Wow, you really come to appreciate a framework when you have to go back to an older iteration of a lanuage. I had to jump back into AS2 again and man you start to miss alot of the new time saving features that have come with new versions of the lanuage. I even found myself building an event Dispatching framework which pretty much mymics Flex's event framework. So I think thats a good measure of just how far the Flash player and the flex framework have come.
Yeah so we have herd how Microsoft invaided Flash on the Beach. How its opening its doors in many ways becoming more transparent to the developers using its platform/technologies. And now hiring people like John to be "evangelist"'s. And I find myself starting to see M$ less like the evil empire and more like the …… well I dont really know, but it seems to be changing for the better. I guess the whole image of winForm apps (windows stock standard looking apps) has been blown away by WPF and now we will start seeing some really creative people doing some cool creative things. Something Adobe has enjoyed for a while now.
I think Microsoft has started to realise they were missing was what Adobe inherited. A really loyal creative ( more UI visual sense ) and super supportive developer comunity, alot of whom were evangelists for free, spreading the word and helping each other. Not to say that that community wasnt there for windows peeps before but as a more designer based developer (more UI…ekkkkkk Im a freak) I was never really exposed to this in M$ land. M$ developers were more focused on getting X and Y to work rather than making this form not look like an excell nightmare.
Where is it heading. Well the next generation of UI developers are growing up using opensource tools, free server technologies and office tools that dont have the blue gleam that we are all used to. They use macs, and curse everytime they send someone an word doc only to have the windows person say they cant open it. What will happen when these script kiddies grow up?
The feeling of Flash/Flex etc has changed too. It all feels alot more grown up and no longer like this bunch of people are making this cool software and work with it because they believe in it. Im not saying Adobe has a negative feeling….just different. And when I base my job….8+ hours of my day, each day to working with a software….it becomes a bit more than just another development tool… it becomes personal. My lunchtime mood can be effected by the fact that that treecontrol wont do X or Y and I have spent 2 hours chassing the goal of X only to find Z.
Basically it is going to be an interesting next few years.
Yep I did it again this year. I grew a mo for movember.
So now I have nasty pictures of me looking dodgy to show people, and movember is over…Well it was for us in NZ yesterday but hey.
P.S. the bottom one isnt me lol 
