Quite an interesting
meeting at LFPUG last week. After
Elecash told me almost a year and half ago at Subflash I've been meaning to attend a full demo of FDT. He very kindly did a 30 minutes one for us in Malaga, but certainly not this deep.
I remember trying
FDT's Linux version back then and I have to say I wasn't very pleased. I don't know what it was, maybe the JRE version I was running, maybe FDT itself, but it wasn't working properly. Let alone it runs on top of my old nemesis Eclipse. So yesterday I grabbed one of the FDT guys (the marketing one) and asked how the Linux version was doing these days. "We don't officially support Linux". Rather disappointing for a *commercial* application ¬¬
But I have to admit that the workflow looks veeeeeeeery cool. It seems the tool tries to help you out without getting in your way. You know, like those tools that pretend to more clever than you are *cof,Word,cof,cof*. For example, the live error highlighting feature saves you a lot of time. Also you can move around FDT views and dialogs using the keyboard only, and that's usually a good usability sign.
On a side note again I was amazed by the HUGE difference of skills across the Flash community. While there are people successfully doing actual work with a very low let's say... regard for Software Development best practices, there're also pure hardcore programmers following those best practices to heart. And all of them are using pretty much the same tools. Kudos to Adobe for creating such a flexible platform. I say this because the guys at PowerFlasher seem to be using
Parsley, a framework for Flex and Flash that I had never heard from before and that it seems very interesting.
There's no LFPUG meeting next month and it seems we might have a little bit of
haXe for January, which would be very cool. Damn I need a new version of
HippoHX for then!