Tom Byrne

I ended up writing an ANT task which can build an SWC based on a Flash Builder project file. This way I could integrate regular SWC creation into my deployment process, backing up all external code.

As a language, I like CSS, it has a simple elegance that achieves it’s humble goals very nicely. It’s these humble goals that bother me. HTML is an XML based language, and fundamentally, all CSS is doing is targeting nodes within this XML and modifying their attributes. Of course, it’s not possible to, for example, modify the href property in an anchor tag, and this shows that the implementation of CSS is stifled by it’s modest goals. Also, CSS’ ever-growing list of selectors shows a fundamental inflexibility in it’s syntax. Selectors basically target specific nodes within your HTML, this sounds [...]

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 [...]