Does Adobe finally understand developers?(designshack.net) |
Does Adobe finally understand developers?(designshack.net) |
I don't think these products would have been at all successful 5 or 10 years ago, the web "wasn't ready".
> Adobe has been steadily building steam in this area for years, but they have never marketed their efforts so well as they are today.
If Adobe have been building these products for years that would mean they haven't been "not understanding developers": they just didn't guess 5 years in advance this is where the web would be. Silly contradiction.
I'm not going to defend Flash's continued relevance on the web because like most people I think it's had its day but from about 2003 to 2010 the Flash developer community was massive and thriving, people were doing serious programming and Adobe was doing a pretty good job of understanding them and supporting them. It's this wealth of experience that I hope Adobe brings to bear on its HTML5 developer tools.
I feel like the relevance of Flash (and Adobe) is really quite poorly understood. A lot of the expertise and good practises from the more serious elements of the Flash community flooded into the JavaScript community and I feel this is one of the reasons JavaScript has developed so quickly. What's more, a lot of the "web2.0" style dynamic and interactive elements of websites that we take for granted now are watered down (and much better) versions of ideas that were conceived during those frenzied years of UI experimentation in the Flash community.
Granted those years of Flash threw up some UI abominations, but it was also a melting pot of ideas and creativity, the like of which we don't really see anymore, which is a shame in a way. Even though Flash was my livelihood I was happy to move on because I could see it was for the best, but if you ignore Flash your understanding of the last 10 years and the current context of web development is impoverished.
1. Source code for the framework was available in the default flex builder installation. Wanna see how adobe designed the default table renderer, drop right in and look. You didn't have to search online for how to use esoteric features, you could just look at the super class to see the code path it takes. This is my biggest complaint working with Apple and MS frameworks.
2. Proper handling of component invalidation. Many other frameworks still have problems with calling methods out of order during initialization. Flex collects all changes to a component before processing them in the invalidation loop.
3. Data binding let you do some really cool things by automatically wrapping them in anonymous functions to process like <mx:Button id="myButton" enabled="{isButtonEnabled(someString, items.length)}"/>
4. Lots of support for component customization, especially in the skinning department. Going from flex back to mac cocoa was like going from paintbrushes back to using twigs to draw.
However, the biggest downfall for flash was always the performance, they were stuck in a corner because the flash engine was designed first and foremost for processing frames of animation, on the cpu, in another programs window, with no control over their own run loop.
It is important to note that for half of the glory days it was Macromedia Dreamweaver. Until FlashBuilder, we were told with straight faces to use the Adobe Flash Professional. Remember, FlashDevelop?
I think adobe figured it out maybe 2 years ago.
>Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.
>“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.”
They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?
The big boxes are there to give an idea of the most interesting, most important, or most attention-grabbing things in the article, for rapid skimming. (In magazines, I think they're there to grab your attention as you leaf through trying to find something worth reading. That doesn't apply in quite the same way to an article on the web.)
So the intended use is that (1) you skim quickly over the article, looking only at the stuff in the boxes, to decide whether it's worth reading, and/or (2) you read the article normally, basically ignoring the boxes.
And it's usually not placed directly below the actual line of text where it appears in the article.
Wait what? I've used Sublime Text 2 for a little while... but I have the impression that it's a fancy Notepad with a cumbersome configuration system. Is it more with regards to web page editing? Can someone enlighten me?
I've always stayed away from Flash because you had to shell out a gazillion dollars for the developer tools. I stumbled on the open-source toolchain a few years ago, but I wasn't able to figure it out. All the tutorials I could find were written for the official toolchain, and the docs for the open-source toolchain assumed good knowledge of the official one. swfmill...flasm...mtasc...so confusing!
Adobe's recent noises of abandoning Flash Player for Linux hasn't helped my perception of them, either. I develop on Linux if I can. Having to test Flash in Windows -- and not being able to target Linux -- would be a pain.
So as far as I'm concerned, Flash is a dying legacy platform; HTML 5 and Coffeescript are the future.
I especially excited about Edge Animate! My little brother (who majoring in Animation) asked me, "If Flash is dying on the Internet, what will people use to create animations?" I didn't quite know how to answer that question a few months ago -- it seemed to me that Flash the application was more accessible than writing dozens, and dozens of lines of code to produce sub-par animations.
Yay for Adobe getting into this space, and for charging a subscription fee rather than a huge, up-front price (I believe this will substantially lower the amount of pirated software, too).
YES!, Stop neglecting your only good web design product Adobe
I totally agree overall, I felt like Flex was a fantastic development environment. It was the final, flash-based product that usually ended up lacking, but you could create some cool stuff with it.