I had some time tonight, so I thought: “let’s spit trough my 1000+ Google Reader items. After some reading i’m starting to read all the Flex related MXNA posts starting from a couple of days ago. Because I don’t have the time to read them all, I read mostly the topics mentioned more than once. I saw some blog posts about Firebrand comming into my path more than once, so let’s read what it is! (as curious as I am).

I clicked on a article from Ethan Eismann (about: an experience designer at Adobe currently working on Thermo and Adobe AIR). Well he talked about Firebrand in just a couple of lines and I quote “Components skinned to perfection”, and “Unbelievable“. Eismann wasn’t the only one who blogged about Firebrand. Ted Patrick was blogging about this application, calling it a “great UI“, and “Looks like a great use of Adobe Flex!“. And also Ryan Stewart blogged about it: “they’ve got a great user interface …“. So well, I thought, this should be great and amazing! So then I clicked on it… what a disappointment.

Did you see the smooth Firebrand animation comming down? (Eisman: “Transition and motion working smoothly“). Also, how long did you wait for the loader? It took me 1 minute and 20 seconds before the loader of the application was complete (2 Mbps internet connection). After that it took me another 30 seconds to connect. In total it took me 1 minute and 50 second to even SEE a video.

First impression: “You’ve got to be kidding, components skinned to perfection?, great UI?”.

Well let’s see:

A very nice example. 2 icons on the right side. Full screen and…eh small screen? At what screen am I now? When I put my mouse over it, it says, well nothing… If you click the left “display” icon, you go to a bigger screen!

Very weird that the icon that I just pressed, didn’t changed at all! (By clicking again, you go to small screen). Also apperently in “bigger screen” (and also full screen) you don’t want to rate, see credits, add to faves. But apperently you DO want to see how long the movie takes. You also want to go to small screen if you press a next brand below.

Lets talk about these cool options. The first one is add to favorites. Also note the awsome visual reference when you do that. (2 second delay of rollover, if they did that on purpouse). Where did the favorite go? Is it favourite now? Also I think the choise of the add to favorite icon is not the best one, because the third and fourth icon could be an add icon too.

So let’s send a mail to a friend (second icon). After sending the e-mail, I get this message:

Nice colour of choise, when something went succesfully. The link and shop button aren’t working. If something ain’t clickable, please do usehandcursor = false, or don’t show them.

Let’s click trough our our tabbar (skinned in perfection), also note the beautiful aligned close button, without rollover.

What about brands. We got o whole list of those! You can even choose from a combobox, if the tilelist doesn’t perform well enough. Also

look at those amazing add to favourites, skinned in perfection (with still no visual reference when clicking on it). Also note, scrolling with your mouse is still a privilege for windows users. Mac users still have to use the too small scrollbar slider. (Maybe with 100+ brands, a filter option should be cool too!).

Well, I saw a lot of other stuff, but it’s getting late, so I’m leaving it like this right now.

How about performence? (Macbook Core Duo 1.83 Ghz)

Also Safari shut down a couple of times, mostly because of errors like these.

Conclusion

This is just one sample of flex application really hyped by everyone. And I know, I also was a bit distracted about her anouncing the videos :

But i’m asking the Flex communitiy to give some more critisism Flex applications being made. I love Flex very much, but Flex is just a tool, not all things made in Flex change into gold. There’s more in a website than some cool transitions. Please also think about design, usability and experience. Let’s improve the overall quality of Flex applications together.

Enough said, hope not to offent anyone, by being too sarcastic.

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