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Flex Article
Designing for Flex – Part 4: Merging the web and the desktop
Rob Adams
Table of Contents
- Introduction
- Living on the web, living on the desktop
- Browser expectations
- Flex accessibility
- Moving to the desktop
- Desktop application considerations
In Designing for Flex – Part 1: Overview and discovering Flex, I discussed how Flex brings together two formerly different mediums of software: the cross-platform, universally accessible yet technically constrained web application and the platform-dependent, locally installed yet richly interactive desktop client application. Although I have discussed many aspects of Flex that were originally derived from web idioms (content-focus, use of motion in Flash) and desktop idioms (saving files, controls and their uses), I’ll examine how the combination of the two mediums changes user expectations and how that can affect your Flex applications.
Flex applications can live in one of two runtimes: the web-based Adobe Flash Player and the desktop-based Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR). As you might expect, Flex applications that target the Flash Player feel more “web-like” to users whereas those targeting AIR feel more “desktop-like”. However, no Flex application should simply blindly copy the idioms of the old medium; Flex applications are rich Internet applications first and web or desktop applications second. However, the choice of environment has an effect on how users approach your applications, and you must take that into account when designing them.
This article covers the following topics:
- The similarities and differences between web and desktop applications, and when to choose one versus the other.
- How to support existing user expectations for application behavior on the web.
- How to make Flex applications accessible to users with disabilities.
- How to design for desktop-specific concerns such as network connectivity, file system access, windows, and menu bars.
The Designing for Flex series includes the following articles:
- Part 1: Overview and discovering Flex
- Part 2: Planning your application
- Part 3: Structuring your application
- Part 4: Merging the web and the desktop
- Part 5: Designing content displays
- Part 6: Guiding with motion
- Part 7: Making your application fast
- Part 8: Making your application safe
- Appendix A: List of best practices
- Appendix B: For further reading
I suggest that you read parts 1, 2 and 3 before proceeding with this part of the series.
Download all parts of the FIG series as PDF files that you can print and read offline: adobe_flex_interface_guide.zip (ZIP, 5.7MB)
ß∑ßThis content is a public draft. Please give us feedback in the Flex Interface Guide Forum.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial 3.0 Unported License.
About the author
Rob Adams works for Adobe Systems, Inc. in San Francisco, California. He started at Macromedia, Inc. in 2004 and has worked on the Flash authoring tool, Flash Player, and Fireworks, but nowadays works primarily on the Flex product line. He is involved with the design of the core framework itself as well as the designer/developer tools such as Flex Builder and Creative Suite. Although his primary focus is on design research, he also does some design work, promotes sound design practices both within Adobe and without, and makes himself a general pain in the necks of the designers, product managers, and engineers he works with.
