Monthly Archives: October 2008

The Ajaxians go to Mozilla

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Congrats to Dion and Ben on their move to Mozilla. I’ve been lucky enough to get to know Dion more over the past year in my role at Adobe and he’s one of the best out there. He and Ben make a pretty awesome tag team.

So what are they working on? Developer tools, something that is close to Adobe’s heart and important for the web. But what I’m most excited about is how this will help evolve Adobe and Mozilla’s relationship. I think Mozilla is a fascinating organization and that in a lot of ways, because we’re both so close to the web, Adobe and Mozilla have a lot in common. Our methods and incentives are different, but I think for the most part our goals are the same. We both want to evolve the web as a platform and improve the lives of web developers. Adobe uses Flash as the engine to do that (along with Ajax in Adobe AIR) but I think more cooperation between Mozilla and Adobe could go a long way towards helping both Flash and Ajax.

Good times for web developers are ahead me thinks.

New Prefixes for Flex 4 Components

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As a couple people have noticed, the nightlies of Flex 4 include some changes to the component names. Instead of <Button> we’ve now got <FxButton>. I asked Matt what was up and he gave me some info. If you’ve been looking at the Flex 4 stuff at all you know that what we’ve done is create new “Gumbonents” that have the same name as old components. Up until now we’ve been relying on different packages to keep them clear. So you used to see <mx:Button> and <Button> side by side and those belonged to different packages. With Flex 4 you can interchange the new “Gumbonents” and the old Halo components so we needed to support both models. It became pretty clear that packages alone weren’t going to cut it.

There are a couple of benefits to using prefixes over just packages. One is the ability to merge Halo and Gumbo components into one namespace, the 2009 namespace. This makes it easier to upgrade as we create new Gumbo components or update Halo components. It also means we don’t need to add namespace support for CSS which should save a lot of headaches.

In general this should make everything a lot easier. Tooling/code completion will make more sense, upgrading will be easier, and transitioning over to the Gumbonents will be easier as well. It may take some getting used to writing <FxApplication> instead of <mx:Application> but in the long run I think it makes more sense.

Spark Project in English

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One of the coolest things Mike and I saw on our Asia tour was the Spark Project. We got a demo of some of the individual projects in Spark and it’s some very, very interesting Flash work. We joked with them about translating it into English so that more people could check it out and I just got an email today that they’ve done it.

It’s only the main page that’s translated right now, but it’s the most important part. They’ve got a list of all the projects they’re working on (and there is a ton of stuff) so I encourage you to check it out. And if you know Japanese you can help translate the individual projects.

This One Time, at Flash Camp….I Got Flash CS4

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We’re doing a BarCamp style event just for the Adobe crowd in San Francisco during the weekend of October 10th. The event, dubbed Flash 10 Camp is going to offer a bunch of sneak peaks and content regarding Flash Player 10 and Flash CS4. Lee Brimelow is even giving the keynote on Sunday.

I won’t be in the Bay that weekend unfortunately but it looks like it’s going to be a very good event. I’d love for the Flex crowd to show up en masse so you can see everything that Flash Player 10 offers. There are going to be a bunch of prizes given away over the weekend and one of them is Flash CS4, so if you want to see what’s been cooking, this s a great way to see it and possibly have some to take home.