The random utterances of David Arno

Yesterday – Wednesday 27th October – I had the pleasure of presenting an introduction to AIR on Android workshop to the good folk of the dotBrighton user group. The workshop took the audience through details of using Flash Pro and FlashBuilder Burrito to develop basic apps that explored some of the AIR Android APIs. Read more

The twentieth century saw some massive changes in scientific consensus, such as the particle/ wave duality, plate tectonics and quantum mechanics. Another of these great changes was the consensus acceptance of chaos theory. In the first half of the century, a popularly belief was that first we would crack weather prediction, then would learn to control it. At the heart of this claim – which now days seems ridiculous – was the belief that predictable “linear” equations describing real-world systems were the norm and that strange unpredictable equations were an oddity; oddities that in time we’d learn to tame. Read more

Flash on the Beach organiser, John Davie, has made the elevator pitch videos for this year available to all. You can watch my one below. Being very self-critical, I dislike the number of times I some “um”, which spoils my performance in my view. Others disagree with me. Watch it and make up your own mind. Read more

Recently I wrote an article on a suggested ActionScript language enhancement: implied interfaces. The idea was that, rather than having to explicitly define interfaces, they could be implied from public methods and properties of a class. This prompted a comment from someone just calling themselves “Toby” with a fascinating idea. In a nutshell that idea was: “why must we specify that a class implements an interface when it should be obvious to the compiler whether it does so or not.” Read more

Ideas come and go and fashions change in software. One factor has however remained constant and unquestionably true throughout the 20+ years I’ve been writing code in a professional capacity. It is the mantra: “code should be highly cohesive and loosely coupled”. Cohesiveness has been neatly handled for many years through modularizing ones code. Just about every language I can think of (with the sole exception of VBScript) supports the idea of splitting functionality across multiple files, libraries, modules etc.

Loose coupling though has been a far harder nut to crack. Read more

6 of the Best – 10 Mins Each
The final day of theis year’s Flash on the Beach (FOTB) kicked off with one of my favourite sessions from last year. Six of the speakers get ten minutes each to entertain and/ or enlighten us in some way. This year there was a great mix of silliness, cleverness and awe-inspiring beauty. Read more