Flash Coder

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 »

I had a reasonably new blogger (Flash Otaku) comment on my components list post with his site details. And to be fair, he definitely is a component developer, so I thought I’d mention his site rather than let his comment languish in obscurity on an old post. He has some good AS2 and AS3 examples, he’s starting to do tutorials and he’s giving away the code. Looks promising. I’m not a fan of components myself (though I probably don’t need to tell you that), but I know you lot are. If you like components, go see. Flash Otaku, keep up the good work.