Does Adobe finally understand developers?(designshack.net)
designshack.net
Does Adobe finally understand developers?
http://designshack.net/articles/software/adobe-edge-does-adobe-finally-understand-developers/
9 comments
Up until a few years ago I was a full time Flash developer, working in ActionScript3 which is a strictly typed, fully OO language which conforms completely with the 4th edition of ECMAScript. I used a great IDE (FlashBuilder) that had full code introspection, static analysis, amazing auto-complete and all sorts of great features built in. Unit testing was not uncommon, as was continuous integration, automated build processes and version control. I, and many others, were doing "real" programming on the Flash platform and felt totally understood as a developer by Adobe.
I'm not going to defend Flash's continued relevance on the web because like most people I think it's had its day but from about 2003 to 2010 the Flash developer community was massive and thriving, people were doing serious programming and Adobe was doing a pretty good job of understanding them and supporting them. It's this wealth of experience that I hope Adobe brings to bear on its HTML5 developer tools.
I feel like the relevance of Flash (and Adobe) is really quite poorly understood. A lot of the expertise and good practises from the more serious elements of the Flash community flooded into the JavaScript community and I feel this is one of the reasons JavaScript has developed so quickly. What's more, a lot of the "web2.0" style dynamic and interactive elements of websites that we take for granted now are watered down (and much better) versions of ideas that were conceived during those frenzied years of UI experimentation in the Flash community.
Granted those years of Flash threw up some UI abominations, but it was also a melting pot of ideas and creativity, the like of which we don't really see anymore, which is a shame in a way. Even though Flash was my livelihood I was happy to move on because I could see it was for the best, but if you ignore Flash your understanding of the last 10 years and the current context of web development is impoverished.
I'm not going to defend Flash's continued relevance on the web because like most people I think it's had its day but from about 2003 to 2010 the Flash developer community was massive and thriving, people were doing serious programming and Adobe was doing a pretty good job of understanding them and supporting them. It's this wealth of experience that I hope Adobe brings to bear on its HTML5 developer tools.
I feel like the relevance of Flash (and Adobe) is really quite poorly understood. A lot of the expertise and good practises from the more serious elements of the Flash community flooded into the JavaScript community and I feel this is one of the reasons JavaScript has developed so quickly. What's more, a lot of the "web2.0" style dynamic and interactive elements of websites that we take for granted now are watered down (and much better) versions of ideas that were conceived during those frenzied years of UI experimentation in the Flash community.
Granted those years of Flash threw up some UI abominations, but it was also a melting pot of ideas and creativity, the like of which we don't really see anymore, which is a shame in a way. Even though Flash was my livelihood I was happy to move on because I could see it was for the best, but if you ignore Flash your understanding of the last 10 years and the current context of web development is impoverished.
In my opinion Flex is still the best UI framework I have ever worked with, and I've worked with many.
1. Source code for the framework was available in the default flex builder installation. Wanna see how adobe designed the default table renderer, drop right in and look. You didn't have to search online for how to use esoteric features, you could just look at the super class to see the code path it takes. This is my biggest complaint working with Apple and MS frameworks.
2. Proper handling of component invalidation. Many other frameworks still have problems with calling methods out of order during initialization. Flex collects all changes to a component before processing them in the invalidation loop.
3. Data binding let you do some really cool things by automatically wrapping them in anonymous functions to process like <mx:Button id="myButton" enabled="{isButtonEnabled(someString, items.length)}"/>
4. Lots of support for component customization, especially in the skinning department. Going from flex back to mac cocoa was like going from paintbrushes back to using twigs to draw.
However, the biggest downfall for flash was always the performance, they were stuck in a corner because the flash engine was designed first and foremost for processing frames of animation, on the cpu, in another programs window, with no control over their own run loop.
1. Source code for the framework was available in the default flex builder installation. Wanna see how adobe designed the default table renderer, drop right in and look. You didn't have to search online for how to use esoteric features, you could just look at the super class to see the code path it takes. This is my biggest complaint working with Apple and MS frameworks.
2. Proper handling of component invalidation. Many other frameworks still have problems with calling methods out of order during initialization. Flex collects all changes to a component before processing them in the invalidation loop.
3. Data binding let you do some really cool things by automatically wrapping them in anonymous functions to process like <mx:Button id="myButton" enabled="{isButtonEnabled(someString, items.length)}"/>
4. Lots of support for component customization, especially in the skinning department. Going from flex back to mac cocoa was like going from paintbrushes back to using twigs to draw.
However, the biggest downfall for flash was always the performance, they were stuck in a corner because the flash engine was designed first and foremost for processing frames of animation, on the cpu, in another programs window, with no control over their own run loop.
Try AngularJS - No strong typing, of course, but the MVC separation is much cleaner (directives are awesome!), and it focuses on making things composable instead of a huge inheritance tree. Lots of fun.
I totally agree overall, I felt like Flex was a fantastic development environment. It was the final, flash-based product that usually ended up lacking, but you could create some cool stuff with it.
I totally agree overall, I felt like Flex was a fantastic development environment. It was the final, flash-based product that usually ended up lacking, but you could create some cool stuff with it.
I still mainly do Flex development (building educational research games on contract for a big university). I'm hoping that Adobe builds a Flex like framework for Javascript that integrates with their Edge suite. I'd love to be able to deploy games/apps directly in the browser instead of relying on a plugin or AIR on the desktop.
You made me nostalgic for my childhood.
It is important to note that for half of the glory days it was Macromedia Dreamweaver. Until FlashBuilder, we were told with straight faces to use the Adobe Flash Professional. Remember, FlashDevelop?
I think adobe figured it out maybe 2 years ago.
It is important to note that for half of the glory days it was Macromedia Dreamweaver. Until FlashBuilder, we were told with straight faces to use the Adobe Flash Professional. Remember, FlashDevelop?
I think adobe figured it out maybe 2 years ago.
Yeah, FlashDevelop was (and still is) ace! I think Adobe were beginning to figure it when they started to let you do AS3 only projects in FlexBuilder, whenever that was, maybe a little longer than 2 years ago. FlashBuilder is a brilliant IDE IMO, there's certainly not equivalent in the JS world yet.
I needed to make a plugin for our video player recently, so I downloaded FlashDevelop and gave it a go. I was astounded at how good it was for an entirely free piece of software. It's no wonder Adobe gave up on Flash, they certainly got no money from me while I developed with it.
The way things went with flash after the macromedia acquisition was part of what got me into using haxe.
I really don't understand this article style
>Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.
>“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.”
They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?
>Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.
>“Adobe made a clear statement: we don’t care about coders.”
They write a sentence then quote themselves in big text with highlight. Is this a standard way of presenting an article?
It's a style of presentation that's very common in magazine articles.
The big boxes are there to give an idea of the most interesting, most important, or most attention-grabbing things in the article, for rapid skimming. (In magazines, I think they're there to grab your attention as you leaf through trying to find something worth reading. That doesn't apply in quite the same way to an article on the web.)
So the intended use is that (1) you skim quickly over the article, looking only at the stuff in the boxes, to decide whether it's worth reading, and/or (2) you read the article normally, basically ignoring the boxes.
The big boxes are there to give an idea of the most interesting, most important, or most attention-grabbing things in the article, for rapid skimming. (In magazines, I think they're there to grab your attention as you leaf through trying to find something worth reading. That doesn't apply in quite the same way to an article on the web.)
So the intended use is that (1) you skim quickly over the article, looking only at the stuff in the boxes, to decide whether it's worth reading, and/or (2) you read the article normally, basically ignoring the boxes.
It's called a pull quote, and yes, it's pretty standard for long magazine articles and their webby counterparts as an aid to skimming.
Usually, though, they're quotes from other people, not the author's own writing (maybe possibly if you have an editor, like in a magazine, it's not so bad). Doing it with your own quotes seems kind of pretentious.
And it's usually not placed directly below the actual line of text where it appears in the article.
And it's usually not placed directly below the actual line of text where it appears in the article.
It's part of magazines, practically any article over 2 or 3 pages will have them.
Correct but the article would have been a better read if the author didn't put the exact same words he used in the article in the quote and than place the quote behind the original text.
If you don't quote, it's not a pull quote, it's a heading or an aside. The example given is a bit of a miss, yes, because the same words appear quoted immediately; normally you'd pull something a little deeper in the text (like from the middle of a paragraph).
That's not quite right. A pull quote can also simply refer to an excerpt "pulled" out of the article text. Google it.
I did mention that the pull quote quotes (excerpts) the main article; that's what makes it different from a block quote. Though there may be ellipses, a summary is not a pull quote.
Actually, pull quotes almost always precede the quoted text in the article. They're entry points for readers to jump into the article, consequently it makes no sense to place them after the quoted passage. Moreover, they're secondarily used as a spacing device, namely, to expand an article so that it ends at the bottom of a hard-copy page, rather than being followed by empty white space. On web pages, of course, this is rarely necessary and so almost never done.
"(...) but for now it’s a little underwhelming for those of us who use the outstanding Sublime Text 2 every day".
Wait what? I've used Sublime Text 2 for a little while... but I have the impression that it's a fancy Notepad with a cumbersome configuration system. Is it more with regards to web page editing? Can someone enlighten me?
Wait what? I've used Sublime Text 2 for a little while... but I have the impression that it's a fancy Notepad with a cumbersome configuration system. Is it more with regards to web page editing? Can someone enlighten me?
If it's anything like Textmate then the robust snippet, scope and command system are what makes it special.
It's been a few years since I've taken a look at Flash; some of the other comments lead me to suspect some of the things I say here will be out of date.
I've always stayed away from Flash because you had to shell out a gazillion dollars for the developer tools. I stumbled on the open-source toolchain a few years ago, but I wasn't able to figure it out. All the tutorials I could find were written for the official toolchain, and the docs for the open-source toolchain assumed good knowledge of the official one. swfmill...flasm...mtasc...so confusing!
Adobe's recent noises of abandoning Flash Player for Linux hasn't helped my perception of them, either. I develop on Linux if I can. Having to test Flash in Windows -- and not being able to target Linux -- would be a pain.
So as far as I'm concerned, Flash is a dying legacy platform; HTML 5 and Coffeescript are the future.
I've always stayed away from Flash because you had to shell out a gazillion dollars for the developer tools. I stumbled on the open-source toolchain a few years ago, but I wasn't able to figure it out. All the tutorials I could find were written for the official toolchain, and the docs for the open-source toolchain assumed good knowledge of the official one. swfmill...flasm...mtasc...so confusing!
Adobe's recent noises of abandoning Flash Player for Linux hasn't helped my perception of them, either. I develop on Linux if I can. Having to test Flash in Windows -- and not being able to target Linux -- would be a pain.
So as far as I'm concerned, Flash is a dying legacy platform; HTML 5 and Coffeescript are the future.
Great article highlighting some of Adobe's new web-related products.
I especially excited about Edge Animate! My little brother (who majoring in Animation) asked me, "If Flash is dying on the Internet, what will people use to create animations?" I didn't quite know how to answer that question a few months ago -- it seemed to me that Flash the application was more accessible than writing dozens, and dozens of lines of code to produce sub-par animations.
Yay for Adobe getting into this space, and for charging a subscription fee rather than a huge, up-front price (I believe this will substantially lower the amount of pirated software, too).
I especially excited about Edge Animate! My little brother (who majoring in Animation) asked me, "If Flash is dying on the Internet, what will people use to create animations?" I didn't quite know how to answer that question a few months ago -- it seemed to me that Flash the application was more accessible than writing dozens, and dozens of lines of code to produce sub-par animations.
Yay for Adobe getting into this space, and for charging a subscription fee rather than a huge, up-front price (I believe this will substantially lower the amount of pirated software, too).
> It seems like Fireworks is the only decent true web design tool that Adobe has in the Creative Suite, but it has a sort of cult following, only the enlightened few drop Photoshop and pick it up instead.
YES!, Stop neglecting your only good web design product Adobe
YES!, Stop neglecting your only good web design product Adobe
Too many subheadings, stopped reading
We try to aim for more constructive comments on Hacker News - if you didn't read an article, you probably shouldn't drop a comment, unless there's a tangible reason you didn't (such as - this doesn't work in my browser, I'm blind and it's not accessible, I'm deaf and the video has no subtitles - the pattern here is constructive criticism)
I don't think these products would have been at all successful 5 or 10 years ago, the web "wasn't ready".
> Adobe has been steadily building steam in this area for years, but they have never marketed their efforts so well as they are today.
If Adobe have been building these products for years that would mean they haven't been "not understanding developers": they just didn't guess 5 years in advance this is where the web would be. Silly contradiction.