I’ve had a few commenters here bring up the fact that I’m not blogging so much about Flash these days. And it’s true. At the end of December last year I started learning Objective-C for iPhone development, and now I’m extending that into OpenGL.
At my job at Infrared5, I’m working on a big Flex project. I’ve managed to largely avoid Flex up til now (readers of this blog will know I"m not a big fan), but I have to admit, I’m enjoying it and learning a lot. It’s not something I want to do long term, but I really am glad I’m getting my feet wet finally. So, while I’m learning and discovering a lot there, I’m really about 2-3 years behind the rest of the community, so the stuff I’m learning is not particularly blogworthy. “Hey, I learned how to skin and add a dropshadow to a text input field! Woohoo!”
But when I go home at night, I’m studying Objective-C, Cocoa, and OpenGL, and it’s blowing my mind. I’m also starting to get involved in the budding iPhone development community, which in many ways has that early technology frontier feel that Flash had back in 1999-2001 when I was getting started there. So, when I discover something cool, I write about it. I know there are a lot of others in the Flash community following the same path. Also, Infrared5 is starting to get involved in iPhone development. We’ve released our first in-house developed game, iFly, we are already working on one large client iPhone project, and have several more in the pipeline. So there’s a good chance I could be doing Objective-C around the clock.
So, is this the end of Flash for BIT-101? I can’t really say. I’m certainly not making that conscious decision. I’m just doing what I’m interested in and sharing what I find. I know that for many of you, this is a blog about Flash, but for me, it’s a blog about whatever technology I’m diving into at the moment. I had a flurry of Python posts a while back when I was studying that. When I went to Microsoft and met Bill Gates and he turned that hypno ray thing on me, I wrote about Silverlight for a couple of weeks. I’m sure there are other examples. In general I’ve always returned to the Flash-centric orbit.
Maybe I’ll burn out on the iPhone/OpenGL stuff and get back to Flash eventually. But to be honest, I feel like this diversion has the power to become the main path for me. As developers, we always have to be learning and growing. Even if you just stick with one language like ActionScript, it’s almost a full time job keeping up with the changes and discoveries. But you also have to be learning new technologies. I can say without a doubt that learning Objective-C has made me a better AcitonScript programmer. Looking at similar problems from the viewpoint of a new languages gives you a whole new insight to the problem itself. Branden Hall gives a great talk about “Great Ideas I’ve Blatantly Stolen” where he talks about borrowing technology solutions from various other languages and cross applying them back to ActionScript.
So I don’t really know where this is taking me. I do know that I’m having a lot of fun and learning a lot. I invite you along for the ride if you are interested.