I'm the lead developer at The Onion. When I'm not working I enjoy long moonlit walks along the beach with robots, the history of science and technology, and warm fuzzy kittens.

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A human being should be able to change a diaper, plan an invasion, butcher a hog, conn a ship, design a building, write a sonnet, balance accounts, build a wall, set a bone, comfort the dying, take orders, give orders, cooperate, act alone, solve equations, analyze a new problem, pitch manure, program a computer, cook a tasty meal, fight efficiently, die gallantly. Specialization is for insects. —Robert A. Heinlein

Skip Intro

by Jeffrey Weston, Mon Sep 15 9:47 pm, 2008

Come round the fire children and listen to a tale of yore. Long ago, before the internet was an 'application' the only way to do something that behaved like an 'application' was to embed some other kind of technology as a plugin into an html page. Many people used Java, but then, there were some who began using Flash, believing that there could be a platform for designing and programming applications to be delivered over the 'web'. But these people were fooled, because over time it became clear that first of all, it was a 'goddamned pain in the ass' to attempt to get information in/out of Flash to the web around it, and secondly, every jackass with a couple hundred dollars were making 1/2 hour long animated intros to websites with the now universally despised phrase 'SKIP INTRO'. And, lo, Flash was a tool discarded and left for brochures and marketing departments run by creative directors named 'Brad', until Youtube came along.

Now, being alive and working in the year 2000, I actually did quite a bit of Flash. Was it Flash 3? 4? Not sure. They're not even doing numbers anymore, "Fl CS3" or something that Adobe thought of in the hour it takes for Acrobat to load and read a PDF. Everybody had some exposure to Flash then, just as you did to say, Perl and Cold Fusion. I'm in therapy now, it's ok (just as I'm sure younger technorati may encounter future sessions over what might become a traumatic django pony). But the point is, I'm now building a media player in Flash because we need one at work, and coming back to it after nearly a decade it's interesting to see what happened.

Primarily, it's geared to letting you make a media player easier. No longer the idea that it will become the defacto web application platform. Actionscript feels enough like Javascript that it's familiar ground. There's a sort of DOM, although the Adobe style layout and layers of tools to build it is mostly frustrating (which is why everyone seems to make minimal objects then manipulate them via action script files). With ExternalInterface you can actually interact via javascript with objects on the page. That's huge. Not huge enough for me to ever actually want to use it again day-to-day, but for a media player with no SKIP INTRO, an improvement.