In this episode, the sub-generation of Big Trouble in Little China fans talk up the upcoming Grindhouse and then five into an extended discussion of Adobe Flex 2 and Apollo. And Charles asks, “why didn’t Sun do all that with applets?”
All-in-all, I think it was a nice episode.
Thanks to Charles, there’s even show some notes(!):
- Compiz/Beryl = Hot Shit!
- The 4 Hours Work week podcast from SXSW 2007
- Flex2/Tamarin:
Big ups to James “An OK Dude” Ward for filling Charles’ head with Flex 2 at the Ann Arbor Java User’s Group recently.
(This episode edited by Charles.)
I’ve been playing with the flex2 sdk for a bit now, and it seems as though most of the stuff, with the exception of a few effects (rotation being a notable) and some of the super hot widgets (page flipper, et al) can be done w/dhtml. Unfortunately, the really good stuff, i.e. the real value add is in their graphing and charting (not free) along with their data services (extremely not free).
Of course, for big companies, with 20K to drop on licensing fees(plus another grand per developer seat) it might be a pretty good deal, but because this effectively excludes the little guy, chances are that those pesky cockroaches independent shops will collude on an open source solution which will force adobe to open source what they’ve got (oops, there goes the cash cow!), or drastically reduce their prices.
If I were an analyst to a big guy (which I’m not) I’d say that if you need the hotness and convenience of the dataservices right now, go for it, and then be prepared to transition away in two years or so.
Have you guys not checked out NetNewsWire for the Mac? Its awesomeness is unparalleled. Just create a high priority folder of feeds in there and ignore the rest until you find the time. Voila – RSS bliss!
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