Nathan Levesque

This is a somewhat obvious tip, but in the past when sending PureMVC notifications I’ve sent them with an Array as the body. This is nice for simplicity, but requires you to more or less remember what the order of parameters are and what type each is. My solution is simply to create a single value object class for notification bodies (that phrase sounds weird) sending complex data. Then you can cast the body of the notification back to its type and maintain type safety, as well as having access to any code completion.

It’s not an end-all solution, I wouldn’t expend time coding a class for simple notifications, but it certainly helps keep your command code clean and readable when you’re send more complex data.

Click here to see more information, but the gist of it is meetings on the first Tuesday of each month!

The first meeting is April 8th at 7PM at Adobe’s offices in Newton, MA. Topic will be the open sourcing of the Flex SDK.

I’ll be there, and if any of my readers will be too, drop me a line.

In the past week or so I’ve begun development on a Flex-based Blog Engine. I don’t have any screenshots or videos of it yet, as it is not entirely functional yet.

It uses Flex,PureMVC, PHP, MySQL, and WebOrb for PHP.

In the meantime, check out the preliminary information and keep an eye out for updates!

As of tonight, I decided to discontinue pursuing future projects in the area of traditional HTML/CSS design. This is partly based on my mounting frustrations with the CSS standard, that despite being explicitly defined by the W3C, has never been fully and properly implemented by any browser. Every designer instinct tells me that CSS is necessary and not to use table designs, but recently I’ve found it increasingly hard to rationalize this as a benefit against productivity.

As far as I’m concerned, technology should be an aid in my pursuit of the holy grail of Design. If the technology is too old, or just not up to par with my needs and expectations, than I have no other recourse but to pursue other technology that lets me do what I want consistently and with the relative ease I expect. To this end, I have recently put much time into developing with Flex, and in the future plan on working with Silverlight (as much of an Adobe fan as I am, I’d be a fool not to learn more about the competition, for more info, see Blue Ray). I like pushing the edge, and to me, CSS feels like a hack to make HTML, nearly a 30-year old technology, look decent. Ditto on JavaScript in terms of AJAX (that aside, I love what JavaScript is, just not how it is used).
Another factor in this decision is a shift in career focus for me. While I intend on continuing my design skills, I find myself enjoying application programming more and more each day. I find myself more challenged with this, but challenged in a good way.

I find it so much more rewarding not to be fighting the technology, but instead fighting against my own lack of knowledge as I push myself into these areas of programming that are, at least to me, new. I don’t feel like I’m giving up on HTML/CSS. In fact if anything, I consider my journey through HTML/CSS based design complete. It’s been a mix of good and bad, but what I take from it are the lessons and the experience.

So here I am, feeling at a crossroads of sorts. While I find comfort in what I’ve learned, I feel the urge to push forward, and while my past and the present is important, in many ways they both hold me back.

Now all along you’ve probably been wondering about that little picture up there. It’s for the analogy I’m about to give you: Living as a developer/web designer is much like swinging along on monkey bars. You want to keep moving because if you stop too long on one rung, you lose your momentum, you risk losing your grip, and even if you want to start moving again, it’s not that easy.

RIP, HTML/CSS
2002-2008