Full Complement

It's took me some time, but I became serious tonight about figuring out how to import a SWC file into Flash CS4 and I'm glad I took the time. I found this extremely useful video demonstrating how it works.  In a nutshell, you create a class in Flex and it is packaged simply into a single file called a SWC. This file includes the class code for easy importing into Flash.

I recently attended Drupal Camp in Irvine, a very well-organized conference on Drupal, an open source content management system for website design. I used to work with Mambo, and since then I became frustrated with the amount of work required to manage a Mambo site. I feel that Drupal has a much cleaner interface than Mambo or Joomla. It reminds me of the simplicity of a Google operated service or Moodle. I don't need a complicated GUI if I'm creating a backend to a website. It seems thought that all of these services require keeping up-to-date on the available modules.

There was a time when I thought Yahoo was one of the most innovative, promising companies on the Internet. These days I am not so sure it has much of a future left. Yahoo appears to headed the way of AOL.

I have always been critical of people who use AOL. AOL always seems like a portal for the least comfortable with technology, providing gimicky user interfaces and keywords as a crutch to navigate the depths of the World Wide Web.

Adobe released betas of two products, Flash Builder 4, formerly known as Flex Builder 3, and Flash Catalyst, a newer design and development tool, providing a midpoint between design programs like Illustrator and Photoshop and Flex Builder. The landscape is getting quite crowded in Adobeland. I'm wondering if all these new programs are making the landscape easier for developers, and more complicated.

For a recent Professional Development, I provided the following list of Web 2.0 Tools and Resources for exploration. Tried to weed out the best of the best.

Top five misperceptions about ActionScript 3

I find it amusing how often I see posts trying to get people to move over to ActionScript 3 from ActionScript 2. It's almost in the same spirit as moving from XP to Vista. There is these need for companies to create the next version and update. It's part of the capitalist system, and I think this is the backlash. We get comfortable using a particular version of software and do not feel a compelling reason to make the movement to the next version. And how many of these new options or features are imperative for what we are accomplishing.