I recently overheard a conversation about IDE naming and its impact on an individual or company's bottom line. There were numerous supporters of the notion that the name of the tool an individual or company chooses has direct correlation to the number and types of clients that individual or company can secure. In contrast, there was an equal amount of supporters of the notion that the IDE name makes little or no difference and that it instead rests with the underlying technology used, as well as, the competency of the individual and/or company.

A lot of Mac users have become familiar with a powerful text editor in the form of TextMate. It combines some of the power that is Unix with some of the cleaness that is OSX to give you an editor that could replace some IDEs. It has code snippets and macros made available via bundles that have been created by the community and cover over 30 different languages. You can use it for Flash development, even issuing "Test Movie" commands from TextMate.

Adobe CEO, Shantanu Narayen, confirms to Bloomberg TV at the World Economic Forum in Davos, Switzerland recently that a Flash player for the iPhone won't be coming anytime soon.

Finally updated the source for my AS2 :: BackgroundFill class to work for AS3. Just define your gradient, instantiate the class and you're good to go. Check out and download the source @ http://labs.otuome.com/as3/background-fill.

Posted (2) new walkthroughs this morning on my labs site. The 1st demonstrates basic usage of the KwikUML AIR app (model creation/editing, stub code generation, etc).

Being a member of the Adobe user group management community has its perks. It's a really diverse group of extremely intelligent and gifted individuals that don't mind sharing their time, talent and wisdom and this helps keep the user group community thriving.

For those that don't know, Alchemy is a research project being conducted by Adobe and Automata Studios that allows developers to compile C/C++ into ActionScript that's capable of running in the ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).

KwikUML is now open-sourced and hosted courtesy of RIAForge. Full source code and API documentation has been posted just in time for Xmas!! Feel free to pitch in if you're interested in helping to further this project...

It's been an extremely long hiatus over the past few months being totally immersed in work yet again. A lot has happened during that time from insane project burns to promotions to community involvement, etc. so, I forced myself today to sit through some certification testing today and took and passed the Adobe Flex 3 and AIR certification exam (an early Xmas gift to myself ).

It's 50 questions covering the following topic areas:

• Creating a User Interface (UI)
• Flex system architecture and design
• Programming Flex applications with ActionScript

The next version of Flash Player will offer a lot of enhancements to the user experience and it seems Adobe listened to the developer community on a few of the features. Here's one that is sure to be huge: