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Why I still like books.

I could be completely off base on this, as I have done zero research to support my hypothesis, but I sometimes feel like I am one of maybe four developers who are fairly advanced in their careers and still turn to physically printed paper books when getting serious about learning a new language or concept.

Reading about complex material on the internet, for me, is akin to sitting in a classroom where you’re attempting to learn while trying not to stare at the liberal arts hottie with the cool tattoos and piercings, ignoring several juicy conversations going on around you, keeping yourself from opening letters that the mailman is inexplicably delivering straight to your desk every two minutes, with a guy walking into the room every few seconds yelling “Hey! Anyone interested in the new Fallout 3 game? Follow me!”

This takes serious amounts of discipline and patience, a certain level of which I shall never achieve. Granted, this can also lead to some very interesting tangents that are often fruitful as well, but if I need to really immerse myself in a subject there is still no substitute for the isolating nature of a physical book and a quiet reading area.

I acknowledge that in this incredibly fast-paced field most books are usually outdated before they even hit the shelves, but I’d point out that one of my favorite books that I reference from time to time is a data structures textbook published in 1994. All of the code examples are in C and assembly, and yet I’ve used the concepts in every language I’ve encountered - from perl and coldfusion to pre-actionscript flash and AS3/Flex. A solid developer deals in algorithms and concepts and therefore a decent book (or any resource for that matter) can be invaluable if you can abstract the really important stuff from the syntax. But that’s a huge topic for another post.

360|Flex Camp NJ

I just got back from 360|Flex Camp NJ, put on by the 360|Flex guys and the folks from the NJFlex user group. As expected it was a great time. I think they were hoping for a larger turn out, but between the economy being what it is and the fact that we can still taste 360|Flex San Jose with MAX right around the corner, I don’t think they did too bad.

I didn’t get to go to the training on Friday, but the sessions today were very good. I especially liked seeing Fluint in action, which I can see has come a long way. I think the thing I get most out of the sessions at these things is the quick overview of a technology or library that you know is out there, know vaguely what it does, but just don’t have the time or energy to chase down on your own. That 40 minute session is worth at least a day of futzing around at the keyboard just to give you an idea of whether something is worth pursuing. Back when I first started with flex I was coming from .net and unit testing was a big part of what we were doing. When I looked into the unit testing options available for Flex at the time in comparison to the .net tools I was not impressed. Fluint now looks like a viable toolset, which I probably wouldn’t have looked at anytime soon on my own.

The sessions are always great of course, but my personal favorite aspect of these events is the socialization. After the conference we had a fun time at The Office Beer Bar and Grill which, as you can probably infer from the name, had a really impressive beer selection. As developers tend to do when you get them alone in a room with a pitcher or two, we had a blast comparing projects, workloads, past experiences and the obligatory developer-to-developer lamenting over how clueless and/or ruthless our respective clients and companies can be. I kind of feel bad that I don’t have anything to complain about any longer - it’s not my fault that Nxtbook really knows how to treat their employees. Oh well, I still have a deep well of debilitating scars in my past to pull from when the group wants to ghost story about the feature creep monster or a dastardly dismal deployment.

Tom and John and the rest of the guys that pulled this together did a great job, and I hope we see more of these in the future. It was a perfectly sized snack right in the middle of 360|Flex and MAX - where I look forward to seeing this group again at the 360|MAX Unconference in November.

Setting the default size of a Flex Skin

The web serves as my long term memory these days, so when I can’t find something fast enough via google, I need to post it here.

Here’s a quick post to remind myself in the future that the measure() function resides in UIComponent. Since ProgrammaticSkin extends FlexSprite and doesn’t have a measure function to override, you have to override get measuredWidth() and get measuredHeight() in order to define the a default size of a skin.

Find of the week

My cube at work has a new friend..

Have you ever seen anything so strange and demented?
I found it at this architectural salvage / junk store in downtown Lancaster today.. and it was only a buck!

Android is looking good.

From the Android website:

All applications are equal
Android does not differentiate between the phone’s basic and third-party applications — even the dialer or home screen can be replaced.

I downloaded the developer’s kit (which includes an emulator and eclipse plugin) and the platform looks awesome. I am really excited about what this means.

The HTC we’ve been seeing is not nearly as sexy as the iPhone, but if it’s at all affordable then I will drop my iPhone in a second for the ability to install any application without having to go through iTunes and develop in Java using a free, open source sdk.

MOO!

At 360|Flex I gave out quite a few business cards. My Nxtbook Media business cards are pretty cool in my opinion.. I mean, they list my job title as ‘Conjurer of Code / Diviner of Logic‘ .. it doesn’t get much cooler than that, right? But I realized after handing out a few of these that they don’t really convey the information that I need to build relationships within the community. If I were at a sales event, or talking to a prospective customer then these are the cards to give out, but developer-to-developer relationships are based on much more personal information. I want people to be able to visit my blog, IM me or follow me on twitter even if they never need to email or call me at work.

Before MAX rolls around I think I should have something a little more personal to give people I strike it off with that won’t be so intimidating to use. So I dropped by MOO.com and tinkered around with their design tools to come up with something a little more personal to give out in addition to my Nxtbook card.

MOO.com sells their miniCards in packs of 100 and will let you use a separate image for the front of each if you’re feeling especially ambitious. Unfortunately, they make up for this by limiting the back design, with three fonts to choose from, six lines of text to fill out and a handful of pretty useless predefined graphics. After playing with some image ideas, I decided to use their text card editor to create a very simple, to the point card:

Simple and to the point. They’re only $20 for 100, so if these come and I don’t like them then it’s not too much of a hit to try again, but I think they’ll do the trick.

Slicing Charts

Tom Gonzalez has released a sample of Chart Slicing from his 360|Flex talk on data visualization. It’s a nice, clean example of using Degrafa, custom components and custom skins to deliver an effective and simple way to move through data on a timeline. In this case it’s driving a chart filtered by date, but the custom slider could just as easily be used to filter any data by any linear value.

There’s also some other goodies in the source, like his micro chart and DataSet classes.

See Tom’s Post for the example and source.

Ubiquity

There’s a buzz around the web about this thing from Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity…

I know that if I said “How would you like to use a command line interface for the web?” that you would most likely reply “How would you like to wind your car up every morning with a giant metal key?” Ordinarily I’d agree, but Ubiquity seems to have gotten it right.

There are plenty of blogs out there right now talking about it, so I won’t go into detail, but let me just say that in the past five minutes it has already changed how I use the Internet.

Here is my new three step path to power browsing:

1. Watch the video.

2. Install Ubiquity.

3. Read the tutorial.

Ubiquity needs firefox 3, so if you haven’t upgraded yet then do that too.

Enjoy!

First 360|Flex, now MAX

I wasn’t even back from San Jose yet when I got an email letting me know that come November I’ll be right back in San Fransico for MAX! And, as if that wasn’t enough, this time I’ll be accompanied by the rest of the team, so it’ll be a grand old Nxtbook time. MAX is going to be great, there are a lot of things to be excited about in our little Flex world - maybe we’ll get some real dates around Flex 4, Thermo and Flash Player 10…

360|Flex - Let’s not call it goodbye.

Well, 360|Flex San Jose has come to a close. It was a lot of fun - lots of great people, some really decent sessions and, as I pointed out the in the last post, just a great overall vibe of community and optimism surrounding Flex.

…

As I sit in the gazebo of the hotel courtyard, surrounded by beautiful rose bushes and palm trees, a perfectly tempered breeze lightly titillating my scalp with featherlight fingers and the sky as blue as ever, I can’t help but reflect on the great data visualization tools that Tom Gonzalez presented on, or the excellent session on the intellectual hows and whys of data visualization provided by Tony Hillerson and Juan Sanchez. And as I sit here, with several martinis diligently, but ever so gently, working to maintain my relaxed state, I am reminded of the comfort provided by Troy Gardener speaking the gospel of Finite and Hierarchical State Machines… oh, and who could forget RJ Owen and Brad Umbaugh’s walk through of the component lifecycle. Yes, these things I have experienced will remain with me always, forever a testament to the power and purpose of the almighty Flex and our place in it’s world.

And so 360|Flex, let’s not call it goodbye.. only farewell for now - for we shall meet again. I don’t know where or when, but I’m sure you’ll keep in touch.

…

Ehem.. so yeah, it was ok I guess.. if you’re into that sort of thing.