OnAir Tour plus Adobe support of Open Source
Two quick topics in a single post here. First off, I attended the OnAir bus tour here in Minneapolis the other night. I must say it was a good time with some good information. The food was good (pop rocks and nerds, how do you beat that?), the atmosphere was nice and the speakers were fantastic. Didn't see anyone playing Guitar Hero on expert mode to play against, but a lot of people were giving it a good shot. I also discovered that Mike Chambers was taller than I expected him to be after years of only seeing his headshots. Kevin Hoyt gave a great presentation with lots of code flying by fairly quickly - I loved it even though it wasn't focused on Actionscript 3. And it was nice to get to put a face with a name for Grant Skinner.
I'm very pleased with the support that Adobe has been showing the Open Source community and standards with projects like Tamarin, using Eclipse as the base for FlexBuilder and even just switching AS3 to ECMAScript 4. Without doubt, FlexBuilder is leaps and bounds beyond what was available for coding in the IDE. However, it's still too large for my tastes ( it easily consumes over 250mb of memory on my system, versus about 30mb for FlashDevelop ), and it has been quite slow in my experiences - hanging for several minutes at a time to compile even simple projects. Now don't get me wrong - I'm not trying to say that it is a horrible product, just that for me FlashDevelop is a much better fit for writing code.
I'd really like to see Adobe release the intrinsic classes to the community or at least give official permission for them to be redistributed if they've been parsed out. It would be invaluable for those of us who use other coding environments to have auto-complete ( fully supported ). Currently, I have to lose out on my auto-complete if I want to use FlashDevelop or something similar - unless I write something to parse out those definitions. However even if I do that for personal use, I can't redistribute them to the community for others to benefit from in their coding environment of choice.
Others Have Said
And just for clarification, the pop rocks and nerds were not the dinner - just snacks on all the tables!
Great news. More info - Onair.adobe Blog
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My name is Mike Johnson, though many know me as exorcyze. I have been in love with programming
for over 25 years and use Adobe Flash for most of my personal experiments. I enjoy sharing
knowledge and study almost anything. Most of my professional work is in Actionscript, C#.Net and PHP.
