The random utterances of David Arno

This is part 2 of a of two-part article about the Try { harder } conference. I’d recommend reading days 1 & 2 first as this article will likely make more sense that way.

After a full day’s pair programming workshop, day 3 (Wednesday) was a much more normal conference-style day involving a series of technical presentations.

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At the beginning of October, I spent four days at Nottingham Center Parcs at an unusual conference organised by Stray (Lindsey Fallow.) The conference was called “Try { harder }” and involved just 16 participants and one guest speaker. As I opted to attend this conference instead of Flash on the Beach (FOTB) this year, I was hoping to come away with a similar level of inspiration as FOTB has provided in the past, plus I hoped to learn new, useful things too. Try { harder } delivered both in bucket-loads.

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As you’ll likely know, if such things interest you, Adobe pretty much succeeded in killing off Flash last week. They made nearly 10% of their staff redundant. They abandoned the Flash player for mobile browsers. They possibly made most of the Flash Pro “IDE” team redundant (though what has really happened to that team remains unclear.) And late Friday, they announced that they were pulling out of future Flex development and handing Flex over to the community.

The timing of these announcements by Adobe is regrettable. They have spooked the community and left many of us who build on Flash technologies as part of our business unsure of the short to medium term future of Flash. Yet there is currently no alternative RIA solution that can equal Flex. What other solutions there are use very different technologies. making migration difficult at best.

This set me thinking: could the community create a way of migrating existing Flex solutions away from the Flash player?

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Just under two years ago, I wrote an article questioning the wisdom of demands for Flash on mobile devices. At the time, everyone seemed to want Flash everywhere and were demanding it for the iPhone. Also at the time, HTML5 was languishing in unpopular backwaters of the internet. When the news broke today that Adobe were scrapping future development of Flash on mobile devices, I immediately thought of that article and felt happy that Adobe had finally seen sense on the subject. That happiness has ebbed during the day though, to be replaced by a degree of concern.

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I don’t like particularly like the Free Software Foundation (FSF). My dislike of them stems from my dislike of the virus-like GPL license that they champion and their – to my mind at least – dishonest claim that the GPL is “free as in freedom”. Yet despite all this, I believe their latest campaign is one that everyone should read about and hopefully support.

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A fairly common feature of most object-orientated (OO) languages is the concept of globally accessible functions, which are wrapped up inside classes. In order to make them globally accessible, they’ll be defined as static methods, or whatever the syntactic equivalent is in the particular OO language in question.

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This post is primarily a handy way for those that attended the 2011 “try { harder }” conference to access links I showed in my “the joy of ABC” presentation at that event.

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This week, I have been experimenting with the pomodoro technique to see if it could help me better manage my time when working.

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Today I had to make the very sad decision to cancel the Flash unplugged conference that was scheduled for November. As a number of people had already bought tickets for it, I figure I owe them, and anyone else who’d expressed interest in the event, an explanation.

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