GOT Flex Developer?
Flash was originally designed to be used in advertisement impressions on Web pages.
It was meant to create small animations to capture people’s attention, increase
click through to links. When the greater potential of flash was realized, programmers
started demanding more from Flash. This is when programmers started hitting the
performance limits of Flash in the early days.
Flash development environment was originally created by Macromedia. It has always
been buggy and very unintuitive to work with. I have seen Flash IDE evaporation
before my very eyes too many times, leaving you for the most recent backup. Although
Flash was a very powerful tool, clearly Macromedia did not have a good IDE.
When Flex was in the works, Macromedia decided to get out of the IDE business and
focus on their core competency, which was animation. For this reason, Flex was created
as a plug-in to an existing IDE platform called ECLIPSE.
Interesting thing about Flash and Flex programming is that development borderlines
graphics and code. It is not all graphics and it is not all code. Since, it is almost
impossible to find a good developer who can draw, generally, two or more people
work on flash projects, unless one of the two is not required. This creates an interesting
communication problem the least.
Easiest way to create animations in Flash is to use the timeline. You create frames
and define filters and transformations and Walla… Flash takes care of the rest.
This however comes at a price. Flash internally will create a frame for each frame
between the keyframes, taking up memory and increasing the size of the ‘swf’ file.
If however, objects were to be animated within ActionScript this overhead would
be eliminated. This off course requires programming skills.
Did you know?
Documenting your .Net code can be automated using Microsoft's ‘Sandcastle’.
NDoc documentation tool we all loved and used is not compatible with .Net 2.0, leaving
its place to the new MS Sandcastle documentation tool.
Programmers who insert comments into their code regularly can benefit from this
tool to extract the comments into a full fledged documentation, which can be compiled
into a stand alone help file or an online documentation.
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