I just had to refuse the second job offer this year where I would have to fix somebody else’s written ActionScript 1 spagetti code! I don’t know what is the reason for agencies trying to give such jobs but it’s save to say that the troubles of digging through the messy and often timeline-spread code is enough to justify an estimate that sounds too high for the client.
The question comes up why they don’t just ask the person who originally wrote the code! That could have many reasons but if a client comes back to me and asks me to fix something in a years old project then I’ll do it for a measly payment simply because I know my source code. It’s a total different thing to fix somebody’s code, especially if it’s pre-AS2.
I always feel uncomfortable rejecting jobs, even such ones so I would be interested how others handle this situation! Do you usually reject such jobs or do you accept them?
The “Crappiest Corporate Site of the Week” Award goes to Dell Japan for not being able to have a Shop website that runs on current Browsers! When I try to get onto their XPS 700 Customization page I get a simple Access Denied, telling me that I need to use Internet Explorer 4.0 or Netscape 4.6! The site doesn’t work on FireFox and not on MSIE 6 and neither on Netscape 8! Congratulations Dell! You suck immensely!
I’m actually wondering how do you sell your PCs in Japan!
ActionScript 3.0 and Flash Player 9.0 brought a big leap of speed and all kinds of changes and optimizations with it. But these mainly happen under the hood only. While Flash 8 came up with the bitmap level manipulation stuff, Flash 9 doesn’t come with any groundbreaking new features that are visible to the surface (except for the speed improvement).
[ad#ad_content_small]Yesterday on a meeting I was asked if I could use a rotatable 3D mesh in Flash for the clients presentation project and I could only tell them that the lack of native 3D support is the big weakness of Flash. Eventually we will end up with a single frame animation to fake the rotation. However this was one example that there must be quite a demand for 3D support in Flash, not only for experimentation but even more for commercial use. In fact native 3D is already overdue since a while but I accept that implementing such a thing is not an easy challange.
So native graphics acceleration for Flash has to come one way or the other, not only because everybody wants it but also for Flash to stay competitive (think about WinFX). There is still Director one could argue. But somehow I get the feeling that Director will either continue it’s shadow existence or it will disappear sooner or later. 3D for Flash has to come, there is no way or excuse around it! Maybe the next version? Too early! Maybe Flash 10? Who knows! We might however see some sweet audio improvements in a near future!
I’m chased by bad luck since a while when it comes to getting this blog onto the Macromedia XML News Aggregator! First when I used Nucleus CMS it stopped fetching my feeds automatically after a while. Nobody, not me and not the admin at MXNA had any clue what was the cause. Now I’ve switched to Word Press in the hope that this would change but it now seems that I’m stuck forever with this problem. The feed URL for Word Press is very different and there seems to be no working redirection plugin for Word Press 2+. Also I cannot re-subscribe at MXNA with the same domain and any mail to the admin so far stood unanswered. Only workaround would be to change to another sub domain but I don’t want to go that far!
Flex 2 public beta3 was just released and already all formerly written Flex2 beta2 apps started to fail working in the newest Flash Player! Seems like Adobe is making critical changes to the framework faster than we can change our pants!
This somehow spoils it for me to write more stuff with Flex until the very final release is published because I’m pretty sure it will fail working in a soon cooming beta4!
Yes, there’s a big and fat beta glued on it so it’s clear that changes are ahead and former stuff might fail but it’s all public and it’s obvious that Adobe isn’t only making it a public beta for testing but also for propaganda! My written SWNameGenerator doesn’t work anymore, giving me a nicely red flooded Eclipse editor full of errors!
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