I fin­ished the week on a very sad note. You see, some­time on Fri­day I came to the real­i­sa­tion that Flash CFFORMs, while very very cool, were not gonna cut it for the appli­ca­tion I was try­ing to build. Maybe I’m being melo­dra­matic. But right now I’m look­ing at this pile of DHTML wid­gets on one side of my screen, and Flash MX 2004 Pro on the other, and going “hmmm”. I joked a while back that the pric­ing of Flex kinda makes the Flash time­line look not quite so bad. I can’t believe I’m seri­ously think­ing about open­ing up Flash and hav­ing a go. Black­stone, what have you done to me?

Scott Barnes, that mighty ora­cle of all things Aussie and CF, claims he warned us. I must not have been lis­ten­ing that day. Sorry mate. This mouse wants a bloody cookie — and not just any cookie, a nice almond spec­u­laas cookie, please.

So what exactly is the prob­lem? I’m def­i­nitely guilty of try­ing to make them do too much. I’m in love with the tab nav­i­ga­tor wid­get, but put six on one page and load each one up with a list­ing of 20 records, and it gets far too slow to load. I adore the grid for the speed and ease of user sort­ing, but you can’t make text wrap over more than one line, can’t colour indi­vid­ual rows based on the data they con­tain, and can’t have an edit trig­ger a script instead of post­ing directly back to the data­base. I’m try­ing to cre­ate soemthing that’s very RIA-like, which is just not what it’s designed for. It’s my own fault com­pletely, but it still makes me sad.

My New Years Res­o­lu­tion was to stop pre­tend­ing I was ever gonna learn Flash prop­erly, and con­cen­trate on what I’m good at. I’m start­ing to recon­sider. This sucks.