Main concern: usability is the most important part in RIA instead of (fancy/rich/refreshless) user experience.

Jakob Nielsen’s article Flash: 99% Bad liked a big rock throw into the dead water, created a shock among Flash community at 2000. Later, Macromedia invited him to develop best practice guidelines for creating usable RIA with Flash. What he returned to our Flash community is one Developer Center article only: Usability Review of the Pet Market Demo. The true answer for Flash usability is after, a PDF for Flash Usability: Design Guidelines for Web-Based Functionality, Tools, and Applications, you have to pay for US$64 to buy it. Yes, I have bought it at that time, because I am really care about usability and want to learn a lot on it. We seldom hear about his comment on Flash usability again.

I understand criticize on Flex does not mean AJAX is good (vice versa, but s(a/o)me Flex zealot cannot understand), when we saw AJAX has 100 problems and Flash has 50 problems on developer side and user side. What is the point for you make a conclusion Flex must be better? Starting from Doubt on Flex as the best option (3), I do not focus on comparison between them, let talk about Flex itself, the usability problems.

Flash usability problem can be solved, but it is a problem developers not aware and not willing/have time to solve. Yes, Flash usability problem can be solved but hard to solve, when you gain productivity in Flex framework, Flex builder, if you put in time in solving usability problem, you will loss more time than you gain, therefore, is it Flex a worth invest development tool and SWF is a right medium for RIA?

When you choose “My most used RIAs”, can you even choose most used Flash RIA? Sorry, I cannot choose (except YouTube and Breeze <- but it is not daily use), I do not like to use SWF applications, 99% are bad in usability. SWF developers who do not eat their own dog food cannot understand users are suffering when using bad usability SWF applications.

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