And it includes a fancy exporter to Flash11 / Stage3D. All of a sudden, the best way to author advanced Flash content is Unity, not Flash. Considering that Adobe makes their money from Flash tools rather than the plugin, it’s a really odd situation. With the current outlook of Flash after the ‘Flashmageddon‘, it’s hard to say how relevant this will be in the long term, but it’s an impressive feature! And the obligatory cube to celebrate it:
Monthly Archives: December 2011
Colors!
Our little one loves to grab anything shiny, but is especially attracted to LCD screens of any type. He loves the netbook, the MacBook, my desktop’s dual monitors, and of course the big TV, but most of all he loves the iPhone. I often activate the camera in reverse mode and let him play with it, but there’s always been a problem: while he manipulates the phone, he will push some control or other and stop the camera, go to the desktop and start pushing random icons. I was wishing for some sort of ‘baby mode’ where something neat would be happening on the screen, but controls would be disabled.
I decided to use the Sunday morning to dust off my Canvas, CSS and JavaScript skills to code, with Alba’s design input and feedback, a little BabySaver that could keep his attention with bright colors, and be impossible to quit for him. Click here to see its current form. Click on the “Endless” button to enable interactions, otherwise any clicks will take you to my homepage. Continue reading
Text Editors
Programmers spend most of our time in front of a text editor. Whether it is a standalone editor, or one integrated in an IDE, that’s just what we do.
Back in MS-DOS days, my editor of choice was QEdit, later renamed to The Semware Editor. I loved its configurability, and remapped pretty much everything in it to suit my preferences. Around that time I was also working on Unix systems and used vi there, although only for short editing sessions. I had been exposed to Emacs multiple times (starting with MicroEmacs on the Atari ST), but I could never get comfortable with its crazy keyboard combos.
After Windows 95 came and became my regular environment, the best choice was Ultraedit. Very soon, Microsoft Visual Studio became the compiler and IDE of choice for Win95 development, and its built-in editor proved quite powerful, so I would use Ultraedit for editing files that were not C++. Continue reading