Hi Kurt, Good questions, though I don't think the fear is necessary. Reasoning in #4.
1) Everything except for animation and advertisements. 2) Flash is still better here, but then requires more code. Component skinning is steadily improving and setting color choices seems pretty comfortable now. Best combination is to use both. 3) Yes, but ignore it for how long? If you ignore it for a year you'll probably be ok. If you ignore it forever, your market will start shrinking eventually if you are a programmer. 4) It should generate more opportunity because it won't take so much time to create an application and that will change the equation radically. A very smart fellow who knows all the quirks and workarounds of F4-current once mentioned that it's because flash is so difficult and has so many glitches that one needs to know about that there should always be work for us. My thought was "He's right, but I don't think I want to have my job to be constantly working around the bugs and quirks of F4<->F5<->F6<-->Central<-->F7" as a result, I jumped on the Flex bandwagon as soon as I could and then boped over to Laszlo when it went open source. But you are asking about The Market. Each of these will have a market. I see three different markets of work targeting the Flash player now. The first is maintaining old broken code and adding new features to it. There will always be work like this just as there are still cobol programmers who are resisting using relational databases. In fact, this work should increase as developers move into the new arenas. The second is developing groundbreaking new applications for companies. This will be done with Flex and Laszlo ( Before I create noise by using the "L" word, just humor me that some companies will choose one, other companies will choose another the reasoning will depend on the company's focus). With all the work already invested in the quirks of F4-F8 adding two more variations on a theme, both of whom are superior in general to the lot isn't such a big deal and makes it so that you are prepared both to evaluate what's right for a job and to take on whatever interesting work presents itself. The third is public collaborative works. Generally open source projects that build on one of these three things and create ripple markets. With these, I think you are not just a coder, but half businessman half coder who can bring a publically shared solution to the paper money world in your local market. I think there are two interesting trends here. OS advocates often poke at the Flash player because it's not OS and because it helps make Linux a second class citizen, but when Laurence Lessig said that Flash authors need to embrace OS I was shocked. Everybody has been giving their code away from the begining. Why this sense that the content is also so closed? The key thing here is that because the language and the tools were so primitive that they made colaborative work hard, one flash developer's code generally didn't talk to another's, so collaboration was hampered. Now with MTasc and ASDT, Laszlo's going open source and now Flex2 Builder being so nice and based on Eclipse we should see some public colaborative works that generate into jobs as well, but to take advantage of that you probably need to be either a businessman as well or have a partner or group of partners. This area dwarfs the other two, but it's also a lot more confusing and I'm not sure where I want to be in terms of it yet. Also because MM will keep control of certain areas of the source code, I'm not sure how that will effect things either. For example, I'm not sure what the pubic extensibility points are going to be for Flex2 builder yet. This will be a story that we follow for the next ten to twenty years. 5) +1 better, many iterative improvements and changes with some significant new features. Many things are still familiar though. _______________________________________________ Flashcoders mailing list [email protected] http://chattyfig.figleaf.com/mailman/listinfo/flashcoders
