Take a look at this post . Lots of good links from people who know whats going on in the comments.

Here’s another really good set of resources.

Skinning is certainly a good start to the problem, but I think the solution you’re talking about goes a wee deeper than that. I vented my thoughts in a couple of posts ( here, here and here) if you’re interested.

Cheers

I’m also from a design background, but when I took my current position at Schematic, I skipped out on design for a while and concentrated on development …. having said this, the first project I was on was flip.com.

The “flip book” viewer and creator on flip.com were built entirely in Flex. The designer and the developers did their best (the best a developer could do) at making this application look like it’s not built entirely out of Flex. Although I believe we did a fair job at accomplishing this, I think it only promotes Matt’s “first look” at what the framework, aesthetically, is capable of.

Given this, I think it’s good to point out that when HTML first hit the scene … way back when … every website looked drab. Everyone used their header tags one through five to segment text, and if you were lucky, you had a nice spiffy background …. maybe something in sand or an awesome animated GIF pattern. Since then, we have all sorts of hybrid HTML/XHTML/whatever sites that push what the original markup language could do.

Since Flex 2 is Adobe’s first push at making Flex more than a high-price enterprise application solution, I believe we will see people creating more stylized sites that may border on the type of style we see with consumer websites. I believe developers have to warm up to the framework more as well as communicate with their designers as to what the capabilities are of this new(ish) product.

That was way longer than I intended it to be …. so it goes.

Some applications may need a custom look and feel, but most don’t. You wouldn’t write down a Mac application because it looks too much like Mac applications, would you?

I find myself in the same situation as you are in, I have just begun to play with Flex and realising the potential. I just finished a Flash website for which the client wanted a simple content management system to be able to administer the site without my help. At the time I started developing the CMS, Ajax seemed to be the best choice of technology. Today I would say that using Flex would have been simpler and it would have become better too. And in the case of a custom CMS look is not important (feel, however is another thing), so the standard Flex look is fine. It’s slick enough to get the client impressed, even.

I wouldn’t use Flex for consumer websites, thought. Perhaps if it was form-driven, but in that case I definitely would skin it.

What’s funny is that most of the sites you go to which are flex tutorials don’t even use flex on their sites. I’ve followed some tutorials on actually building apps and it seems I would have to be psychic to code in this. It has no real data capabilities. Is anyone using this stuff or is it totally useless? Maybe sticking with Flash/Actionscript is the best option?

I’d love for you to throw your hat into the ring and let us know what you think.