Lack of Posts, New Blog.
Hi all. If you’ve noticed, I haven’t done many posts lately. There are a few reasons for this. The number one reason is that Director remains in a delicate place in the development world. A large number of people need multiple delivery platforms, particularly mobile apps, and Director can’t do that at this time (other than Mac/PC of course). I have barely played with mobile development but like the look of LiveCode/RunRev. It had a very old Director feel, but publishes to my iPhone (and many other platforms). Cool. I played with the trial version and remembered the early days of the “english language” programming (which I still do a bit of in Director from force of habit… go to the frame).
Another reason I’ve been a slacker on this site is that I’m now doing most of my work using the FlexBuilder Plug-in with Eclipse. I’m doing all my coding in Actionscript using an in-house framework. I just can’t quite get it. The unbelievably complexity of doing something like adding a push button crushes me. Multiple text files need to be edited and linked to one anther with long strings that barely mean anything to me. Hundreds of lines of code to make relatively simple things work. Packages. Importing math classes so you can multiply numbers. Class extensions. Endless subfolders along the lines of com.yada.deeper.something.why. The list of terms that I see every day is like a set of encyclopedias written in Klingon (yes, a sad geeky statement).
I’ve always been a very visual person. I can code, but I’m not a programmer. I loved Director because I could put things on the stage and then simply drag a behavior on to it. People use lots of terms for OOP, but I simply say “drag a behavior on to a sprite,” and that is all I ever needed to know with Director. Others could do vastly superior programming using really fancy OOP in Director, but that was not my real cup of tea. I was an experimental physicist in grad school, not a theorist. I needed to touch and see things.
Now, at the end of the day I never want to boot up my computer to play with Director (at night) since I’ve been crushed by the AS/Eclipse beast. Instead I play with photography on my iPhone, read news on my iPad, browse the web on my iPad, and often watch shows on my iPad. The day of work makes me not want to look at code.
I hope my tone doesn’t show that I have a problem with Director. I still love Director. When a prototype needs to get made I’ll always use Director. You can put things together in almost no time at all. In case you missed my tweet (I see my tweet connection on this site is broken…hmm), there was a story about how Director was used to prototype OSX: How Mac OS X Came To Be [Exclusive 10th Anniversary Story] http://bit.ly/hl0H7X. Love it.
Director can make a code-protected application with the push of a button that will run on modern computers. Yes, there are problems with Director if you are doing complex things that involve 3rd party Xtras, but I rarely had the need for those (which shows how simple my stuff was). At this point you always have to be aware of limitations on the Mac/PC as far as Xtras go.
If Director allowed me to create apps for my iOS device I would be back to using it on many spare evenings. But at this moment I’ve been having more fun with photography at night. I’ll still do posts when interesting things happen with Director, and even more if I start using it a lot, but other than that this blog will still stay relatively quiet. And on that note…
I’m starting up a new blog where I’ll just talk about photo apps for the iPhone and iPad. I have a feeling it will be far more active than this blog, since it is so much easier to do a blog that focuses on something I currently enjoy.
I actually forgot how much thought has to go in to a brand new blog! My biggest challenge was which URL to choose. I grabbed two and haven’t really decided yet. One is catchy, one is straight to the point. The two I went with are:
TapTapPhotoApps.com
iOSPhotoApps.com
I keep flipping. Both domains currently work, but for the moment I’m using the more straightforward URL. Hmmm…
If you have an iPhone or an iPad and enjoy taking pictures, be sure to bookmark my new playground. Right now it looks a bit bland (other than my cool photos that make it on to the blog 🙂 That will slowly change over time, but I really do enjoy blogs where the theme is just in the “background” and the content is the important part. On the other hand, maybe I should use a lot of blink tags with big red text. So many decisions…
See you all on Direct-L. I’m still lurking, and even have something to say on rare occasions 🙂
7 comments April 9th, 2011