flex-based applications that all look the same, save color, and use all the same components vs. a lot of really creative, though not always intuitive, nice-to-look-at applications.
We need more people in the middle. We need more people that can code and design. People that think visually and mathematically. This might seem like a stretch, and I will concede that the two worlds are very different, indeed, but it has been my experience that when you have a healthy combination of designer developer what comes out in the end is pure awesome.
One poor example of this involves a good friend of mine. He works developing Flash. He is currently working on a fairly large project that involves lots of interaction with a back end system. Instead of letting him be more involved and helping him out, the companies "Tech" people, don't really pay him much respect when he has a question. Then he turns around, goes back to his desk, and continues to write just as much ActionScript as they are writing server scripts. If he could work a little more closely with a more cooperative set of developers, the project could go much more smoothly.
Why do companies, and the RIA world, treat the two sides like polar opposites? Don't they realize that things are the hottest at the equator? Lets all be designvelopers together, and make the world a more interactive (and pretty) place.