Kids are fearless and brilliant and will learn to drive an interface faster than any adult. This great article outlines 4 ‘pleas’ from a father to touch app developers that are not so much for his kid (2 years old) but for his own understanding, and I have not seen it spelled out so clearly and concisely before. Well worth the read.
Archives for category: gotchas
DispatchEvent.org has a very nice 4-part blog entry on using Ant with Flex/FlashBuilder. It is from 2009, however it is a good starting point, and things now have only gotten easier
Flash’s strength has always been the write-once, deploy anywhere capability of the player. Fortunately this has carried over to the mobile realm reasonably well, although I personally don’t like using Flash (or any plugin, like HTML5/javascript) within a mobile browser since using a smaller screen works best with fullscreen interaction, and multitouch interfaces can present coupling and ambiguity problems.
That said, writing once and deploying as an app to multiple devices come with two prices – an incomplete API, and performance issues. The latter can be greatly affected by how code is written and what techniques are used or avoided, and any source of experimental results, like thie one below, are more than welcome. Still, Adobe has not only persevered but done an amazing job taking up the task of becoming not just browser independent, but mobile independent, leaving much of the quality risks and rewards to the programmers and designers:
http://www.codeandvisual.com/2011/flash-on-iphone-better-than-blitting-real-world-performance-results/
When a programmer says, “I wrote it in a couple hours last night’ or ‘I threw it together on the plane back from Amsterdam, Manitoba’ – don’t take their word for it.
A programmer is like any craftsperson: the core of the idea is finished in 10% of the time but they cannot help but tweak and tune and refine and enjoy their own creation to the point where someone else has to drag it out of them to publish.
In other words, anything that is loved by its creator is never finished.
Ralph Hauwert has a great introduction to particle systems and optimizations for the FlashPlayer AVM2 on his blog, UnitZeroOne.
