It appears that Microsoft understands that people may be upset with the drastic changes coming in Windows 8. Today, Microsoft extended support of Windows 7 until the year 2020!
Reminder: Windows XP support ends in 2014.
A day in the life of a geek.
It appears that Microsoft understands that people may be upset with the drastic changes coming in Windows 8. Today, Microsoft extended support of Windows 7 until the year 2020!
Reminder: Windows XP support ends in 2014.
So, it appears that Adobe is transitioning Flash from a tool used by web developers to a tool for app developers. With Adobe AIR, you can build from a single source code, an app that runs on the desktop, iPhone, iPad, Kindle Fire, Blackberry Playbook, Windows 8 Metro, Android phone, etc…
Very few other technologies come close (.NET/Mono can be used to build it with mostly the same code base, with a different UI layer)
The future of app development will be interesting.
I’ve posted about this in the past, but Michael Tuminello (Sr.Product Marketing Manager, Rich Media) of MediaMind (my employer) wrote an interesting article for Figaro Digital about why the transition to Flash from HTML 5 is bad for the free (ad-supported) internet at the present time.
Flash is a very interesting environment to develop in. It’s actually the environment I’ve been developing in most of my career at EyeWonder / MediaMind. On a new project I’ve been working on at MediaMind, it required that I develop some new UI features in an ActionScript 2.0 SWF. Due to technology limitations, this couldn’t switch to ActionScript 3.0 (or we would have). I then remembered my hatred of ActionScript 2.0 with a passion.. its lack of proper documentation, or proper type checking, or well.. anything. Good thing I had some code I wrote for EyeWonder back in 2006-2007 (part of AdWonder 8.1.. anyone remember that?) that did something similar, or I would of probably have ripped my eyes out.