Windows 7 support

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.

Flash’s transition from web development to app development

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.

ActionScript 2.0

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.