So now that I’m working on something that’s proprietary, closed source and in stealth mode, I’m finally doing stuff and learning how to do things that are really cool! Typical. Perhaps I should just start queuing up blog posts about the stuff I’ve discovered to push out live once we launch something other people could look at.
Dear Lazyweb, I’ve started doing Flash and Flex development. For me the Flex Builder IDE is significantly better than the Flash CS4 IDE, but when you build a SWF in Flex Builder it includes all of the MX widgetry. That’s too heavyweight for building simple Flash applets. Is it possible to get around that so I can use Flex Builder for my non-visual Flash development without bringing in MX?
Update: David Zuckerman a Flex Builder Developer dropped in to provide this invaluable advice:
Hey Ian, have you tried an ActionScript project in Flex Builder? It sheds most of the Flex weight, but you’ll still need to modify your project settings. In your setttings, go to the “ActionScript Build Path” tab, and open up the Flex SDK that’s listed there. Remove everything but playerglobal.swc (you can keep utilities.swc if you want). That should give you just the language definition, and none of Flex
I haven’t moved the project over to this fully but it looks like it works perfectly. Thanks David!
So I’ve been at a new job for a couple of weeks now. I left Songbird around when we shipped 1.0 to seek some new challenges. I’ve been doing Mozilla browser development for seven and a half years and I’m sick of it. I still think building browsers is one of the most interesting fields to work in – since we all spend much of our time working and interacting through web sites small incremental improvements to web browsers can have a huge impact on a wide variety of activities. But building web browsers is hard.
Now I’m doing some web stuff. It’s a challenge but in different ways. I’m working a lot with Flash and AIR right now, I’ve just successfully evangelized jQuery to the other developers and about to head back into cross-browser html + css development. The project I’m working on is still under wraps but it’s really exciting and I’m working with some pretty amazing people. I can’t wait to be able to brag about it.
In the mean time I might start talking about more web-y things here.