Been busy the last few months, and haven’t really posted too mucho about what is new and exciting.
Here’s a few links to enjoy:
http://www.fordvehicles.com/transitconnect/
(Bill Shippy helped me when the going got tough. Creatively not inspirational but the architecture is good, and lightweight. I like the deferred downloading and integration of some metrics and incremental updates supported — almost the whole interface is driven by xml data).
http://www.fordvehicles.com/sync/
(screen savers only — Lee Felarca and Bill Shippy were the developers on the main site)
http://www.clickbooq.com/
(rewire from PHP to Ruby on Rails — the Flex CMS migration was my baby and it was intense. Originally built by three different development groups (myself included), I took all those divergent styles and coalesced them into a functional rewire and repair)
http://www.airgid.com/
(flash development work for a good friend of mine — it was also kind of intense but enjoyable — and with all the papervision sites going down these days I’m happy we curbed the itch to do it in papervision — it would get lost in the crowd of 3D spinning cubes when really it should be a fast, light sales tool only)
I’m working on some cool stuff but for the most part I’m hitting video players like they’re going out of style =).
All of a sudden video players are the new flash photo gallery (seems like all I built for 2004 was photo galleries).
Itching for some heavy application work (which is what I did for five years from 2001 to 2006) I’m aiming to open source a presentation layer app sooner or later. I used to build apps in Visual Studio with a Flash presentation layer for companies like AIAG and Chrysler through a few companies I worked with (Plexcan/Plexus and McGill) and it was really nice to switch out to web based advertising work, which is a little more diverse but also much more prosaic. Before AIR, I used to spec projects in Delphi and C# which integrated the Flash .ocx to leverage custom RAD environments to Flash’s nice integrated development environment. Folks used to ask me ‘why are you using Flash when C# and Delphi have much of the same abilities and more’ — my answer was the same as my answer to AJAX development versus Flash — it’s nice to be able to distribute the functional elements of an application to a control that is best suited to the task — AJAX is crap in general and C# and Delphi allow you to put buttons on a form, but for a presentation layer Flash kicks ass (and Silverlight is also an awesome environment, but there’s not much business call for that yet).
I think I’d spec AIR only now, and do away with C# and Delphi altogether (although, for a stand alone application Delphi still generates a completely Win32 app, which needs no installer or other such nonsense to deploy — great for Enterprise environments where you have no control over the security of the system and deployment to the environment would be a three month interaction with the IT group at the enterprise to deploy, when most users need the product for a day or two. ZINC and Screenweaver used to come in handy too, for single package delivery of a flash app to desktops, but with ZINC 3 it’s still too buggy to use (very poor effort there I have to say MDM), and Screenweaver has become the Ruby of Flash wrapper apps (command lines R US). I’m personally very tired of command line app deployment having worked in a Java environment for four years and having to debug and deploy that mess on a monthly basis.
I’ve been saying to the guys at work that next year, this time we could all be doing Silverlight instead of Flash, or AJAX if that crowd wins the war. But it’s nice to see someone pushing a technology (MS and Silverlight) that is creative with some level of interest — Flash has a bit of an ego these days sadly — great environment, but what built the Flash platform was agreements by MS and Apple to distribute the player. If MS decides one day to only deploy it’s own player (Silverlight showed up recently on my Windows updates as an optional install — Adobe should be scared) and anyone that uses the new update site (which they are currently Beta testing Silverlight enabled) must have Silverlight installed we could be doing SL in a year to two years instead of Flash. Now, also imagine that MSN has the gonads to dictate that if an ad is delivered in SL format it will have reduced deployment costs over a Flash ad, now you’re talking 1/3 of the ad buys going SL instead of Flash. And if that’s the case, I’m going to be a Visual Studio lover in no time, since I’d have an integrated environment, with an excellent coding system and very mature language (mostly based off the same type of syntax as Java / Flash). All they need there is a streamlined delivery to Enterprise where an installer is not necessary for the application to run (for the marketing crowd) and we’re off to the races.
But that’s a fantasy right now. It’s very interesting times to be in this business!
