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Does Adobe finally understand developers?

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Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#21

Post by bgilroy26 »

codeka wrote: post #9
stan_rogers wrote: post #4

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's called a pull quote , and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.

Usually, though, they're quotes from other people, not the author's own writing (maybe possibly if you have an editor, like in a magazine, it's not so bad). Doing it with your own quotes seems kind of pretentious. And it's usually not placed directly below the actual line of text where it appears in the article.

It's part of magazines, practically any article over 2 or 3 pages will have them.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#22

Post by seanalltogether »

Wintamute wrote: post #10
citricsquid wrote: post #3

Wouldn't the more obvious conclusion be that Adobe believed 10 years ago that the way to make money was to cater to those that don't want to program and just want something that "works" and now they've decided that there is a large enough user base of people that are willing to pay for tools to help with real programming? I don't think these products would have been at all successful 5 or 10 years ago, the web "wasn'…

Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build p…

In my opinion Flex is still the best UI framework I have ever worked with, and I've worked with many.

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

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.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#23

Post by untog »

frozenport wrote: post #13
Wintamute wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build p…

You made me nostalgic for my childhood. 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.

I needed to make a plugin for our video player recently, so I downloaded FlashDevelop and gave it a go. I was astounded at how good it was for an entirely free piece of software. It's no wonder Adobe gave up on Flash, they certainly got no money from me while I developed with it.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#24

Post by brianfryer »

Great article highlighting some of Adobe's new web-related products.

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).

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#25

Post by dugmartin »

seanalltogether wrote: post #22
Wintamute wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build p…

In my opinion Flex is still the best UI framework I have ever worked with, and I've worked with many. 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…

I still mainly do Flex development (building educational research games on contract for a big university). I'm hoping that Adobe builds a Flex like framework for Javascript that integrates with their Edge suite. I'd love to be able to deploy games/apps directly in the browser instead of relying on a plugin or AIR on the desktop.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#26

Post by csense »

It's been a few years since I've taken a look at Flash; some of the other comments lead me to suspect some of the things I say here will be out of date.

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.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#27

Post by embwbam »

seanalltogether wrote: post #22
Wintamute wrote: post #10

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build p…

In my opinion Flex is still the best UI framework I have ever worked with, and I've worked with many. 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…

Try AngularJS - No strong typing, of course, but the MVC separation is much cleaner (directives are awesome!), and it focuses on making things composable instead of a huge inheritance tree. Lots of fun.

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.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#28

Post by ternaryoperator »

stan_rogers wrote: post #4
samarudge wrote: post #2

I really don't understand this article style >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?

It's called a pull quote , and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.

Actually, pull quotes almost always precede the quoted text in the article. They're entry points for readers to jump into the article, consequently it makes no sense to place them after the quoted passage. Moreover, they're secondarily used as a spacing device, namely, to expand an article so that it ends at the bottom of a hard-copy page, rather than being followed by empty white space. On web pages, of course, this is rarely necessary and so almost never done.

Re: Does Adobe finally understand developers?

#29

Post by stan_rogers »

eli wrote: post #20
stan_rogers wrote: post #8

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you don't quote, it's not a pull quote, it's a heading or an aside. The example given is a bit of a miss, yes, because the same words appear quoted immediately; normally you'd pull something a little deeper in the text (like from the middle of a paragraph).

That's not quite right. A pull quote can also simply refer to an excerpt "pulled" out of the article text. Google it.

I did mention that the pull quote quotes (excerpts) the main article; that's what makes it different from a block quote. Though there may be ellipses, a summary is not a pull quote.
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