FlashApe

I was doing a bunch of Flex work for the past few months, and get really comfortable with Flex Builder. There are so many awesome features to aid development it simply kicks ass.

However, my current project is Flash CS3-based, so I went back to TextMate, which I also love. There are many great features in TextMate which eclipse does not do that really make me miss working in it.

My main points of comparison:
TextMate:

• Perceptual Bulk - TextMate feels so lean, where FlexBuilder just feels so heavy. Probably due to eclipse not being a native mac app, but still, I just feel ‘cleaner’ working in TextMate.
• Tab Triggers - I can’t count how much typing I’ve saved using tab triggers in TextMate. Type in a few key strokes and hit tab, and some templated code gets placed…with tabstops mixed in so you can simply tab to the next appropriate place to type. I only pray that someone tells me you can do that in eclipse.
• Column Selection - Another tool of TextMate that i find incredibly timesaving. being able to select a rectangular area of text, and have whatever you type repeated on each of the selected lines, is a blessing. Another thing I wish eclipse would support.

Flex Builder (eclipse):

• Integrated debugger - That pretty much puts the smack down right there.
• Code Sense/Code Completion - Another swift backhand. For being such an awesome text editor, why can’t TextMate handle this better? (yes I know about using the escape key for auto-complete, but that’s pretty weak compared to what you get in eclipse).
• Find in Language Reference - I use this constantly, and as far I know it doesn’t exist in TextMate (for actionscript anyway)

There’s probably a few more but those are what jump out at me. If anyone knows how to get some of the features listed above into the other app, please do tell

Wanna be successful?  Penetrate.  Advertising, marketing, self-promotion, facebook applications, anything really, get your name out there in the public consciousness, eventually people will look to you first (as long as you don’t drop the ball and start to suck).  That’s why I admire most of the moves made by Adobe after the Macromedia acquisition.  Open-sourcing their products means getting their name and software out there, and (hopefully) saturating the market with their products.  On Ted Patrick’s post to whip people into a frenzy (totally successful, by the way) about the new software releases he stated “Remoting and messaging will never be the same!”, and I’d say it looks like that is going to be the case. Maybe I’m being over-optimistic, but I don’t have a hard time picturing amf data transfer replacing vast amounts of xml-based data tranfser after a short while. I know I’d certainly rather use amf any day.

Got tired of dreamhost’s never-ending technical/hardware/email issues and made the jump to a mediatemple dv server. Took me a couple of days to get everything up and running and the dns switched over but I think I’m all good now. If I have time I’ll post some notes on he switch, there were a few sticky points that were a little hard to figure out and find info on.

Someone put together a monster list of sites and services that offer Web API’s…check it out.

I hope anyway….recently I was diagnosed with AD/HD. After talking with doctors and researching it, I am simply amazed at how much of an impact it has had on my life. I always took it as that was “just me”, that’s “just how I am”. Add on to that the affect it had on my wife, who was having a hard time and getting frustrated dealing with “the way that I am” and the impact is that much greater.

How do I feel about the diagnosis? Fantastic. I feel like someone found a missing piece to the puzzle that is me. I’ve only been taking the ritalin for three days so far, and I’m starting off with a pretty low dose, so I can’t really say anything about hte effects yet, we’ll see how that goes. I’ve got my fingers crossed though, and I’m looking forward to days when I don’t have to:

• walk out my front foor, realize i forgot something, go back, get what I forgot, walk out my front foor, realize i forgot something, go back, get what I forgot, walk out my front foor, realize i forgot something, go back, get what I forgot, walk out my front foor, realize i forgot something, go back, get what I forgot,walk out my front foor, realize i forgot something, go back, get what I forgot, walk out my front door, finally get to my car, start driving realize i forgot my cell, go back to my apartment, forget what I went back there for
• Spend 10 minutes looking for that i was JUST holding 5 seconds ago….10 times a day
• Listen to my wife get frustrated because I lost something again, or forget something again
• Make careless errors on work because I simply can’t focus
• Spend more time than necessary at work because I can’t focus/am easily distracted
• Have 4-5 projects at a time that are unfinished for no good reason
• Lose track of the conversation I am having with someone else after 10 seconds.

Anyway, we’ll see how it goes. I’m hoping to post some updates, especially related to how it affects my work.

With all of my projects, i follow the same directory structure, which looks like:

/Client_Name
	/Project_Name
		/_assets
		/classes
		/deploy
		/fla

It’s a simple and effective structure that allows me to easily sync everything in CVS. However, I was also keeping a separate copy of the ‘deploy’ folder within my local webserver for local testing, and trying to manually keep the two in sync.

At first, in order to solve the problem of keeping the two folders in sync i was looking for a program that would just sync the folders whever a file was saved into a folder that was being ‘watched’. Nothing really panned out there, although i did find a few apps that would sync two folders whever i told it to (I wanted somethign more automatic than that).

So yesterday, I was talking to a coworker about it and he told me I was going about it all wrong, and the solution is really simple. All I needed to do was set up symbolic links within the webserver, and point those symbolic links to my deploy folder within the project structure. Symbolic links are just like aliases, but hold a slightly different meaning, the main one being that the webserver will follow those links to their target, but it wouldn’t do that with aliases. He then busted out the terminal and set one up to show me how to do it with a simple ‘ln -s’ command. Now, I’m ok with the terminal, but I’d rather have something that can do it within the GUI, so I did a quicksearch and found SymbolicLinker, which although pretty old still works fine. Now i can right-click on any file or folder to make a symbolic link.

Seriously. I just saw this post about new technologios called Photosynth and Seadragon, if you haven’t seen it check it out it’s pretty amazing (one lets you work with an apparently unlimimited amount of image data without slowing down your pc, the other creates spacial imaging from sets of photos).

Combine that with Surface, and I really get the feeling that something amazing is about to happen.

Via

If you use WP-ContactForm, there’s a good chance that it’s letting a bunch of spam through. Recently I found WP-ContactForm: Akismet Edition, which is based on the original but adds integration with Akismet, which is another wordpress plugin that puts the smackdown on comment spam. After installing the new contact form, my contact form spam submissions have gone from about 30 - 40 a day to 0, so I highly recommend it!

I was flushing out my profile today on LinkedIn, and was curious as to what kinda of results people, especially flash developers, are getting out of it. I signed up a while ago but I rarely check in on it (like every other social netowrking site I have signed up for), but I did notice there are a ton of flash developers on there.

http://www.linkedin.com/in/richrodecker

I love Mixed Martial Arts (UFC, Pride, etc), and was into jiu jitsu myself a while back. Lately I have been talking about wanting to get back into it, so my wife went and got me some training time at Legends as a Valentine’s day gift (strange gift, I know, but pretty cool).

For those who don’t know, Legends is and MMA training center that just opened up here in Los Angeles, and is owned by Randy Couture and Bas Rutten, two of the biggest names in MMA history. And they aren’t absentee owners…in fact, when I went there, the first person I saw was Bas Rutten, who was about to start teaching the 10 a.m. MMA class.

Originally the plan was to train with Eddie Bravo, who is one of the jiu jitsu instructors at the gym and a huge name in his own right, but he was (wayyy) too expensive, so I went with another jiu jitsu guy there who trained under a few big names. He was great and we got a lot of new stuff covered in a short amount of time.

I was defintely hoping to see Randy but I guess he is out preparing for his fight with Tim Sylvia, but overall it was a very cool experience.