NYCPHP Meetup

[Paul A Houle]

Gary Mort wrote:
> I've never been able to justify buying a big flash developer package 
> just to play around with flash....
>
    To stick up for Adobe (which I rarely do),  I will say that the 
flash authoring tool from Adobe is pretty awesome. 

    The quality of the authoring tool,  I believe,  is one of the big 
reasons why Flash has been successful.  Somebody with a visual 
arts/graphic design background can pick up the tools,  do the 
tutorials,  and be making amazing animations in hours.

    From the viewpoint of a developer,  it's not quite so amazing,  but 
personally,  if you're interested in doing Flash and if you think your 
time is worth more than $0 an hour,  the Flash authoring tool is a 
worthwhile investment.

    On the flipside,  I've been doing Silverlight for the last two years 
and I think it's a much better environment,  for developers,  than Flash 
is,  constrained by the problem that not so many people have it 
installed.  The app contains a mapping system which is vastly more 
powerful than anything I've seen in a web-based application,  be it 
Google Maps or something flash-based.  Although it's not quite as 
featureful,  it draws complex maps as quickly as ARC/GIS does and makes 
our competitor's Flash-based and Javascript-based apps look entirely 
uncompetitive.

    Other than that,  I also tend to be disappointed w/ the performance 
of AIR apps.  One of my major complaints about the desktop twitter 
clients that are floating around is that most of them are AIR based,  
leak memory,  and cause all sorts of problems.  Hypothetically there's 
the advantage that AIR apps run on Macs,  but practically,  AIR apps 
spin the CPU on my mac at 100% (even when they are doing nothing) and 
make it sound like a helicopter taking off.