3) I'm not sure what you mean by tedious. You might be referring to the Flash editor's use of the timeline. If that's the case then you'll want to look into the Flex SDK I mentioned. I haven't used a timeline for over 5 years.
As a programmer my design skills are mostly implementable with the graphics class. But when I do work with flash designers, I have them create assets in the Flash IDE and publish a .swc which I import into flex builder. This gives me nice intellisense access to all the graphic elements.
I very rarely open up the IDE, usually it's to rename an asset which the designer had forgot or incorrectly named.
1) So use use the Flex SDK and your favorite editor. Or, if on Windows, flashdevelop. Or, if you like Eclipse and have some cash to spare, Flex Builder.
2) Your opinion. Assuming it was done well, a Flash/Flex based mail client could rock. As an added bonus, done right, it could also be a client side mail client (using AIR).
Also, if you're using Flex controls, reskinning isn't that hard.
3) Again, your opinion. Without knowing what you mean, I can only assume you mean the whole Flash Authoring Tool (damn Adobe for overloading Flash to mean the IDE, the VM, the framework, and the technology)/time line thing, you don't need to use it. There are loads of options. See #1, above.
I am surprised you haven't gotten -28 points for this response. HN used to be better than this. The death of Flash is critical to survival of the web as we know it.
The flash poses so many threats that I don't even know where to begin: it is closed, i.e. not controlled by the community, is binary and not text-based, puts new hardware platform manufacturers at Adobe's mercy, it violates nearly all common software "behavioral standards" on all platforms it attempts to run, i.e. configuration/control of basic things like scrolling, zooming, printing, font rendering, security, keyboard handling, etc. Flash ignores ALL settings in your browser with an exception of proxy configuration, just like their PDF plug-in.
Platform control is dangerous: we just beginning to escape from Microsoft hell, and the last thing I want is to depend on Adobe: imagine starting a new portable hardware platform business: you'll have to beg Adobe to release their fucking plugin for your new awesome phone, and hope it won't drain your battery in an hour, or annoy your users with "Time to Upgrade!" popups.
I am surprised that people from Mozilla, Apple, Opera and Microsoft STILL haven't gotten together and pushed out an emergency release of their browsers with an awesome built-in support for <video> and <audio> tags.
I, however, am certain that Flash will disappear. Eventually browsers will become good enough, that whatever else Adobe will come up with won't be enough to convince developers to steer away from HTML. Besides, Adobe doesn't have any engineering muscle, I'm sorry if this sounds too personal, but they just can't code and ultimately they don't stand a chance competing with Mozilla/WebKit or Microsoft's Silverlight - they're in another league.
I am surprised you haven't gotten -28 points for this response. HN used to be better than this. The death of Flash is critical to survival of the web as we know it.
I don't know why but reading this made me laugh out loud.
MTASC or haXe from Motion Twin are also good alternate .swf development compilers that you can integrate with your favorite development environment. I've played around with haXe with MinGW build tools on Win32 and was pleased with the results.
(1)You can build complete Flash applications using freely available Flex SDK & command line compiler. You dont have to stick on to Adobe Flash IDE or Adobe Flex Builder.
(2)'Cheesyness' depends a lot on how you implement fonts and how how much of a professional designer you are. Its is a function of your imagination and professionalism. See kontain.com
(3) Just like any other language, workflow tediousness depends on the kind of IDE you use. If you are of the developer kind and tries to use Flash IDE's timeline based designer workflow, it will be a disastrous experience.
Having said that , i wish Adobe open-sourced the Player.
Why would you use flash for something like kontain.com? It feels so weird. Nearly everything you see there could easily be done with html. Doing it in Flash only means that you are going to create a lot of inconsistencies with the way everything normally works. Strange context menus. Strange selection colors. Strange click behaviours. And so on.
Why would you want that? That’s crazy. Flash should be used as a last ressort. Video. Games. That sort of stuff. Use friggin’ html for the rest and do not confuse your users.
Yikes. Whoever created kontain.com did not know what they were doing. Not only does it break some basic browser functionality, like opening a link in new tab, but because it is all flash it is also painfully slow. It takes 9 seconds to display the first page (which is very simple and would render in under 2 seconds if it was done in HTML) and 14 seconds for every photo page. I bet it also doesn't play well with mobile browsers.
Using this site as an example of "professionalism" is just wrong.
Contain seems slower than javascript based sites. Any idea why? If you leave the flash UI framework and do it all yourself is there a big performance hit?
A possible (and most common) reason for slowness is that the developers might have coded it such that all UI graphical assets required sitewide (buttons,icons and other graphical assets) are preloaded before the actual content starts rendering (rather than loading graphical assets on an, as-it-is-required basis).
Using generic flash frameworks and components definitely increase the file size as they usually come with a lot of functionality (thus code) and legacy code that you might never really use.So if time allows,building your own components is highly recommended to keep file sizes low.
It is possible to build real fast sites with Flash. As an example, if a page contains 20 small thumbnail images (means 20 separate http calls in an html environment), it is possible to load a single zip file with all 20 thumbs into flash and unzip and render it at runtime.Thus reducing the number of http calls from 20 to 1.
As lowdown commented above, the performance of a Flash app depends on how the developer approaches the problem.
As many other commenters pointed out, a 100% Flash based environment is definitely not a great choice for a social network site like Kontain. But the site's neat design and rendering is a great example to show that Flash sites neednt always be cheesy or flashy or flexy.
1) I have to use their lame tool
2) Flash UI feels super cheesy (imagine gmail in flash)
3) The workflow is very tedious