amadiver
You might be very comfortable sharing the story about the situation, but I hope you can appreciate that not everyone else would be.
Looks very similar to ActionScript 2, with shades of Scala. Really neat looking language.
Anyone know where the `param: Type` (i.e., parameter name colon type) convention came from? I've seen it more frequently lately, and I wonder if it's easier to parse than Java's `Type param` (or my favorite: `param Type`)?
A wiki on cultural differences is a really good idea, though.
I don't get to build as many of them as I once did, but they're incredibly fun little puzzles to solve. Cramming largish photographs, animation, copy (including fonts, which usually result in the bulk of filesize), and animation into such a tiny package is no small feat, and requires a lot of time (the productivity tradeoff Jacques referred to) and tons of little optimization tricks you need to spend a few years collecting and perfecting, like:
* becoming a vector artist. Sometimes its necessary to have a partially transparent image, which means 32 bit PNGs, which are super expensive. Flash allows you to create vector masks (vector illustrations are incredibly size efficient), which means you can use a PNG-8 or JPG and mask out the areas that need to be transparent. Which means getting really good, and fast, at tracing outlines. The next level being
* learning how to do photo-realistic illustrations. In the old days of 12k for a banner, I did a lot of car banners, which meant a lot of car illustrations that needed to look exactly like the photos. Even then, you'd have to reuse your assets a lot, in creative ways, in order to make the filesize. (Like using a tire illustration for the windshield [by scaling and masking]).
* writing really tight code. In the early days, our basic animation engines were a few KB, but you could rewrite your own using only the chunks of code you needed, and save a few K. My newest library is about 800 bytes and is powerful enough to use on most of my banners.
* learning that people really aren't as detail oriented as you might think, and blurs, rotations, tints, and speed are usually all the tools you need to make a convincing animation
You might be overestimating the differences between Flash and JS here -- especially when you add HTML5 into the mix. What's to stop a skilled JS dev from playing <audio> when the user hits a page, burning processors with a few autoplaying <videos>, after forcing the user to sit through an interminable, animated <js/css3/svg> 'loading' screen? At that point, it's up to our own good tastes to decide how to wield that kind of power.
One possibility is where a plurality of constituents agree either on a course of action, or believe an individual is qualified to act in their best interest. Obviously, this system has flaws (what happens when an elected person behaves selfishly?), but I'd argue it's more fair, in general, than a self-selected group executing their own agenda. We can't vote Anon out of power if we happen to stop believing their actions are just.
> Why is mob justice any worse than a justice system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge?
It's not, but are you insinuating that it's okay to subvert an unjust justice system using any means necessary? Or any means that work? Or am I reading into this? I don't think the US justice system is so broken that it needs to be fixed by extralegal means, but maybe I'm naive.
> Would altering or abolishing a system that allows people to be held indefinitely with out charge be a good thing?
Altering that system would be a great thing! Abolishing it, I believe, would not. If you're suggesting anarchy as a viable replacement, I'm honestly curious if you can point to any examples of large-scale anarchy that worked well? Again, I might be reading too much into your question, and you might have meant simply replacing it with another system that is not anarchy.
Thanks for your reply.
almost...
In my experience, there's a sweet spot for HTML/CSS. If I keep things really simple, it makes layouts a breeze. The moment I introduce complexity into the design, I usually wish I had the control of a scripted layout.
_ =
fileMenu: ->
mainWindow.menu "File", (e,f) => this.onFile(e,f)
onFile: (err,file) ->
if err then throw err
file.openMenu (e,m) => this.onOpenMenu(e,m)
onOpenMenu: (err,menu) ->
if err then throw err
menu.item "Open", (e,i) => this.onOpen(e,i)
onOpen: (err,item) ->
if err then throw err
mainWindow.getChild type('Window'), (e,d) => this.onDialog(e,d)
onDialog: (err,dialog) ->
if err then throw err
#...
_.fileMenu()
Interestingly, while the Flash IDE is most definitely closed, the SWF file format and the tools to create SWFs... it's not so cut and dry. Here's the (Flash 10 SWF Spec)[http://www.adobe.com/content/dam/Adobe/en/devnet/swf/pdf/swf...]
There's probably a bunch of stuff left out that'd make implementation difficult, but that hasn't stopped:
(GORDON)[https://github.com/tobeytailor/gordon] -- an open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript . It only supports up to Flash v. 2; almost useless, but interesting.
Here's the (Flex SDK)[http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Flex+SDK] which includes the Flex framework, and a partially open source SWF compiler.
Apparently, Flex compiler isn't totally open source because of patents concerning audio and video codecs (I'm recalling this off the top of my head; please verify).
Here's (Tamarin)[http://www.mozilla.org/projects/tamarin/]. It's a VM for EcmaScript. It's been rolled into SpiderMonkey, the JS engine for FireFox, I think. It includes support for packages, namespaces, classes, and optional strict typing of variables. Really useful stuff for interactive devs that, unfortunately, hasn't been widely adopted.
Adobe contributes to WebKit on behalf of Flash & Air; I don't know what their contributions have been/how useful they are, though.
I'm a professional interactive dev, and I specialize in Flash, so you might conclude that I'd be biased, and I wouldn't blame you at all. However, as a Flash dev, I'm familiar with the non-marketed vectors of the Flash environment. Take that as you will.
We're geeks: let's all invest a little time to investigate the rhetoric. If you really don't like Flash, pick another reason: there are many ;)
sealed trait Option[+A] {
def bind[B](f: A => Option[B]): Option[B]
I don't blame people for statements like "Once such a WYSIWYG app exists, there'd be no excuses left to use Flash online". They're authoritative and are tapped into the zeitgeist. As an Interactive Dev, though, I hope my opinion can count as some kind of counterweight to what I sometimes view as polemic.
I'm really glad to see a possible explanation for why Homeland Security would be cracking down on music blogs. While I don't agree with the DoHSs actions, I now have a foothold in understanding the situation. It may or may not be correct, but as a fairly logical interpretation of the scenario, it'll suffice.
I'm disappointed to see your fairly dramatic response (though I like the elipses and poetic linebreaks :) ) and 'yummyfajitas's pat response earn collectively more upvotes for delivering far less information (no offense).
Python taught me about list comprehensions and bound methods.
I've never played with Python before, and I'm trying and failing to understand what bound methods are. Could anyone explain them?