Flash Coder

This shocking story just in. Steve Jobs, CEO of Apple, may not always tell us the truth!!!!! Dun, dun duuuuuuuu!

Ok, so if you are involved in the Flash platform in any way then you already knew that. But, I came across more reckless ‘fact’ quotation from old Jobby which I thought I’d share with you all. The first ‘fact’ is about Nintendo and Sony, and the second one is about Google.

Read, laugh and take comfort that as Flash platform developers we are not alone.

It seems that recently people, good people, are coming out of the woodwork to point out that they might not always like to deliver their Flash Platform solutions as OO solutions. I hear the collective gasp of horror and revilement from the community of Actionscript developers who have spent years refining their coding and OO methodologies to a point where they can code in Java with little effort. I myself am one of those coders. However, I am forever using the term ‘Pragmatic’ when I speak to staff and peers alike. Look at the big picture. Not everyone wants a solution that takes 2 months to deliver because you have to develop redundant, reusable, unit tested OO code. Many clients want throw away solutions and have no likelihood of code reuse. The problem is that we’ve become enamored with the idea of perfecting and using only code. Anyone who speaks of the timeline does so with contempt and some even call for it’s removal altogether, suggesting that it is the province of antiquated, knuckle dragging wanna-be coders. Not like us ‘real’ coders. Read the rest of this entry »

The Dear adobe web site allows you to express your dissatisfaction at Adobe products and service generally and specifically. It’s not run by Adobe but Adobe got involved 48 hours after the site was launched. Don’t know why nobody thought of this sooner.

John Nack wrote on this a few days ago and I’ve been to busy to catch up with what’s going on, so I only just saw it. This is an excellent idea and will bring real benefits if we all use it, so I just had to reiterate it here. It’s not like we haven’t all got our personal hates about what is otherwise truely excellent software, so go and express yourselves. You’ll be amazed just how many people feel the same way as you about pricing, installers, software etc

You can see comments in a top 50 format or a product specific format.

Well Microsoft made a decent move in having NBC use the Silverlight platform to view the footage on the Olympics in a fairly RIA manner. It was also a shrewed move to increase the Silverlight install base at the same time. All good marketing moves. MS certainly is living proof that if you market something hard enough, it’ll become the defacto standard. certainly Reuters are reporting the battle as being on again.

Adobe… WAKE UP! This could have been put to bed a long time ago. This is not about who’s platform is the best. Flash is clearly the best. It’s about who you tell. Perception is 9/10ths of reality. I used to be a Systems Manager a long time ago. I worked on DEC equipment (big servers), who were then bought put by HP and then became Compaq. The servers in question were Alpha servers and the OS was VMS. Read the rest of this entry »

You have all probably noticed that with regular but unreliable frequency my (and your) blog posts appear on the Adobe XML News Aggregator (MXNA) once, twice, sometimes even 3 times in a row. They’re not different posts, I don’t try to beat the clock by pinging my site and thus possibly cause a duplication. Quite apart from the fact that it annoys the crap out of me, does anyone know why this happens and what can be done to stop it?

Well, like a vast number of Flash developers (and normal humans), I have converted to the Mac Book Pro. I bought it over 6 months ago now but I was to embarrased to post on my conversion to the dark side . I love the sleek looks, the functional design, the fact that is has everything I need built in from bluetooth to wifi to the iSight camera. It’s fast and I can run Windows XP through parallels (which was the straw that broke the camel’s back in convincing me to buy) at the native speed that I run it on a PC. Read the rest of this entry »

It seems more and more over the last year everyone is saying how great frameworks are. There are many types of frameworks and I’m specifically talking about development frameworks as they represent the majority. I’ve listened patiently. I’ve researched various development frameworks (Cairngorm in particular). I’ve questioned their use and I’ve discovered some legitimate use in various circumstances. On the whole they are most popular with managers as they top the buzzword list at the moment right next to ‘Web 2.0′ (despite the fact that coding frameworks are implicitly at the core of any decent pattern based OO Flash development whether you choose to acknowledge them or not). Read the rest of this entry »

I attended the London MMUG (previously the MacroMedia Users Group, now the MultiMedia Users Group - cudos to Aral for managing to change the name and still keep the same domain ) . It was held at Olympia (the conference hall, not the mountain, sadly) at Adobe’s ‘Adobe Live’ show. An expert pannel were assembled, many of whom I know and all of whom had interesting things to say. The topic was Web 2.0. Read the rest of this entry »

Well actually, it doesn’t and that’s the point. I installed the Flash 8 Player and then I ran an FCS application I’d written and came across the new Macromedia Flash Player Security popup. All good and well but the two lines which say

“Local applications can read information on your computer or network, so you should be careful about letting them communicate with the internet” are badly worded.

Come on Macromedia. This message is going out to our clients. Why not just put FLASH KILLS ! Can we have a message that’s a little less broad and sweeping in putting all our non-flash savvy users off ever loading up our sites again incase every hacker in the world has access to their entire hard drive?

Or is it just me?. I feel Flash and actionscript 2 are being diverged and undersoled and it needs to be addressed.