Will Flex completely replace Flash one day?

[cancerinform]

I see the new Flex 4 beta and there is a new animator class, letting things move etc. The power of flash is its animation capabilitie. So I wonder Adobe wants to move completely to Flex.

[gerbick]

Nope. Flash Builder 4 + Flash Catalyst still doesn't equal Flash CS4.

[1stbite]

Flash Builder (Flex) is still primarily an application builder and I can't see it becoming favored by animators anytime in the near future.

There is plenty of crossover between Flash Builder and Flash, and Flash does have the ability to be more flexible creatively, however Flash Builder makes fast development of applications easy and now with Catalyst beta out in the wild we will start seeing better designed flex applications but still just applications.

Flash still rules :-)

[PAlexC]

Flex is a framework inside the player. Adobe has stated that it will NOT replace Flash. It's an alternative methodology for building Applications in Flash.

[FlashLackey]

Fundamentally, Flex can't replace Flash because Flex is only an implementation of a Flash application (that an authoring platform was developed for).

If you're meaning whether or not more people will use Flex for projects rather than some other direct Flash implementation, I suppose it's possible. I definitely think new Flex features will be added that attract more people to use it. But, I think there will still be a lot of Flash projects not well suited for Flex.

[PAlexC]

I think you still need to use ExternalInterface to talk between a Flex swf and regular swf, correct?

[jAQUAN]

Nope. Flash Builder 4 + Flash Catalyst still doesn't equal Flash CS4.

After spending the weekend with Catalyst, I have to agree. Sure it's only beta 1 and the UI will probably grow a lot by the time it's gold (how about a pan tool adobe? jus' sayin). Designers with zero coding knowledge will enjoy being able to animate and activate their own transitions for once but the serious developer will likely prefer dictating their own structure. For now it just seems like really good Flex training wheels.

...and now with Catalyst beta out in the wild we will start seeing better designed flex applications but still just applications.

That remains to be seen imo. Catalyst does not in my experience so far always produce the cleanest code. Paths vs optimized graphics for example. (Btw, I can see the bezier data maintained in the .fxg format leading to some very cool path animations). And I have to suspect, with the repetitive editing required, it's not generating the most optimized .swf's.

It definitely deserves points for being the first app from a major company to adhere to standard practices and actually generates .html that uses swfobject.js correctly.

It's an alternative methodology for building Applications in Flash.

I wish I'd heard it so succinctly way back when I was first trying to figure out what Flex was that Flash wasn't.

and finally.

I see the new Flex 4 beta and there is a new animator class, letting things move etc. The power of flash is its animation capabilitie. So I wonder Adobe wants to move completely to Flex.

The Flash IDE for me is really only good for and indispensable for one thing. Creating symbols. Especially where building portions of the layout with code would actually hurt development. The timeline is still the best solution for a lot of situations. Adobe is suffering from a touch of M$ disease in that they have to watch out not to sabotage their other product lines. The best vector environment ever is Illustrator, yet it has no Flash Timeline pallet!? I could see adding just a few tools, panels, save as file types and export options to AI so as to eliminate the need for the Flash IDE altogether and for that reason, I suspect we'll never see such additions.

I'm going to risk predicting that Catalyst, as soon as version 2.0, will take a huge leap in the flash tool of choice. I doubt I'll touch 1.0