My wife and I have been trying to analyze our expenses a bit more lately, so I wrote a little AIR program to help us visualize where our money is going. It's very basic and not at all pretty, but if it works well I may put more time into it. AIR was the perfect platform for this, as we have both MAC and PC's in our house. To install this application, start by downloading the AIR installer here and installing it. Then download the bigmoney installer here and install it. Drop me a line if you have any problems.
I've been tinkering quite a bit with Flex lately, and I thought I would share a little about my experience. Coming from a Flash development background there are quite a few things that I love about Flex, but there are also some pretty large drawbacks.
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Flex has an AMAZING development environment (especially for people like me, who learned to code in the Flash IDE) The eclipse based editor saves tons of time with a really good auto-complete feature and great project management tools.
MXML is very easy to work with, although I find myself writing Actionscript for most of the things I need anyways.
There are some very nice built-in components, and I love all of the effort they have put into making preloaders easy to implement.
I have found that the "Design View" is quite good for rapid prototyping. When I need to wireframe something and have it somewhat functional, I just drag and drop components and and the functionality as I need it.
Cons:
Agility. Using components instead of graphics in Flash makes the file size go through the roof and takes forever to load. I was hoping to convert a video player application I created in Flash over to Flex, but about halfway into it I realized that my load time had quadrupled. One workaround I tried was creating vector assets in Flash and using them instead on components in Flex, and it helped a little bit. But there is something about the flex framework that makes is very sluggish.
There are also still some pretty prominent bugs. For instance, the TabNavigator component can cause the entire application to go blank. I found the issue on the bug tracker, but I don't see that Adobe is doing anything to fix it.
Overall there are some god uses for flex, and some not so good ones. I used it recently to create a file-uploading system for internal use at work. And I've never created an AIR app with it, so it might be better that way. However, I probably won't be using Flex for any large-scale, public facing applications in the near future.
Last week the long-awaited bumptop beta was released. Like many psuedo computer nerds, I was really excited about this product when I saw the videos on TED. So I installed it on my home PC (It isn't available for MAC) and here are my initial thoughts:
Pros
- I like the sticky-note feature
- Easy to customize with themes
- Fairly Intuitive
Cons
- WICKED Slow.
- Almost TOO many features - I'm not sure a desktop should be an application in and of itself.
The website of Salt Lake City Flash Developer Chris Hall. In addition to making flashy web things for USANA I am currently a graduate student, father of two and a horribly failing musician. When I find time between these things I am occasionally available for freelance work, so if you are interested please contact me.
