I recently joined the “Twitter for designers,” Dribbble.com. If you haven’t seen Dribbble yet, go check it out. It’s a great resource for finding design ideas by keyword search. I am very excited because up until recently, getting onto the site required an invite which seemed impossible to get. I love the site because it inspires me to create new designs and illustrations and reminds me that I’m capable of doing that stuff. That’s right, I can draw AND code!

Check out my profile and follow me!

First, if you don’t know what I’m talking about, check out the news. I think the best explanation comes from Mike Chambers’ Blog and a corresponding post on the Flex Team’s Blog.

Don't panic! Take a deep breath and look at this cute bunny

Not much has changed with the Flash Platform

If you read closely, not that much has really changed. The problem is perception. Let’s review what is going away and why it’s not as crazy as it might sound.

Mobile Flash Player

Adobe is discontinuing work on the mobile Flash Player. I don’t know the numbers of people building Flash content for Android but I suspect it’s not incredibly high. I would also wager that even Air on Android/iOS is still far from critical mass, but Adobe say they will continue to support this. The desktop Flash Player will stay the same and for the foreseeable future continue to surpass HTML5 in features and cross-platform functionality.

Another way of saying this is that the Flash Platform remains the best choice for the tasks that it was already the best choice for. Mobile was never one of these and some applications, like video players, may have lost that title to HTML5. But in cross-platform, rich-media, deeply interactive experiences on the web, Flash is still ahead of the competition.

Flex is still here

Adobe is discontinuing its support for the Flex SDK. However, it will stay around as an open source project (it was already open source.) It may never get better than it is already, which so far has been good enough to become the platform of choice for many Flex developers.

Flex cannot get any worse than the next version 4.6, which you were probably looking forward to until today. And you know what, that’s okay. We don’t need to be so obsessed with the next thing that we change careers because the next next thing has an uncertain future. I happen to know of some projects that are still using Flex 3 and will probably never upgrade. Why? The user doesn’t know the difference between mx and spark skins.

It may also get better after being untethered from Adobe and in hands of the Flex Community. In other words, we’re in charge now. The Spoon community, who is inheriting the Flex project, already have plans to make a version 5.x.

Fear itself

The real issue now is the way the public will preceive this news. This announcement has sapped the confidence of a lot of people, customers and developers alike. In my opinion, it’s not the time for us to decry Adobe as evil jerks. It is a time for us as experts to try to help our clients, companies and the public to make sense of the news. It’s time to remember that Flash is just a tool in the arsenal of an interactive developer. In fact, Flash’s popularity, due to largely political reasons, has already been on the decline for a while now. But, it will certainly be dead if the Flash users themselves don’t believe in it.

The next time a client wants an awesome, interactive video, 3D puzzle game, website thing I will still recommend Flash. I don’t want to have him tell me “it has to be HTML5″ because he read online that “Flash is dead.” In fact, I think it’s our job to talk about its strengths and its weaknesses in a totally objective way. We should all dwell in the middle ground between Adobe zealotry and jumping on the next bandwagon.

Your next job

I feel hopeful that the shit will not hit the fan, at least not immediately. That being said, I am always an advocate of looking at other technologies and keeping those abstract coding skills honed. Good developers are in a prime position to port our skills to whatever platform comes next, and those skills are almost always in demand. Even HTML5 (JavaScript) apps share a very similar language with AS3 (really AS1). I was able to pick up JQuery and build my first HTML5 project in a matter of a day or two.

As Mike Chamber’s writes:
“I think it is a HUGE opportunity for the Flash community. As browser support for richer content and motion graphics improves, so will demand for designers and developers who have experience working with motion graphics on the web. The Flash community has been doing this type of work on the web for over a decade and is uniquely qualified to fill demand for similar work in the browser. I don’t think it is a coincidence that some of the most cutting edge motion graphics work being done in HTML5 today is being done by developers and agencies with extensive experience in Flash (such as Grant Skinner, Branden Hall, Big Spaceship, etc…).”

Joel Hooks adds some great notes on this in his blog post. I’d like to also add HAXE, Java, C# and Dart to the list of languages that you should be able to pick up with little effort.

The Community

In LA, our local Flex group shut down abruptly after this news was released. I personally feel this was very hasty indeed and wrote a letter about it upon which this blog post was based. I see that a lot of people are really pissed and their identities are in question. If you’re in this position, I would suggest instead of jumping ship, why not continue to talk about how this will impact our jobs and what skills we can port to other platforms. If there really are people out there who are going to lose their jobs over this, and I think it’s too soon to say, we should still be able to support each other as a community.

Even with all this positivity, I still have to agree with @neurofuzzy “Anyone who has ‘Flash’ in your job title, scratch it out and write ‘Interactive.’” It’s something we should have all done a long time ago because I believe we are more than just Flash dudes.

I’d love to hear your thoughts on all of this. Please leave comments. It will be very interesting to look back on this post in 6 months and see whether I was right to keep a cool head or being terribly naïve.

Some of these ideas are great, many are not. But regardless of their quality, I want to try to reset the expectations of the idea generators. I hope this post sheds some light on the legal, social and practical implications of these ideas and provides some ground rules that will help bring these ideas into fruition.

(Read the full article after the jump)

First of all

If your idea includes the words “like [a social network] but better” stop right there. I had an idea for a car that’s like a Ferrari but it’s twice as fast gets 1,000 miles per gallon! Fuck you.

The value of your idea

Great achievements come from great ideas. Most of the time, however, people are all too willing to start planning their retirement before the thought of a business plan ever crosses their minds. Making an app can cost a lot of time and money and there’s lots of competition. Most don’t sell well after their first month. While it’s true that you can make a million, it doesn’t happen every day.

In reality, your idea is probably worth a great deal less than $1,000,000. In fact, it’s probably worth very close to $0. Why? For one thing, can you even reasonably define what an idea is? For example, If you have a $1M idea but I have an idea that makes your better, how much is mine worth? What if 5 other people had that idea independently? (Even Calculus was discovered by at least two mathematicians working separately and they drew from centuries of previous concepts.) So the answer is simply this: ideas (even good ones) are worth nothing until they’re turned into something.

The good news, how ideas are implemented is at least as important as the intial idea. Google didn’t invent the search engine, they just made it better. That means that you don’t even need a new idea to make a million (or 189 billion)! There’s always room for improvement. The App Store is full of garbage apps that could be made better.

Release early, Release often

If you’ve had an idea, great! Me too. Keep having them. Have as many as you can. Write them all down. Take the best ones and make them!

Any photographer will tell you that for every 100 photos you take you’ll be lucky if you get one good one. Ideas are the same way. I have a long list of ideas for apps, games, products, etc. that I maintain and regularly review. A couple are (I think) really good. Some are good but would require a huge amount of work to execute. Most of them, over time, seem so stupid as to make me wonder what the hell I was thinking. The important thing is that I have lots and lots of them and I recognize that they all need work.

To continue with the analogy of photographs, if you leave them as negatives or let them just sit on your camera card, you might as well not have bothered. Ideas are the same way. They need to be developed into something tangible to be worth anything.

Who owns your idea?

If you think your idea is something you own that people want to take, you’ve got it backwards. You don’t own the idea and people are free to take it but they don’t want to.

Now I’m not a lawyer (and this is not intended as legal advice) but if I’m not mistaken, unless you have made an agreement to the contrary, an idea alone cannot be copyrighted or trademarked. These protections are reserved for “things” that exist in the world. Even a unique concept carefully described in writing is little evidence when faced with a solid, working app. Think about it. If it were not true wouldn’t that mean science fiction writers could sue technology companies for stealing their ideas for robots, spaceships, etc.

Does that mean you shouldn’t tell anyone? Not necessarily. In reality, most people are not interested in stealing your idea and if they are, they still have to make something out of it. I can’t think of anyone who’s got the talent and capital and drive to build something great who is just waiting around for someone to slip up and hand him a genius idea. So you’re probably safe to talk about it. In fact, you’ll probably find it helpful to get other’s input.

If the idea of sharing still makes you nervous you can always use a non-disclosure agreement. You can find many examples online.

The right way to do it

Despite everything I’ve said, I don’t want people to stop contacting me with their ideas. I just want to set the level of expectation back to a reasonable level. Here’s a checklist for you potential idea-havers:

• Lower your expectations. This is the crux of the whole article. Put the concept of the million dollar idea out of your head and think about how to build a million dollar company.
• Develop your idea. Take your idea and make it better. Find out who your competitors are. Spend some time researching, designing, polishing. In other words, turn your idea into a plan that you can use to build.
• Make yourself useful. If you think you deserve 50%, you better be ready to do 50% of the work. That means writing business plans, fundraising, designing the interface, hiring a team, or doing whatever it is you can to make it happen.
• Respect other people’s professions.Building an app or website is hard. It can take months or years of man-hours. You wouldn’t expect a carpenter friend to say yes to building a new restaurant in exchange for 50% of the sales. But he might if you had blueprints, a star chef, and $500,000! See the difference?
• Don’t stop sharing your idea Ask for feedback. Try not to take it personally if you don’t like what you hear.

The last thing I have to say is a note to myself: Take your own advice. Stop talking about it and go make some $1,000,000 apps and things!

P.S.

During the writing of this article, I was trying to do some research into the copyrights of ideas themselves and found a couple of great articles on the same topic by Pek Pongpet so apparently I’m not alone.

The myth of people stealing your ideas

I’ve got this great idea if you only build it

I’m going to keep one as a trophy but if you can read chinese and you’d like a copy, let me know and I’ll send you a present*!

*(If you’re outside the US, i’ll ask you to pay for shipping)

By the way, even though I attend conferences for programmers, I believe these guidelines are good for any conference attendee.

1. Talk to people

   When you break it down, the whole reason to go to conferences is to talk to people. The sessions are good too but I tend to find satisfaction from them only about 50% of the time. People are why I’m there. Don’t be surprised if people aren’t rushing up to talk to you, especially if you’re attending a conference with lots of programmers. Make an effort to approach people and start the dialogue. It doesn’t have to be fancy. You can literally walk up to a stranger and say “Hi. My name is Mims. How’s it going?” and you’re doing it.

2. Know your story

   You’re going to get a lot of chances to tell people about yourself, your company, your projects, and your brand so make sure you know what you’re going to say when someone asks you. There’s a good chance that you’ll be speaking to your industry heroes which can feel very intimidating. Know your own story and be able to communicate it concisely and confidently even if in you’re head you’re thinking “I’m not worthy.” Keep it short and positive.

3. Be interesting

   In other words, have good conversation skills. Of course, this is easier said than done for most people. But even YOU can be interesting with a couple of little tricks. Aside from telling your story, ask them about their story. It’s mysterious but true, asking people about themselves makes you seem more interesting! Furthermore, someone wiser than me once said that if you want to find success, ask your clients what’s keeping them up at night then tailor your service to help them solve the problem. Asking about what’s been inspiring them at the conference is good too because it’s usually something they’re excited to discuss and there’s a slim chance they’ll accidentally tell you their million dollar idea.

   Also, don’t talk forever, just say “Hey, great meeting you. I’ll check out your stuff.” and you’re done. You don’t have to wait for an awkward silence, you can end it on a high note.

4. Bring lots of business cards

   Your card reminds the people you talk to of the conversation you had with them and tells them how to find out more about you. That’s really it. You can make really flashy, expensive cards but printing them on your inkjet works just as well in my opinion. What doesn’t work is when you don’t have one. They’ll go faster than you think so bring a bunch.

   Also, when you trade cards, you can write a note on the back of your card about the project you discussed and do the same for yourself when you receive a card from them.

5. Not a vacation

   It can be tempting to get drunk every night, or blow off sessions, or even to see some sights while you’re away at a conference. I’m not saying you shouldn’t have fun and I’m definitely not saying you shouldn’t have drinks with your industry colleagues. Just remember that you (or your company) are paying a lot for you to be there and every minute is an opportunity to learn something or make a connection with a new client, employee or friend.

   

6. Do some research about the speakers / topics / sponsors

   Obviously, it’s a good idea to review the schedule to see which sessions you may want to attend. It can also be good to do a quick background check on the companies that will be speaking. A quick visit to their website will do usually and you may discover that they did some work you really admire. Chances are, they did or they wouldn’t be speaking. If the schedule is too overwhelming, you can always bring the program home and research retroactively.

7. If a talk is bad, it’s okay to leave

   Unless it would be an obvious or odious disturbance to the session, there’s no rule that says you have to sit through a boring or irrelevant session. Duck out respectfully and go into another session or just mingle in the hallway.

   

8. Attend some sessions that aren’t targeted at you

   I’ve found that some of the most interesting talks at conferences are ones aimed at other jobs. It’s eye-opening to see what business-people, project managers, and programmers from other languages are talking about.

9. Use Twitter

   Like it or not, at a conference, Twitter is the little bird that tells you what’s happening all around you – what talks are worth attending, what news is being announced, where the party is at, and who you need to talk to. Using and watching hashtags suddenly makes your tweets visible to people who otherwise wouldn’t see you and vice versa. I meet lots of strangers through twitter at conferences. For example, this year I had lunch with the cool dudes at Tribal Games who I met simply because they tweeted “going to lunch, who wants to go?” An icon that shows your face helps too – I recognize a lot of people from their icons! Finally, if you don’t have separate accounts, try not to twitter about your personal life at the conference.

10. Don’t waste the momentum

    You’re going to meet people, see new things, and be inspired on multiple fronts. When you get home, do something with all of that good energy immediately. If you just go back to your routine of clients, meetings and daily bullshit, it’s going to go away.

Mims

Prepare to be devastated, ladies and gay gentlemen, for I am getting married next Saturday the 19th! As the day has been drawing closer, I’ve been more and more consumed by wedding planning as well as general stress and excitement which is my main excuse for dropping of the face of the blog.

After the wedding, I’ll we’ll be making my our way through Europe, driving from Barcelona to Amsterdam via Provence, the Black Forest, and a few Belgian breweries. I know many of you hail from Europe so give a shout out if you know some great, strange places to visit along the way!

In between tasting cake and buying championship quantities of wine for the wedding, I’ve managed to keep busy with some really great gigs. I recently built the media-rich Toyota Tundra Experience site in collaboration with Bad Assembly and Saatchi & Saatchi LA which launched this summer. I contributed Gumbo skillz to the insanely extravagant Cannes Multi-Touch Wall with Schematic. I’m also very excited for a project I recently finished in collaboration with the very talented and funny Duncan Brothers and Atom (It’s not launched yet but I’ll announce it when it is).

Sadly, I’ll be missing Adobe MAX and the infamous Flashapaloozastock even though they’re in my own back yard! But after returning in mid-October, I’m looking forward to getting back out there and working my face off! That includes dabbling in some new technology like XNA or iPhone, blogging about some of the stuff I’ve learned on my last few gigs and hopefully, getting my shit together and finally speaking at some conferences. I’m also working on a completely revised version 2.0 of KitchenSync, my incredibly underused tweening and sequencing library.

I hope you’ve all had a great summer!

Roger

Gentlemen, WE CAN REBUILD IT. We have the technology. We have the capability to make the world’s finest programming book. The ActionScript 3.0 Bible Second Edition will be that book. We can make it better than it was before. Better. Stronger. Faster.

That’s right, I’m hard at work tearing the AS3B to pieces and building the second edition from the ground up, and I can’t wait to share it with you. I’ll post more about it when it’s ready to go to press. You won’t believe all the awesome new features in this book!

While writing, I’ve been traveling the world with my trusty laptop. This summer I’ve trekked out from my home in Brooklyn to Peru, Los Angeles, Santa Barbara, San Francisco, Montauk, Pittsburgh, Orlando, DC, Los Angeles again, Seattle, Portland, and Puerto Rico. Don’t worry, I’m taking lots of photos. I love traveling!

I’ve been working on some really cool projects, too! I made a website for the most wacky, creative filmmaker of our time. I helped to design (and hopefully I will soon program) an iPhone app for a gorgeously illustrated series of books for teens. Sorry I can’t be more specific!

When I’m not doing all this I’m rollerskating, going on long long bicycle rides, watching lots of movies, exploring all the amazing restaurants in NYC, and having adventures. I’m taking an intensive culinary class at the French Culinary Institute this Fall. I also got my motorcycle license and I can’t wait to use it more! Sadly, I’ve completely fallen off learning piano, but I really hope to start again soon!

What have you been up to, readers? Did you have a great summer?

Caleb

Caleb has left New York City. He is now studying hard at Cornell University in Ithica, NY. Aside from the mathy homework, he is kept up at night trying to determine what has gone wrong with his ray tracer. However, there may not be any better reason for a nerd to lose sleep!

Last night, I participated in the Iron Flash competition at the LA Flash Users Group in Venice Beach. As in Iron Chef (my favourite television show), the participants are all skilled Flash users pitted against one another with the goal of creating something interesting within a strict time limit and featuring a common “ingredient”. In this case, the ingredient was a set of pictures of ‘pucks’, specifically, R. Blank’s dog Puck, Puck the faun, Puck from the Real World, and a hockey Puck. We had 3 hours to make something out of any or all of the pictures. My fellow competitors were Jon Ruppel of Hooky Interactive and Ben McMaster (also at Hooky) who both made some awesome stuff in such a short time. UPDATE: All of the entries have been posted on the LAFlash site.

It was a great experience, and not just because OMG I WON!!!

My entry was a video game featuring Puck the dog. I was considering other physics based games involving the hockey puck and the dog somehow. Then I thought of using the dog instead of the hockey puck and somehow that reminded me of the sport beloved in Canada, Curling! The scoring system is a little wonky but if I may say so, it’s not bad for 3 hours work. Here are screenshots (click to link to the game) along with the source code:

Download the source code

• Banner ads
• ActionScript 2.0
• Last minute crazy hectic projects
• Working with recruiters (Actually, this one was from a couple of years ago)

Some people say I’m crazy or that this sort of work is unavoidable or that it may be shitty but is highly lucrative. However, I always try to avoid projects where I cannot reasonably predict success. Banner ads, AS2 projects, and last minute work all have in common that they seem more subject to chaos than the usual job. Banner ads are difficult to plan because they require loads of tweaks, tedious restraints such as file size restrictions, and duplication of effort for multiple sizes or multiple ad standards across target sites. Or at least they have in my experience so far. ActionScript 2.0, aside from being nearly obsolete, tends to encourage poor programming practices by being a hybrid of non-OOP and OOP paradigms. Last minute fixes and jobs that need to be done ASAFP are rife with issues: the time a developer needs to familiarize himself with unfamiliar code is usually not considered, formal architecture and design is omitted leading to freestyle coding, and because the deadline is so short, if even a tiny issue arrises the project is fucked. Of course, any project can get out of control, but with a little forewarning and careful choices, chaos can be avoided. These types of projects tend to practically guarantee that there will be issues and that there won’t be a smart way to negotiate them.

As for recruiters (or staffing agents, or talent scouts, or whatever else they call themselves), in hard times they might seem like a necessary evil. Still, I feel that I can almost always find a much higher quality match with an employer or employee by direct referrals from other colleagues and friends in the industry – even if it’s through linkedin. Besides, I’ve had enough shady recruiters call me with “incredible offers” on nights and weekends to make me want to disconnect my phone.

So no offense to anyone else who is stuck making banners for their job. I know that all of these things are a neccessary part of our industry. However, I personally don’t want to be involved anymore. I seriously am going to add a “no-banner” clause to my next contract. Instead, I hope to focus on some of the following things that make me happy…

• Game and application development
• Working with people whom I respect and enjoy
• Writing books and blogging

Wish me luck!

Wrong.

I’m just as lazy as the next guy when it comes to updating my portfolio page. In fact, I have for the past many years neglected to keep my portfolio page up-to-date as I imagine some of you probably have.

Since about 2003, it’s looked like this mucous-coloured collection of bad links:

As of this week, it looks slightly better!!!

But more important than looking better, the work on this page is up to date!!! I used object oriented PHP and mySQL for the backend and it actually stores an archive of every project I’ve ever worked on. The images are pulled in from Flickr using  phpFlickr. It also generates XML data from the database so I could move this to Flash later (5 years from now).

Even though I’ve designed and re-designed my site over the past few years and had very lofty ambitions, I actually managed to finish the new portfolio page and the homepage in less than a weekend. I know it’s not gonna win any FWA‘s, but I’m proud of myself and I hope it is an inspiration for you to stop thinking about updating your site and start updating your site.

From the WSJ (tipped off to me by twitter)

If anyone at Adobe, specifically on the Flash side of things wants to give us an update, that would be great.

[Update: an upbeat explanation by Mike Chambers]

Here are the slides from my presentation

You’re having an awesome birthday bash and you send out an email to all your closest friends… that is, all your closest friends except ‘Ed’. Now you’re faced with the embarrassing situation of having to invite your friend Ed post-invitum. But don’t fret, here’s a simple solution that will save you loads of embarrassment!

Go from to

Step 1. Find the original email

Did you send a copy to yourself? Good! If not, check your sent folder. Not there? Ask your mom to forward the invite back to you.

Step 2. Forward to yourself and BCC your friend.

Click on the forward button. This time send it to yourself! In the BCC field put the name of the person (or people) you forgot. BCC stands for “blind carbon copy” and the names on this list won’t be listed so they’ll ony see your name listed.

Step 3. Delete “fwd:” from the subject line.

That’s a dead giveaway that you’re a loser and a fuck-up who doesn’t care about his friends.

Step 4. Remove the quote formatting.

You know the blue line that runs down the left side of the text that you’re forwarding? That’s the quote formatting. It may also appear as a “>” or some other symbol. Taking that stuff out is the last step in making your email look fresh.

If you’re using Mac Mail, just highlight the quoted text and press Command + Option + ‘ (apostrophe) until the blue line disappears.

Also make sure you remove the text that says “Begin forwarded message:”! Duh!

Step 5. Make sure it looks right and send!

If done properly, your email will look exactly like a brand new email and your friend will never know that you don’t really like them that much!

If you’re a resident of sunny L.A., drop me a line! Let’s be pals.

I’m sure the question is burning on the minds of all (seven) of our avid reader’s minds – “Why haven’t I heard any juicy Flash-related gossip from dispatchEvent™ this summer?” The answer may surprise you!

I (Mims) have taken the summer off to participate in a race from London, UK to Ulaanbataar, Mongolia with two other friends from Brooklyn. In fact, I’m writing from Kraków, Poland right now! You can read all about our misadventures on our team website, Mr Dinosaur Drives to Mongolia – the website.

The plan is for me to return around the middle of September. Until that time, I’m going to be on a strict no-Flash diet so you won’t be hearing much from me. However, when I return the Bible should just be hitting the shelves and I’ll probably even see you at Flash Forward. Meanwhile, Roger will hold down the fort.

Thanks as always for reading. Until next time… Dziekuje!