JXL on 2005

The Bad

I lost a good friend in the war. I got really scared I had potentially lost more in the bombing of London.

Microsoft pays Real over a lawsuit. My wife’s new Alienware starts the year off badly, and ends up with a fried mother board. I still need to call support because it’s under warranty I hope, but I’m never buying another Alienware ever again, and I suggest you do not either. They are not all the hype makes them out to be, and their support is pathetic.

The Weird

Xamlon launches, headed by one of my Flash idols, only to mysteriously stay in beta. Haven’t really heard a lot of activity from this area. The inventor of the internet smokes crack when discussing his creation. It takes a full year for credit card usage at fast food restaurants to travel 20 miles up the highway finally reaching the exit where I live. The weirdest of all, the W3C wants to standardize RIA’s…wtf?

The Surprises

Everyone is taking pictures with their phones at New Years. It seems everyone uses a phone to take pictures now, and it’s the norm. Adobe acquires Macromedia. The last, great Central App is released. I saw AJAX not suck. I saw Laszlo not suck. Jakob Neilsen acknowledges Flash can have good uses, and suggests we use the v2 Flash components.

The Cool & Good

2005 started off just like 2004; every recruiter and their mom wanted qualified Flash Developers. I blogged for help. I’ve used that list garnered extensively over the year, removing only 1 name, and moving some names higher up the list based on needs & client feedback. Flash finally got a pimp RichTextEditor. Flashcom brought the world together. iTunes delivered music, but GameTap gave us games!

I fell in love with open source Flash development via FAME, only to fall out of love end of year. By the end of the year, I was fed up with Flash for pure application development alone, and MTASC’s future, the open source compiler for Flash and the core of FAME, had its code start to freeze as it’s author pursues other endeavors. Beginning of the end for me in that realm.

Dofus, a MMORPG (massively multiplayer online role-playing game) done in Flash becomes free. I was really irritated with the comments on that entry; it felt like people were doing everything in their power to dissuade any of the coolness factor from the client being done in Flash to how all powerful the server was. Not sure where the insecurity came from… maybe cause Flash proved itself in that defining moment?

Yahoo! releases Yahoo! Maps, and makes good on Mike Chamber’s suggestion about Yahoo! "showcasing Flash" and how Yahoo! will help push the Flash Platform.

Flex Builder 2 lights up the Web 2.0 conference. A super model digs Flash Lite. My man Darron Schall releases FlashVNC, which hints at the revolution Flash Player 8.5 will bring with it’s new features. This is corraborated by FlashTelnet and FlashAIM.

Me Personally

2005 was the year of Flex for me, most definately. I started the year hoping to spread the wonderful joy working in Flex is to other Flash Developers. I still had time for both Flash & Flex, even 2 years later still discovering new, useful classes in the v2 component framework. By the end of the year, I started to come to terms with being a Flex Developer vs. a Flash one.

Still, Flash permeates my life, and SWF in general. My CaptivatePlayer gets so popular, it scores me a DevNet article. I actually had a lot of angst & frustration towards Macromedia and the direction they were taking Flash development earlier this year. I felt very left out, and squashed by stockholder interests. I respected that from a business point of view, but still felt personally betrayed. Thankfully, they shared a vision, got a lot of our feedback, and my faith is once again restored & renewed. I even managed to make it into Flash. In celebration, Guy and I enjoyed Margarits, Grapes, and Flash 8 Video.

On a personal life note, a lot of closure was reached this year as well as some personal goals. I got to speak at MXDU again. I did my part to fight terrorism. I got a new router, a distaste for Cisco owned LinkSys, and a new respect for D-link. I graduated, and got my BA. I think my favorite part, though, was getting a new puppy, and celebrating my 1 year anniversary with my wife in Canada for some burn out therapy.

Conclusion

Being overally serious makes me feel uncomfortable. I guess that’s why the Web 2.0 explosion this year really irked me because people are so gung ho about this un-definable concept. I dig concepts, though, and I dig all the positivity, zeal, and desire to create & help people with technology that AJAX & Web 2.0 have helped contribute too. Hopefully next year Flash & Flex will add immensely as well.

Till then, the 2 most important things for me this year were Storming Mortar with Ninja Wizards, and using Nigel Pegg’s DataGrid to save Microsoft.