mE123 - Slashdot User

Comment Has anyone mentioned that developing Flex Sucks? (Score 2, Informative) 181

by mE123 on Wednesday October 07, 2009 @09:46PM (#29676621) Attached to: Decoding Adobe's Big Device Push

Has anyone else tried to use Flash/Flex to do anything more then just a game/animation? The frameworks are at best immature. While the Flex language is "ok" (basically just ECMAScript), the libraries, tools, frameworks, and most everything else that goes with it are just abysmally bad when compared to any other modern language (Java, Obj-C, Python, C#, etc).

The Flex Builder plugin for eclipse only supports Eclipse 3.3, which means modern plugins won't work. The flex compiler itself is slow and hard to setup. Oh, and the tools only officially support Windows and OSX. The documents are horrible and only give you most simplest of use case examples, but this might be because most of the frameworks breakdown when doing even remotely off the "rail" they have defined.

Just as a quick example of something inexcusably broken, the ComboBox that comes with Flex doesn't have a set selected by value function. You can only set by index and by label... which is just crazy when you consider most ComboBoxes contain localized strings order alphabetically in that local.

As a development environments go, I think you would be hard pressed to find something worse for development than flex.

And I could go on about how bad the user interaction is by default. But you really have to see that one to believe it.

Amazon Launches "Frustration-Free Packaging" 353

Posted by kdawson on Monday November 03, 2008 @09:11PM from the save-the-earth-and-keep-more-of-your-fingers dept.

mallumax notes Amazon's new Frustration-Free Packaging initiative. Over several years the retailer hopes to convince many of its suppliers to offer consumer-friendlier packaging. It's starting with just 19 products from Mattel, Fisher-Price, Microsoft, and Transcend. Until this program spreads to more products, better get one of these (ThinkGeek and Slashdot share a corporate overlord). From Amazon's announcement: "The Frustration-Free Package is recyclable and comes without excess packaging materials such as hard plastic clamshell casings, plastic bindings, and wire ties. It's designed to be opened without the use of a box cutter or knife and will protect your product just as well as traditional packaging. Products with Frustration-Free Packaging can frequently be shipped in their own boxes, without an additional shipping box. Amazon works directly with manufacturers to box products in Frustration-Free Packages right off the assembly lines, which reduces the overall amount of packing materials used."

Submission + - The Pixo Secret: iPods Run OS X and Always Have.

Submitted by Redrum on Saturday July 14, 2007 @11:17PM

Redrum writes: Everyone thinks that Apple's iPod runs an OS called Pixo, and that the iPhone ushered in a brand epoch based on OS X. That myth has been busted: the iPod runs Apple's own Mach/BSD kernel, and Pixo is only used as a graphics layer. Daniel Eran outlines the story behind Pixo and what OS X means for Apple. It's no joke; the story was confirmed by Tim Monroe, a member of Apple's QuickTime engineering team as is easy to verify yourself: Those OS X iPods? They're Already Here! Pixo, ARM, and the Mac OS.

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