Mar
29
First there was the Ford Fusion (the server side vehicle), then there was the Ford Edge (the corporate newsletter of the bunch), and now the Ford Flex (the highly customizable utility vehicle). What’s next, the Lincoln or Mazda CS3? Maybe the Mercury Air, or the Ford Premier. The Jaguar XK already comes with the Flash Player installed in the dash. Anyone else think this is coincidence or conspiracy?
Jan
4
Well it’s a new year and I have held off posting anything. I didn’t really have a lot to say and I am not one to blog about nothing. A TV show about nothing was a huge success, but I can’t see a blog about nothing doing as well.
The past year has been a roller coaster for me and my family to say the least. We moved twice (4 times if you count corporate housing stops), one move was into a completely different country, I started 2 new jobs (Yahoo! and now Disney), my son went to 2 different schools, and somehow my wife found the time to get pregnant with our third child. So that means we won’t be resting anytime soon.
Looking back I wouldn’t of changed a thing as crazy as everything was. I learned so much professionally and personally. Professionally I have grown, my coding has improved greatly, for the most part I have been strictly working in AS3 and have absolutely no desire to turn back, unfortunately legacy code exists and AS2 will never go away, not for a long time anyway.
One of the best things of last year was working with Papervision, it has opened up a whole new world (or dimension) to me. I am a developer but I do have a creative side and being able to merge both halves of my brain using something like Papervision is truly amazing. Introducing the third dimension into interface design improves user experience because as humans we are trained to work with objects in 3D space and building everyday metaphors into the UI of our apps will make them that much better. Now if we could just get rid of the keyboard and mouse it would make obtaining those metaphors a lot easier. I think we are going to see a lot more 3D in the RIA space in 2008.
Last year we were all introduced to the iPhone, I am not going to drone on about it, but it truly is a great piece of hardware and software. Sure it is missing a few key things, but it is only a first release. Early this year Apple is releasing the iPhone SDK, you know engineers will be all over this SDK and it will only be a matter of time before some really cool apps and extensions are released for the iPhone. There is already a GPS extension in the works, GPS is the only thing I miss about my old LG phone.
So what else do I see happening in 2008. This is not a political blog so I won’t go into how I see the global economy switching from the U.S. dollar to the Euro, and I won’t go into the recession that everyone seems to be poo pooing which personally I think has already started. I also won’t go into how the Big 3 American car companies are digging their own graves and how the auto Unions are holding the biggest shovel. My all Chrysler employed family may disown me if I talk down the unions, oh wait, I think I just did.
2008 should be an interesting year from an RIA standpoint. There is a lot coming down the pipe. AIR is the first thing that comes to mind. Adobe has done a great job with AIR, I am just not sure how well it is going to take off out of the gate. In its current state it is a cool toy. I don’t think it is going to flop, I just think it will take a little time to fly, and maybe another major release. Personally I don’t agree with the whole AIR run time. I have used both mProjector and Zinc in the past to wrap swfs and create desktop applications. Both of these products allow you to create cross platform (Mac and PC, no Linux love) stand-alone apps with the Flash player included in the executable (if need be). These products had more hooks into the OS and file system, what they didn’t have was an embedded version of Webkit and a JS API. They also didn’t have the ability to interact with PDFs. So yes, AIR has it’s advantages, I just don’t agree with the runtime, it just adds a level of unnecessary complexity and doesn’t easily allow for easy deployment. IMHO. The apps should be stand alone so you can burn them on a CD and have them just work.
I mentioned the iPhone SDK already, this will be huge, of course people are going to try and monetize off of this, why wouldn’t they. What I am really hoping, as are most who are reading this blog, is the iPhone Flash Player we’ve been all dreaming about. There are rumors, lots of them, unfortunately only one guy (and probably a few hundred others) know for sure, Mr. Jobs, please enlighten us. The Internet on your phone is still a little watered down, you promised me the real internet in your ads, where is it? I know there would be memory issues, let’s face it, there are some very heavy flash sites out there. Already I have seen Safari on the iPhone close/crash when an image heavy page is loaded. By now I am sure most of you have heard about QVM or tamarin-tracing, could this be the beginning of something huge?
What else, Flex 3, all I have to say is wow. If you haven’t played with the beta do so now. The profiling and refactoring alone will blow you away. Flex has taken off big time, the one thing that puzzles me though is the number of recruiters who contact me with Flex work yet I still don’t see a ton of it out there in the tubes. Some of the jobs are with Fortune 500 companies. Either they are taking their sweet time to launch their “next big thing” or they gave up on using Flex because they couldn’t find the talent.
This year we will also see the Flex framework fully open sourced. Thank you Adobe, this is really going to change the landscape. Maybe we’ll finally see an AS3 decompiler.
EcmaScript 4, this is going to be an interesting one to watch. There has been a lot of rumblings from a few of the big players. Microsoft doesn’t like it. Once again, Microsoft and Adobe will be at each others throats.
IE8 will be released, yawwwwwwn.
Thermo, Astro, Buzzword oh my. H.264, Google Gears, WPF, it’s shaping up to be a good year. I have even heard some rumblings from the Cold Fusion camp, sounds like there is going to be some cool stuff coming from them.
I am not one to make resolutions, I believe if you have to wait till the beginning of the year to make a resolution you’re not very motivated. But this year I want to expand my horizons. I want to get into other technologies, I have played with a lot of things but I want to go beyond playing. Things like Ruby, Gears, Python. I want to get dirty with SQLlite. I also want to contribute more to the Open Source community. I also don’t want to move, don’t want to start a new job and maybe want to take a vacation for the first time in 4 years. We’ll see how much of this list I get to, with a third child on the way it could be tricky.
In closing, Happy New Year to all, I hope you and your families have a great 2008.
Sep
5
Well it says a lot about Silverlight when Microsoft is still rolling out Flash sites (only targeting Flash Player 8, AS3 must be too tough for them ;). I know Silverlight is still in beta and obviously not ready for primetime, but I still find it a some what humorous, maybe you will too, maybe not. I am sure I will get flamed for this post, but isn’t that part of the fun of having a blog? http://www.syncmyride.com
I will admit they have almost implemented a nice SEO (Search Engine Optimized) Flash site. If you view the source you will notice all of the content is written in xhtml, the swf then parses that same xhtml and uses it as its datasource. I said “almost implemented a nice SEO’d Flash site” because if you turn off javascript the content is not displayed. Certain Search Engines will still parse the mark-up but others won’t. They should of made the site fail more gracefully and display the raw XHTML for those Search Engines who ignore javascript like Google.
As a side note, another thing I found interesting is they show an image of an iPod on the site next to their (crappy) Zune player. Understandable I guess since iPod is the number one portable music player. Microsoft isn’t going to deny that.
Apr
25
Adobe has announced that they are planning, over the next year, to open source the Flex SDK. Using the Mozilla Public License developers will now be able to contribute and enhance the Flex SDK including the Flex framework classes, the Flex components, the Actionscript debugger, the Actionscript 3 compilers (including the mxmls and compc compilers).
Starting in June 2007 Adobe will be posting daily builds of the Flex SDK and providing open access to a bug database online. In December of 2007 after the release of “Moxie” (Flex 3) Adobe will be posting all software assets into a public Subversion repository for public access.
What this means is development models and methods can now be drastically improved or invented. If you want to develop a Flex app using Rails, go for it. If you want to use .NET to build your Flex app, be Adobe’s guest. What this doesn’t mean is open source of the Flash Player, nor should it be (IMO) open sourced. While you are still limited to the capabilities of the Flash Player, your development process is now not limited to the existing SDK. In fact, any software developer can now make their own IDE, Flex Builder and Flash CS3 need not apply.
Flex has seen extraordinary growth in the past 6 months. Enterprise applications are popping up all the time. And with the launch of Silverlight (worst name ever by the way) the RIA arena just got a little more crowded. Personally, I feel that opening up the SDK will help attract a whole other breed of developers, ones that feel tied down to a corporate development environment. For the same reasons developers were staying away from .Net in its early day, they are staying away from Flex. Corporate controlled development environments and languages are always limited to the limits of the compiler, languages, and/or authoring environments. Back in the day, the open source arena exploded with the likes of PHP, Apache, Tomcat, etc. all open sourced and equally as powerful (or more so in my eyes). Suddenly .Net or Java was limited to developers or companies with very deep pockets. Open sourcing has worked for PHP and it is the reason it wasn’t gobbled up by corporate backed languages such as .Net or Java, <sarcascm>take a look around, you may notice a few PHP sites on the good old interweb.</sarcascm>.
Will Flex be the next PHP? Will the community take Flex development to the next level? Will Flex development now be the defacto when it comes to RIA, is it already? No one knows, only time will tell. A colleague of mine just had an interesting quote. “There are no open source millionaires.” I don’t think Adobe cares about that, that’s Microsofts attitude. Adobe just wants to provide the best possible solutions for their customers. They’ll keep making money from products like Photoshop 
