oddhammer

It was a day I hoped would never happen, but I sat down this weekend and updated my little US national debt clock to display over $10,000,000,000,000. I say it's a sad day because despite what some people say (that the further in debt our country is the more prosperous we are) I find it hard to believe we're better off because of the debt we've just taken on. The whole concept of "money as debt" just seems corrupt. Then again, I'm not an expert on economics. Maybe having our national debt increasing at the rate of $36 per millisecond is a good thing.

The debt clock started when a friend e-mailed me a years ago and asked how to do a counter like a clock that starts at a specific point. He needed it in Flash so I whipped one together and sent it to him and then realized I could maybe do something worthwhile by putting it out there for people to use. I did.. and it hit myspace and facebook.. and I'm currently seeing about 65,000 views of it each month. I encouraged people to download it and install it on their own servers (it's not sucking too much bandwidth, but they shouldn't have to wait on my server for their page to finish loading..) so I'm not sure how many views it's getting that way.. I know it's being used on quite a few political web sites (both Republicans and Democrats running for Congress for example), in articles, and on some personal web sites.

I don't fuss with the accuracy of it since I figure if they can pull a number like $700,000,000,000 out of thin air just because it's "a really large number" then there's no point in trying to be too accurate on anything based on numbers provided by the same folks. I like to think that over the last few years I've helped a tiny bit to raise awareness of our out of control spending.. I can hope it's not too late to sort things out and maybe someday I'll be able to reverse the clock.

Some people don't like submitting bug reports about specific issues, but would rather just complain about general problems that bug the crap out of them. For those people there is the Dear Adobe site.

I don't particularly like the idea of smearing a company for no good reason, but if the people who are using the site have submitted bug tickets and feel like Adobe is ignoring them then I guess they have every right to complain.. or just use another product. That's part of how free market economics is supposed to work? If you find a better product then use it. And if the masses yell their complaints loud enough and the company is nimble enough then it'll fix the issues and keep the business.

Here's one I found: "please allow Flash's action window to stay visible when another app is in front, sometimes you need to compare code to something else." .. been an irritation for me for years and has been reported to Macromedia and Adobe many times. It's one of those "minor" issues that becomes major if you have to use the application a lot. I'm pretty sure I saw on one of the demos or heard through the grapevine that this has been changed in CS4.. so when you have the Actions panel open and switch over to another app the Actions panel remains visible. So maybe they did react and fix that. I'll keep my fingers crossed for code folding.

Check out The Online Community Grid..  a grid computing system using Flash Player instances as people browse around the web.  I’ve heard rumblings of other projects that ran along these lines, but can’t recall one that was up and running.

The code is up on the Google code thing so you can dig around in it and see what it’s doing. 

Some interesting stuff there..  it’s something to keep in mind for later projects and it’s fun to see people continuing to push the boundaries of what Flash is supposed to be.

Over the years I’ve seen a lot of ways to produce SWFs.  Some options were commercial (Generator, Kinetic Fusion, Turbine, Flex, etc..) and some not (Ming, Jzox, etc).  I even did a little hack where I used the command line to fire up the Flash IDE and pop out a customized SWF at will.  I was just experimenting and didn’t use that in a production environment of course and it was all legal like since I was using my one copy of Flash on my own system, etc..  but it was sort of fun in a Frankenstein way to hit the web server on my pc and watch the Flash IDE go through crazy gyrations and spit out a SWF.  It was a poor mans Generator (and not legal so don’t get any ideas.. especially since there are better legal options out now).

Now there’s something around the bend that just brought back those memories and made that hacker inside me cackle a bit in remembrance of those days long ago. 

I was reading some stuff and found my way to posts from about a month ago by Colin Moock and John Nack and Chad Udell. 

You can already create SWFs on a server with Flex, but for most animation and graphic oriented things you really have to do it in the Flash IDE.  If Flash CS4 is indeed going to use XFL as the “source” then it opens the possibility for those cool things the others mentioned (go read their posts if you haven’t already) and changes the Flash production model.  Take a look at what Adobe did with Photoshop Express and Buzzword and..  well.. you run with it.  This could open up some interesting new avenues for Flash production.