To me design is to perpetually strive to turn ones actions and creations into a signal. It’s about avoiding the noise. It’s about using the noise on purpose. It’s about formulating and following manifestos. It’s progressive, experimental in it’s core. It requires thought unencumbered with fixed believes. It is a non-stop challenging of the status quo.

The mind of the designer is built around sound theoretical foundations. Some of them… Others are totally unstable. Unproved. Designer’s mind is a work in progress. Fueled by the eagerness of self-improvement and even more by the desire to make things better for people… Somehow even when the designer is unreachable to the spotlights I imagine her/him as being impressive.

…And being expressive. The lack of theoretical foundations means lack of argument. To me this is a verdict for being reactive - it means having a single choice and be oblivious for the alternatives.  It’s a verdict for ignorance. These foundations in a way are an ability to communicate. An ability to discuss and analyze or just consider options. It is about forming a hypothesis, making an experiment. It’s about getting into the feedback loop. Then update the hypothesis or formulate new ones.

I would avoid questioning designer’s technique. I believe this is something the designer should grant by default. Lack of technique means lack of practice. It’s a signal for immaturity (not to be confused with lack of potential). It means not knowing your tools and language. It is often a deficit in expressiveness.

Taste is important. Subjective prism refracting the rays of aesthetics. Often taste is a deep understanding of the roots. Of the sources and evolution of things. It is knowing about the rationale behind them. All this should be intuitively sensed and recognized by the designer.

To me design should be holistic. It is rarely about building a single thing. It is about bringing it in the context of many things. It’s about minding the context. It’s thinking about systems of things.

Somehow in my life and work I feel this hunger to allow being influenced by a strong designer.

It is clear that still the majority of Flash users are the creative community. This community can be characterized mostly with its tendency to focus on what’s getting build and giving little or no attention at all on how it is getting build. And I believe this is how it should be - designers should stick to design work and concentrate on the vision for the software product, while engineers should worry how the vision is going to be implemented. Sadly, this division of labor keeps being denied by the creative community as it continues to produce “awesome coolness” with suspicious engineering qualities.

To make such technological shift to work Adobe aimed at attracting more and more software engineers to the Flash community, but it appears it was at the cost of blocking non-programmers from building the things that used to be build easily from people with no computer science background. There’s an ongoing effort of bridging this gap between designers and developers, but while this hasn’t happened yet as my friend-designer Fabian Vercuiel has wisely put it: “It leaves the members of the creative community in some sort of an identity crisis“.

People start asking: “What am I? Am I a designer or a programmer?”, and it’s a common thing to see one-guy-do-it-all in a Flash software project and running into bios similar to: “Artist, Designer and Technologist”.

This is a huge problem and I’ll tell you why!

In the past the one-guy-do-it-all approach worked well, because the projects were predominantly small, didn’t expect extensions and didn’t require long-term maintenance. So it was affordable not to pay attention on how they’re getting built - quick & dirty cowboy programming delivered fast results and clients were happy.

With time projects grew in size and complexity, but the attitude towards building stuff stayed the same - things are still getting built with no respect to the underlying software architecture and with total ignorance for the need to put some extra effort to maintain the cleanliness of the code.

Creative technologists continue to undertake projects they could not handle properly - as the “awesome coolness” get bigger and bigger in extremely short periods of time this might amaze the client for a short while with its astonishing productivity until it reaches that certain moment where the creative technologist could not proceed further - simply because what’s being build even though impressive with its UI/UX is nothing but a mess. After reaching this point the client comes to the realization that the project is going nowhere and the total cost of owning a mess is zero productivity. If smart enough the client goes to the software engineers and hands off the work to them. And here comes the ugly part…

The software engineers are in a position in which they have to convince the client that the only way to proceed further is by doing a complete rework. But the rework usually takes at least twice the time spent by the creative technologist. From the client’s perspective this is unacceptable - it’s because the product has already been demoed in some level of completeness and because it is a work the client already payed for. Even if the software engineers manage to convince the client to rework, inevitably their productivity is going to be compared to the productivity demonstrated by the creative technologist. All this is unfavorable for both the client and the software team and it brings immense stress to such projects.

I see an easy resolution that will avoid such situations to happen and it is based on simple honesty.

As a creative technologist you are obliged to inform your clients that:

You have a low level of proficiency in the software engineering craft, unless you’re really a professional software engineer.

You’ll produce a beautiful demo that will eventually need a major rework, unless you’re really a professional software engineer. Software engineers refer to such beautiful demos with the term throwaway prototype denoting that this is a conscious decision to produce something quick & dirty in order to reduce various risks for the project - either design-related or technology-related risks before proceeding with the production of the actual solution.

To all creative technologists that want to move to the next level of their software engineering proficiency I’m recommending them to get educated on the following subjects:

Design Patterns and OOP in general
A classic book on the topic is Design Patterns: Elements of Reusable Object-Oriented Software by Erich Gamma, Richard Helm, Ralph Johnson and John M. Vlissides

Software Architecture in general
A classic book on the topic is Software architecture in practice by Len Bass, Paul Clements, Rick Kazman

Writing clean code
I especially recommend Uncle Bob’s book Clean Code: A Handbook of Agile Software Craftsmanship

Dino wrote:
I was also wondering how would I go about adding easing to the scrolling of a VBox? I don’t think there is an out-of-box solution such as an Accordion having a style property openEasingFunction that allows you to specify easing but I could be wrong. Does this require customization of the Container class? I was looking at Container.scrollChildren() and other methods in the Container class to determine if I could override any behaviour.

Somehow his email coincided with a scroll-related task I had recently. I had to use a scroll-bar which is situated on a pretty custom position and it was strolling columns of content with a snapping effect. So, how would I approach the problem with the animated scroll-bar?

The Solution

Going for extending the Container or some of the others Flex containers is a hairy and let’s say adventurous direction to proceed with. And I believe the solution won’t be much flexible. What would you do if you need to place the scroll-bar on a more peculiar place (e.g. on the left or the top side of the container sizes or event somewhere else outside the scrolled container)?

The solution is to detach the scroll-bar from the container, so we can use an outside scroll-bar. The following code fragment shows you how to achieve this:

<!-- 1. Place the View that needs scrolling into a Canvas which represents the visible area
     which can't be exceeded by the View.
     !!!IMPORTANT!!! Disable the scrolling of the Canvas, so we can use a detached scroller,
     which we can place wherever we want (e.g. on the left or top sides of the Canvas) -->
<mx:Canvas id="viewContainer"
    width="{largerView.width}" height="500"
    verticalScrollPolicy="off" horizontalScrollPolicy="off"
    borderColor="black" borderStyle="solid">
    <view:ViewThatNeedsScroll id="largerView"/> <!-- THIS IS THE VIEW -->
</mx:Canvas>

<!-- 2. Create a Canvas with fictive content - this is the actual detatched scroll-bar.
     Make sure the dimensions of this Canvas are corresponding to the size of the visible
     area specified by the View-container. Also make sure the fictive content has dimensions
     corresponding to the the dimensions of the View.
     Use data binding to set the corresponding dimensions! -->
<mx:Canvas id="scrollerContainer"
    x="{viewContainer.x - scrollerContainer.width}"
    y="{viewContainer.y}"
    width="40" height="{viewContainer.height}">
    <mx:Canvas width="1" height="{largerView.height}"/> <!-- THIS IS FAKE CONTENT -->
</mx:Canvas>

The Simplest Way to Attach the Scroll-Bar to the View

Before trying to add a tween and an easing to the scrolling motion, I’ll show you the most simplest solution for attaching this outer scroll-bar to the View that needs to be scrolled:

<!-- 3. Use Data Binding to attach the scroller to the View: -->
<mx:Binding source="scrollerContainer.verticalScrollPosition"
    destination="viewContainer.verticalScrollPosition"/>

Here’s the working sample (view source is enabled):

Animating the Scrolling

I’ve implemented a simple controller component which animates the scrolling movement. You can adjust various properties of the ScrollerController, such as:

● interaction delay
● easing function
● max duration of the tween
● etc.

I’m not going to look at the controller’s implementation in details. Feel free to ask me any questions in the comments section.

Here’s the working sample (view source is enabled):

Tell me what do you think of my solution? How would you solve this problem?