flex

Here’s a Flex example for you. Picnik, the online photo editor built in Flex, just won a ‘Webware 100’ award from CNET. It’s a Flex application that I found absolutely jump-out-the window easy to use.

I like to go into applications the first time and see how far I can get by just playing around; call it a usability test. I had the perfect little test case, a photo of my wife on a houseboat in Kerala, India, a little blurry and tilted shamefully by yours truly, apparently so lazy in the heat that I couldn’t sit up straight!

Well, Picnik to the rescue. It’s so hard to create applications that are so simple that one never has to pause and wonder how to proceed. Picnik is a Flex example that shows just how easy designers can make it. It took me 3 minutes to: Upload my photo, straighten it by drawing a line on a horizontal reference, sharpen it a little with the slider, add a title with a nice font and save it back to my hard drive and then to my Flickr account. Nice. And free, (US$24.95/year option to upgrade).

By the way, hit this link if you’re interested in looking at some Flex 3 Actionscript Examples from livedocs.adobe.com.

I was reading some Flex docs online the other night, and in the live docs section I noticed a link to where you could download the example scripts for many of the examples shown in the Flex docs. The zip file is available and contains some great Flex/AS projects including a Wiki Editor, Video Jukebox, Display Object Transformer and many more. Most of us would be interested in doing more than simply passively reading the Flex 3 documentation and instead taking a little time out to actually use the scripts to understand better how they work in practice, and now you can do that.