Flex 3 Pre-release Tour

Last night I attended the Flex and AIR Pre-release Tour hosted by the Salt Lake City Flex/Flash User Group. The presenter was Adobe Evangelist, Kevin Hoyt. He was very good and the meeting was very worthwhile. Hoyt knows his stuff and presents it well and with a sense of humor.

Watching Hoyt use Illustrator to create and style a button confirmed for me just how tedious developing user interfaces is, no matter what tools you use. After several minutes he ended up with a really nice looking button. But thinking about having to go through the same steps to put a skin on each interface widget made my head hurt. I'd rather debug kernel code. I really would. But that's just me.

But it got me thinking, why is the developer taking the time to stylize or skin the app anyway? Why don't developers just create the basic framework of the interface and let the users skin the app the way they want it to look? Well, of course that's not as easy as it sounds and some new tools would be required to make it simple and fun for users to do so. And maybe for another reason which I thought was Hoyt's most interesting idea.

Hoyt's idea, which I had never heard before, is about the way economies evolve. He explained that when the U.S. was young it had an agrarian economy. This evolved into a goods-based economy. Next came the service-based economy, where most 'products' in the economy are really services.

I had heard all this before, but then he said we are moving into an Experience-based economy.

You go to Starbucks and pay $5 not for a cup of coffee, but for the Experience of getting a Starbucks coffee. The smells, atmosphere, music, all that sort of thing. Or you go into an Apple store to get the gadget-buying Experience that you can't get at Best Buy.

I'm not sure I fully buy into the Experience-based economy idea. But, it makes more sense why a developer would spend so much time on the look-and-feel, the skin, of an application. You may want to provide a specific experience to the user. A memorable way of branding your product or company. I'll definitely be thinking more about the overall experience of the user as I develop applications from now on.

Oh yeah, and Flex 3 and Air look like good products to me. I think we made the right decision in our company to develop our next major app for the Air platform.