Tom Byrne

Grant Skinner, the renowned ActionScript developer, has recently been playing with applications that span both desktop computers and Android based smart-phones. An idea struck me that this dual-platform would be perfect for a environmental controlling system. Imagine, having installed a simple Remote Control app onto your phone, every time you walk into a hotspot certain controls can be sent onto your handset to give you control over certain systems around you.

When I first began programming I was appalled at the simplistic nature of the tools being used to create software; and whilst there have been admiral efforts in the past to make programming a more intuitive affair (think node-based programming) very few of these tools have lived on. In my opinion, this is symptomatic of a bigger problem in the way we build software; namely, the strong tethering between programming language, compiler & delivery platform. Imagine a system where, when you typed (in your preferred language), and behind-the-scenes, your IDE was converting all of your code into an XML based representation of [...]