iPhone Development

I recently had a discussion with Jamie about how it was difficult for developers to communicate and share knowledge about development for the iPhone because of Apple’s stifling non-disclosure agreement. Seems Apple didn’t want their secrets to get out.

The problem with the NDA is that real progress is often made through sharing what we’ve learned with each other as a community. Open discourse is what has helped bring the Flash community forward over the years and can be seen across the whole development world, from the Linux community to forward thinking companies sharing their source (think Google’s new browser, Chrome.)

Well, I’m guessing Apple was taking a LOT of criticism for this as I found this today:

Dear Apple Developers…

I think the lesson we should learn from this is that the real model for the development community at large is one of openness and sharing. It’s nice to see Apple bending to the pressure of that community. I’m hoping we’ll be seeing more online now about what people are doing with their iPhone projects/experiments.

Tips for new coders

The comments in this discussion are priceless. They’re language or platform specific at all — for you folks out there looking for how to learn quickly, get better as a coder and thrive at a new environment, this thread is a must read.

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Zend + AMF

Lee Brimelow discusses the official announcement of the addition of AMF support to the Zend Framework in this post. A couple of details that caught my eye…

The AMF implementation in Zend is being done by Wade Arnold who also works on AMFPHP. The development of AMFPHP will continue but the Zend implementation will be officially supported by Adobe.

Adobe is working with Zend with the goal of being able to install the Flex Eclipse plug-in into Zend Studio. Not sure if this will make me start using Eclipse, but one of my personal hang-ups is that I needed a separate editor for decent PHP editing.

Update: The former title of this post referred to ZendAMF. According to a recent post on Wade Arnold’s blog … “There is no such thing is ZendAMF. I have seen this on some blog posts. There is the Zend Framework with the amf protocol server implementation using the package Zend_Amf and the class Zend_Amf_Server.”

Flash on Tap -- Now in May

Flash on Tap has been rescheduled for May 28th - 30th. This is a killer opportunity for all y’all who haven’t yet signed up and want to attend what will undoubtedly be one of the best conferences of the year.

Football season is no longer an excuse. Come. Drink with us. All of you. Sign up today!

Variable Declaration, aka Iterative Sanity

I was just talking to Tai U, a friend of the Spaceship, about this one. We were discussing how all these new young hooligan coders out there are committing the sin of looping using reserved variable names for iterators. Something sorta like this:


for(var x:int=0;x<foo;x++) {
// x?! what are you doing?!!?
};


Young friends, that may fly for other languages, but in ActionScript you are playing with fire. I have labored for many moons over a better solution for this and the most sensible in my head is described as follows:

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