Flash Coder

Is it that time again already? Feels like only yesterday I was announcing ALPT 2. Roll up, roll up, the third Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament is happening at the Loose Cannon club in Allhallows Lane EC4 on the 27th May. The nearest tube is Cannon Street on the District and Circle lines. The event is FREE to all Adobe professional software users and Adobe are providing all the beer and prizes, so go and sign up now. Read the rest of this entry »

Well the results are in and so are the photos. The event went superbly. Everyone seemed to be very excited to be there (more so after a few free drinks). I went out half way through, but both Robin and Ethan from Adobe made it through to the final table, so fueling the rigging accusation, which was evident by the huge stack of chips that Robin had Naturally, they both donated the winnings to needy developers and designers. Ethan said he’ll post his chosen recipient on his blog shortly.The event was held at the Loose Cannon Poker Club near Cannon Street. I suspect some people had trouble finding the place (if you were one of those please let me know so I can address that next time). Read the rest of this entry »

Hi all,

Anyone who is getting the ”Database communication failure” error, please email me your:

- full name
- email address
- years playing poker
- Adobe software used
- Job title
- Address, Town and post code

and I’ll manually add you all until we resolve this error. Rest assured, we are looking into it. My email address is sean@pokercoder.com

Roll up, roll up, the second Adobe sponsored London Poker Tournament is happening at the Loose Cannon club in Allhallows Lane EC4 on the 25th February (I really should give you people more notice next time). The nearest tube is Cannon Street on the District and Circle lines. The event is FREE to all Adobe professional software users, so go and sign up now. It is still completely FREE  but this time  there is no need to become a member of the club. You just need to  be on the list on the door. And remember, if you’re new to Poker, don’t worry, there are lots of newbies and you’ll still be getting 20 minutes of training before we play. Read the rest of this entry »

Judging by the whole of 3 answers, Flash Lite has not interest and thus no future

William, Wehnzi and Tom all gave good answers, however, it’s all a bit close between you guys, but I think Tom just snatches it. The only real way to get around the lack of consistency across phone OSs etc, is to either convince the phone / OS manufacturers that AIR is a great platform unifier or to allow them to use the full Flash player via a phone browser (as SkyFire are doing - http://www.skyfire.com/).

So, Tom, please send me your mailing address and congrats on the win.

Just a heads up to all of you that went to the first one and made it such a great success, and all of you who didn’t go to the first one but want to come to the next one. It’s on it’s way.
We are looking to have it on February 25th, directly after a top secret Adobe event. Sorry,can’t tell you any more.

Wow, all this thinking up questions is hard work. I’m binning my original idea to do it every Monday. However, I will leave it a week for people to get their answers in. So I’ll announce the winner of this one next Thursday.

I was thinking about Flash Lite recently. Many of my friends and colleagues have strong opinions about the future of Flash Lite or it’s possible lack of future. The mobile market is huge (in the billions) and no real marketing effort has been revealed by Adobe to get all these potential users on board. There are important questions about how to monetise this market, however, from a developer point of view there’s little push for us to take up Flash Lite and thus, the message ’seems’ to be “don’t bother”.
So question 2 is:

Can Flash Lite survive?
If so, what will it need to stay ahead of the game and get developers interested in it again?
If not, what will replace it?

ok, ok, so I was probably being optimistic trying to post the winners on Friday, and I didn’t even get time to post the second competition yesterday (as promised), but better late than never. So…

Thank you to everyone who took the time to enter the competition. It actually gave me some interesting insight into the general ‘perception’ of what developers think the differences between Flash and Flex are. In many cases these were far from the reality of the matter, but equally, many of you gave me very lucid, measured responses. Read the rest of this entry »

I suppose that it’s appropriate that as I have strong views on the subject myself and that the book is aimed at Flash AND Flex developers, the first question should be about Flex vs Flash.

Tell me which is better and why: Flex or Flash? Always contentious I know, but fuck it, it’s my book

I’ve explored this question myself over the years since Flex was first proposed to me at an Adobe presentation, and in real terms, I know what the ‘real’ answer is. However, what I really want is opinion backed by reason.

Post your answer here and check back on Friday to see if you’ve won (I’ll get contact details then).

My first book was officially published by Friends of Ed on 17th Dec 2007: Foundation Actionscript 3.0 for Flash CS3 and Flex. However, it didn’t hit the UK book shelves until just this week. I co-authored it with Steve Webster and Todd Yard, who are both well known in the community and world class developers in their own right, and I was very lucky to work along side them. Their knowledge and experience is obvious in this book and I can only hope my first authoring efforts were worthy to be along side theirs. Read the rest of this entry »