"Taking ourselves way too seriously since 1868!"
Saturday, March 13, 2010

« Earlier pages

10/2/2009

Dear Flash: You know I love you… but we need to talk

One of the main functions of this site has always been to preach the good word of Flash to the uninformed (or misinformed) masses — it's why we created The ActionScript Jabberwocky and hosted the once annual ActionScript Poetry Contest. It's also why we created Flash games and spent months turning a long-in-the-tooth open-source text editor into a fairly great little ActionScript editor.

Over the years, we've had our differences with the makers of Flash (both Macromedia and Adobe), but we've never been shy of professing our love for their work in no uncertain terms.

So why so silent on the matter for the past few months?

Well, quite frankly, we're not feeling it any more.

Don't get me wrong, I still use Flash daily — sometimes still for fun, but most often for work, and there are some amazing things being done in the world of Flash, Flex and AIR these days. And thanks to a diverse client base and a plethora of cool projects, I'm quietly taking part in many of them every day.

But am I loving the platform? Quite frankly, no.

Thanks to a growing problem with bugs, inconsistencies with external interfaces and a general lack of faith in the player itself, Flash is starting to feel a lot like the HTML/Javascript fiasco that caused me to seek out Flash's "works anywhere" promise way back in the 1900s. These days, I seem to be debugging the player more than my own code.

Chris at FlexibleFactory, has a post today that sums up my own feelings toward the state of Flash pretty well. In fact, he inspired me to finally break my silence on the matter too. Anybody else want to chime in?

Print this article Print this article


6/8/2009

AT&T, You suck.

Filed under: by VeryVito at 2:20 pm — [Tag on del.icio.us]

The only carrier licensed to sell the iPhone in the U.S. also seems to be the only carrier incompetent enough to screw it up.

iPhone 3.0 has MMS and tethering — two technologies people have been screaming about for months. But while other users around the

world can enjoy them today (ok, June 16), they're not available on AT&T.

Turns out AT&T could care less, though. They've already got the two-year contracts signed from the 2.0 launch, and don't seem to want to make things easy for "official" users.

Print this article Print this article


5/22/2008

You just missed your chance at $300

Our contest to create a truly cross-platform ActionScript 3 editing tool came to a close last month, and a lot of you should be kicking yourselves right about now:

Thanks to an overwhelming response of exactly zero (0) submissions, it turns out that any one of our reader(s) could have entered a dead tarantula as their sole entry, and we'd have been forced to hand over the $300 prize money.

In fact, it could have been more — although we received no entries, we have actually been inundated with offers to "sweeten the pot" for the winning entry: First the kind folks at ActiveState ponied up a free license of Komodo IDE to the winner, and then several others came forth asking to help enhance the prize pool with cash donations and other goods.

Unfortunately, the actual contest results were abysmal — not a single entry submitted before the deadline, and no word from anyone registered as to whether they made any progress whatsoever. On the plus side, I did discover that running an open internet forum for developers may in fact be the best way to attract robots selling porn, home mortgages, porn and, um…. porn.

My guess is that we targeted the wrong audience with our call — we spoke to traditional Flash developers (who truly want the tool), rather than the Java or Mozilla-platform developers who are more familiar with the APIs and libraries necessary to produce it. At this point, I'm considering making this a "standing prize" and reaching out further to the open-source development community, but for now, my own work schedule makes it difficult to devote too much time to the cause (especially as I'm slowed down by sketchy ActionScript development tools on my platform of choice.

I'm up for suggestions on how to proceed, though, and I'm confident that eventually, we'll have what we need in terms of a strong, platform-independent ActionScript 3 editor (without the overhead of Eclipse). While I'm partial to the aging but bendy jEdit myself, I can't help but think OpenKomodo might be the "next big thing" — especially since it shares its Scintilla-based roots with FlashDevelop, SEPY and the (I think now defunct) SCiTE|Flash of Windows fame.

Print this article Print this article


2/21/2008

$300 prize offered for best plugin to support ActionScript coding

OK, I'm tired of waiting: It's time to buy everyone a good ActionScript editor, and I've decided to foot the bill just to get things done already.

As you may have noticed during the last few months, I've spent a great deal of time customizing, expanding and generally bending the will of the jEdit text editor to make it do things my way (which, coincidentally, is a lot like the FlashDevelop and SEPY ways I learned in the Windows world). For the most part, I enjoy coding with jEdit, and it's almost the perfect cross-platform, multi-language editor. Unfortunately, I have neither the time nor the Java experience to attain the one feature that I miss most from my days with FlashDevelop: Code completion.

It's a simple feature I thought was silly when I first used it, but man, has it saved me time over the years (preventing typos, providing quick hints of little-used function parameters, etc). Thus, jEdit — along with every other Macintosh and cross-platform AS editor outside of Eclipse — remains a second-class ActionScript editor for me today.

So as of tonight, I've decided to remove my developer's cap and instead take on the role of small-time benefactor: Thus, I will personally award $300 to the developer (or team of developers) who creates the best cross-platform ActionScript coding plug-in for one of two editors by April 15.
(more…)

Print this article Print this article


10/30/2007

Wow. “Stacks” really sucks!

Filed under: by VeryVito at 8:32 am — [Tag on del.icio.us]

Check out more recent articles to see how I stopped worrying and learned to love the Stacks.

I've been enjoying my first few days with the new OS X 10.5 operating system (aka Leopard), and I'm really looking forward to seeing what the development community is going to be able to do with the hundreds of cool new features and API hooks built into the OS. But that said: Does anybody really think that the "Stacks" feature has been well implemented in Leopard?

I was actually looking forward to using Stacks: Along with Time Machine (which it turns out is currently useless on my existing network storage system), it was one of the things that drew me to buy the latest upgrade as soon as possible. But it turns out that "stacks" are just folders — not smart folders, and not "on the fly" collections of files. Just folders. And really, really, really sh*tty looking ones, at that.

What the hell are these supposed to be? I challenge anyone to identify these folders!

I won't go into details here, as I'm sure anyone looking for more info will find it in abundance elsewhere on the Web (The entire Ars Technica review is a great read, by the way).

In fact, Leopard is indeed a great system, but the two main things that Apple has been using to promote it to the masses — Time Machine and Stacks — have turned out to be sorely disappointing. I'm sure somebody will figure out a way to get Time Machine to work on a networked drive soon enough, so I'm not actually worried about that one. After all, we've already seen "fixes" for other features, such as this fix to disable the miserable 3D Dock.

But Stacks? Stacks just sucks.

Print this article Print this article


 

Shameless begging, panhandling and soul-sucking indignity

Want to show your appreciation for Turdhead.com, its products or services? Although it's certainly not necessary, we'd be pleased as punch if you felt like donating any amount you'd like, or even if you just wanted to give us a nod on Digg.com. Honestly, we have no pride whatsoever (the name of the site is Turdhead.com, after all), and we'll take any recognition we can get for our efforts here.

 


« Earlier pages

 

Search

Or use Blingo! to search and win prizes.



Get Chitika eMiniMalls

Design and Sell Merchandise Online for Free

Copyright © 2004-2008 by Turdhead.com. All rights reserved. So there. Questions? Write us!
But first, get a load of these cryptic yet official looking numbers:
[ 1972179v | 178p | 884 12.29.05d ]