Geeks of Bohemia

I’m the dwarf. And I’m irate. This little rant about my upgrade to Creative Suite 4 is long overdue.

Really, I’ve been finding new ways to vomit in my own mouth every time I dare to launch Flash CS4, but this little bastard takes the cake:

This is what happens when you click the ‘New File’ button in the Project panel in the default ‘Designer’ workspace in Flash CS4.

Oh your god. How can things like this even possibly pass any sort of QA?

And you know what? The fact that it’s a dumb mistake doesn’t insult me the most, it’s because I recognise those fucking button Controls!

You know what those are? Those are the button controls that you get when you build a Flex or AIR app and don’t bother to customise your components.

And you know what that means? That means that all the bloody interface ‘weirdness’, like these suspect features…

• odd menu bar;
• non mac-like shortcuts where they used to be fairly good;
• stupid one-window MDI like NO Adobe Mac app before it; and even
• a default ‘Essentials’ workspace that breaks even Adobe’s OWN convention of ‘tools on the left, inspectors on the right’.

…is because some smart bastard thought it was time to vindicate all their evangelism and rebuild the front end of Flash in AIR. Think of all the benefits! Write once, release to multiple platforms! Eat our own dogfood!

Yeah, great. Except that it’s a piece of SHIT now. Flash still *does* more or less the same thing as it used to, and some of the new features are nice enough to abet the downgrade (the IK/Skeletal system is very neat), everything is just that little bit more painful to accomplish.

The one-window MDI thing REALLY pisses me off. Of course, Windows users have always had this so it’s not so glaring on that platform, but the point stands. There’s no reason why they’d need to do such a thing unless the interface was rebuilt in AIR, and Flash is the only CS4 app that sports it. AIR doesn’t support multiple document windows like native Cocoa/Carbon applications can.

So, am I a conspiracy theorist, or am I on to something here?
Look, AIR isn’t bad. It’s got it’s place. There are plenty of little applets that don’t suffer at all from the AIR treatment. I even hear TweetDeck is great, even (I wouldn’t know, I adore Twitteriffic and regard it’s minimal functionality its best feature).

But this Flash CS4 debacle is only proving that AIR is not ready for a prime-time application like a Creative Suite app, and it only serves to underscore the opposite idea: that there is NO magic bullet for cross platform development, certainly not AIR, there is NO excuse for riding like a bulldozer over operating system conventions, and Adobe’s solution of building yet another set of proprietary conventions sure as hell doesn’t work.

All right, I’m done. Feel free to disagree with me, tha’ss cool. I still love Flash (and I’m even building a D&D app in AIR), which is why I think it deserves a bit of tough love.

The thing about Shoujo manga is that it’s all about efficiency. Shoujo is manga for high-school age boys, and the gist of it is that boys at that age are starting to really like girls, but they also really really like giant robots and things that fire lasers out of things. So, all the inventors of Shoujo manga did was combine the two things into the same perky female character…and now I’ve spoiled the plot of the second series of Tenchi Muyo.

Last year, during a mammoth three-month procrastination streak from re-drafting my novel, I kicked off a microfiction project called Airless Diaries, equal parts keeping my hand in and butting my head against the caged-rat syndrome that comes with any full-time job. I had a moderate amount of success: a few regular readers, one or two very good contributions from other writers, and I wrote a lot of rough-edged stories over the stretch that it ran for. You can read the archives over at my old Blogger site.

The brief was simple. To participate, you wrote a microfiction - story, prose, stream of consciousness - in no more than 30 minutes. When the timer hit bottom, you submitted whatever you’d written so far, typos, half-baked conversations, and all. You were supposed to imagine that you had thirty minutes of oxygen (in your house, radiation suit, abandoned space station) with no chance to survive. And thus to write the literary equivalent of a last meal.

Then I up and went back to uni, and the project inevitably died. Now that my first year of study is nearly over, however, I fully intend to resuscitate Airless Diaries, but this time do it right - build a proper application around the concept rather than simply running it on a blog with an email submissions system.

(Continued)

Like the new digs? I wish I could say I was responsible for this bit of bohemi-grunge candy, but it comes to you via a freebie from the excellent design blog, Smashing Magazine. As luck would have it, this theme captures the essence of what I want this blog to stand for: the sometimes uneasy intersection between art and technology , and the prose that ties them together.

I’ve been missing the mark, lately, so consider the facelift a resolution to find my focus and stick to it. Ever since
Airless Diaries went on hiatus (about the same time I started my IT degree: big coincidence), I’ve been fucking around with this place without really doing much with it; like a housesitter at an abandoned lot. No longer!

Like many nerds I firmly believe that code is art. On the other hand, I also think that art is art, too. So every post you see from here on out has to meet one or the other of the aforementioned. Or it’ll be something cool I’ve done. Tha’ss okay, right?

Recently I read an article where someone called Twitter the ‘telegraph service of the internet’. That seemed a pretty good description to me, and gave me an idea for a little Twitter application, which I hope to knock up over the weekend.

The idea is very simple: an @replies page that is a roll of telegraph sheets. You can flip through your telegraphs one by one, and reply to any given telegraph (I doubt I’ll make you use the handle and do it via Morse Code…although I admit the idea is tempting) via the same.

I found this nice CC-licensed image of a Costa-Rican telegraph sheet via Flickr to use as the base for the telegraphs. Now all I need is a reasonably high-resolution image of a telegraph handle. Anybody got one on hand?

Ideas for later versions:
- Read telegraphs out via a synthesised grainy-radio voice, including full-stops read out as ’stop’.
- Translate any @reply to or from Morse Code.
- Give up on this fairly limited idea. It’s just for fun, you know?