Alcides Fonseca

After developing software for some time now, I feel like I should mention the software that most helped me until now. This is just a personal opinion, so don’t start flamming me for this, okay? Well, although I use Notepad++ and Textmate for writing code, I’m not talking about neither, and I’m not going to talk about Visual Studio which is a great IDE, and a wonderful tool for designing desktop applications. The best software that has helped me in my programming until now was… Fireworks, that’s right! Macromedia’s, now Adobe’s software for designing web graphics.

So howcome a designer application has helped in your programming? Well, I don’t do low-level programming, my focus in on web programming, so the interface is very important. I find Fireworks the most useful tool because it allows me to get some graphics done very fast and easily, so I can focus on what I really want: to code.

So why Fireworks and not Photoshop? Photoshop is indeed more powerful that Fireworks, but it is also more complex, and I’m not a designer, I just want quick icons, or logos, or some fancy artwork for my software, I don’t want to make some artistic and amazing drawings. And right now, I can archieve everything in Fireworks you can in Photoshop. The only feature I miss is Brushes, but I can emulate it using some workarounds that take too much time.

This is one of the features Adobe could add to Fireworks. I’ve been using it since the MX 2002 version through the MX 2004 and CS3 and I find no real difference between them. Couldn’t they just spend some time on this wonderful product? Of course it doesn’t sell like Photoshop and is maybe overpriced for its target audience, but I’m sure they can manage it… I’m sure there are other Fireworks lovers around wishing for this too…

PS: Ok, I had to ruin my first linkless post with some sort of interesting link. Here it is: Fireworks is a great prototyping tool for interaction desginers

Until now, all flash files were save in a binary .fla file. Seems like CS4 will bring a new format .xfl that is a zip file with all the components of the movie and a xml manifest. This will improve it’s interoperability with third parties like image and video editors, or even opensource flash editors.

Together with Microsoft’s OOXML (even with all those OOXML vs ODF issues, it’s still plain XML) it will allow a next generation versioning systems (who know Git with a tortoiseSVN-like interface, or even better) and a cool Office/Flash/Imaging Diff tool. And merged with a web-based editor would be perfect for non-geek end users. You might read more about this on my guest post over PauloQuerido’s.

I spend this weekend lost in Zambujeira do Mar in the MSP Team Building event. There were a few talks given by some folks at Microsoft, CanalUp, Sociedade Ponto Verde, Associação Terra dos Sonhos and NetJovens. All of them excellent, and I got some interesting contacts for some future activities I’m planing. Spending time with the rest of the MSPs was pretty good too, maybe apart from the CC, BCC and Rodeo ;)

Now, to the missed news:

First, Adobe Air 1.0 and Flex3.0 released. Since I’m probably doing my multimedia project in Air, this is a great news! But there is still no signs of a Linux client… This was something you could expect from Microsoft, but from Adobe doesn’t matter that much…

Second, Python 2.5.2 is out, just a bug-fix version.

Third, Oscars sucked once more this year. I can’t really enjoy the kind of movies that win year after year… I guess I’ll jut ignore them from now on…

(Post original)

Não seria interessante a Microsoft estar presente para (tentar) defender o seu OOXML ou então aprender alguma coisa? Também seria interessante trazer alguém da Adobe para ver se também alinhavam numa de abrir os formatos.

Adobe is betting real hard on RIAs now. After Flex and AIR, they are getting “Thermo” ready. Thermo is a “rich internet application design tool”. It’s kind of a Flex, but for designers. It’s pretty much graphical based (so that designers don’t need to code one single line) and integrates perfectly with Photoshop, Fireworks and the rest of the CS3. This might be a enormous advantage for Thermo to be chosen instead of Microsoft Expression Web.

But if you’re thinking it’s a designer-only tool, you’re wrong! Thermo’s code-view is actually the full Flex Builder application, so programmers can have fun with this tool almost as much as designers.

You can read more about Thermo in Read/Write Web.

Being a big fan of graphical designing of applications, like Visual Basic and so, I can’t wait to try this new IDE. I don’t quite like using Flash, but I believe gorgeous applications will come out from this in no time!

Some years ago, the Internet users were amazed by the power of Flash and now the world is stumbling upon this new AJAX thing making web pages even more user friendly (and fast!). Another new technologies are also being released like Silverlight and AIR and some others are being prepared, like JaxaFX.

Photo by Len Peralta

Well, with new standards getting ready like HTML 5.0 and XHTML 2.0, I believe a new generation of client-side scripting will emerge. The projects I feel the most promising are the ones related with the Tamarin Virtual Machine. For those who don’t know, this is the result of the contribution Adobe made, giving Mozilla the source code of Action-Script Virtual Machine. Joining the best of two worlds, Tamarin will have support for both JavaScript and ActionScript.

The first subproject, Action Monkey will integrate Tamarin with SpiderMonkey (the Mozilla’s C implementation of JavaScript). The second, ScreamingMonkey will allow the Tamarin to be run on other browsers, like IE what means portability of the code. The third, IronMonkey will allow Tamarin mapping through IronPython and IronRuby. Regarding this last one, as an OpenSource foundation, Mozilla should be using Python and Ruby rather than Microsoft’s ones.

All of this will be released with SpiderMonkey and Firefox next year. Can’t wait to try and make some nice looking applications with it :)