FlashApe

NewsTrust : Found this site via boingboing, it’s a non-profit news site that actually focuses on quality content and “news you can trust”. This is a huge breath of fresh air for me, as someone who is completely turned off by the garbage and fluff on sites like digg and reddit, and the completely biased propaganda on ‘media machine’ corporate news sites like cnn and fox.

It’s rating system works different than digg and others. Whereas digg would have one button to approve a story, NewsTrust asks readers to rate stories on a scale of 1-5 in six different categories: Recommendation (Is it a good story?), Information (Is this story informative?), Sources (Is it well sourced?), Trust (Do you trust this publication?), Fairness (Is this story fair?) and Contect (Does it show the “big picture”?). In addition, readers can leave comments and tags for an article.

Here’s some info picked from their site:

NewsTrust is a citizen news service that helps people find good journalism online. This next-generation social network features some of the best news and opinions from hundreds of trusted online sources. NewsTrust members rate news stories based on journalistic quality, not just popularity.

It’s a great way to get “news you can trust” all in one place. NewsTrust offers a fine selection of quality journalism on their free web site, which is now open to the public: http://beta.newstrust.net/

NewsTrust encourages both media literacy and civic engagement. NewsTrust review tools guide members through careful news evaluations, based on key journalistic principles such as fairness, balance, evidence, context and importance. Independent research studies show that citizen reviewers using these review tools can evaluate news quality reliably - and as effectively as experienced journalists.

NewsTrust publishes a quality ratings database for hundreds of mainstream and alternative news sources, to help the public identify trustworthy publications. This valuable online knowledge base about the news media was created to help citizens make more informed decisions about our democracy.

NewsTrust is non-profit, non-partisan and member-driven. NewsTrust’s Executive Director, Fabrice Florin, is a former journalist and a digital media pioneer at Apple and Macromedia. The NewsTrust team includes award-winning journalist and media executive Rory O’Connor and former Lucasfilm project manager David Fox, who bring extensive track records in content and technology development. NewsTrust advisors include Dan Gillmor, Howard Rheingold and other digital media innovators from organizations like Google, Poynter Institute and the University of California.

or, “This over-abstraction has got to stop”.

Over the past few years of being a flash developer, I’ve ridden most of the major waves as far as flash/actionscript goes. Went from tweening on the timeline, to tweening using code, to gathering up all (or as much as I could) of my code on one frame, to using classes, to using OOP, to using design patterns, to using frameworks.

On the business side, I’ve gone from a place of being an employee and collecting a paycheck, to freelancing and trying to parlay that freelance career into a business. One of the things I have become acutely aware of in that time is the time-to-money ratio for projects. Now, that doesn’t just mean that my time equals money, but also that means how I could make the most money in the least amount of time.

Design patterns, and to some extent, frameworks, well, they are the double edged sword of the programmers world. The can provide an elegant solution to a problem, but there’s also a clear cost to implementing them. They add a layer of abstraction to your code, which means more time spent adding it in there, and more time spent trying to follow the abstraction when reading the code.

Is all that extra abstraction worth the time spent on it? That’s up to you decide. There have been times when implementing a particular design pattern has saved the day. However, I have found in many of the flash sites I have worked on, it’s not. Does the client care that you used ‘awesome’ OOP skills? No. Does he care that you delivered the project on time? Yes.

Again, I’m speaking of flash websites here, not flash applications. Yes, I know that most flash websites nowadays can almost be viewed as mini-applications, but I have the point of view that pretty much all flash sites are one-offs. When application goes from v1 to v2, you’re pretty much extending the core app. When a flash website goes from v1 to v2, it’s usually a complete rewrite.

With that being said, it’s in my best interest to complete the project as fast as possible, get paid, move onto the next one. Jesse Warden Has a great post here, in which he makes a similar to the point I’m trying to make. In that post, he refers to a set of priorities in his projects, listed in order of importance :

• Deadline
• Creative
• Bandwidth
• Maintainability

I totally agree with that.  It’s easy for programmers to get too carried away tweaking and re-tweaking, abstracting until you can hardly follow what’s going on anymore, much in the same way that designers can easily lose themselves shifting thing around a few pixels in a psd.  The difference is, tweaks to a psd can take lace relatively painlessly.  Tweaks to an over-abstacted web site might require taking time to figure out and trace out the logic, and it may involve possible editing multiple classes, which may in turn effect other classes.
To wrap it up, I guess I’m just trying to say is, don’t make it harder than it needs to be.  Keep things in perspective, because like I already mentioned, there’s no bonus points for style to client that has no idea what a class actually is.  And _root != evil, i don’t care what anyone says.

Credit card no credit for those who want to start a business.

Time magazine announces ‘You’ are the collective Person of the Year. Sure, the individual is what drives it, but the whole ’social networking’, ‘web 2.0 thing’ sure comes of age, even though people still have a hard time defining what it actually is, and I don’t connect with most of the hot web 2.0 sites out there.

Amfphp 1.0 came out just about one year ago, after languishing around stuck at .9 for what seemed like an eternity. I’m sure he’s got some crew helping him out, but the big props gotta go to Patrick Mineault for resurrecting the project, kicking it’s ass, and making it rock. Thanks man, all that hard work doesnt go unappreciated.

By now, most people know what the Delegate class is about. A lot of people also know it’s limitations, such as not being able to pass extra parameters to the method being delegated too. Joey Lott’s Proxy class too care of that issue. While adding stuff to actionscriptclasses.com, I came across this “refined” Delegate class by Steve Webster, which not only allows for the passing of additional parameters, but also adds a reference to the anonymous function that is created, allowing for easy removal of the event listener.

Got a little request for everyone out there…anyone have some good resources for someone who would essentially be a beginner for project management in the web/flash development field? Not so much looking for project management software, more like where they would learn the ins and outs of a project workflows: different phases of the project, SOWs, dealing with specs for a project, things like that.

Website Development and Search Engine Marketing