Such write-ups  won't have any effect on the Apple's decision about Flash Player.  It's a cold blooded decision, and if the real reason for not letting FP on iPhone OS is to keep control of the applications and have a cut from the iStore, writing blogs and I'm also a big fan of Adobe software typing this comment on MBP and want Flash Player to be on iPhone and iPad. So?

Open letters won't help. Begging won't help. For some reason, Leonard Cohen's words come to mind:

Ah but a man never got a woman back
Not by begging on his knees
Or Id crawl to you baby
And Id fall at your feet
And Id howl at your beauty
Like a dog in heat
And Id claw at your heart
And Id tear at your sheet
Id say please, please
Im your man

If Flash Player really performs poorly on iPhone OS, as John Gruber describes , than it can be resolved only by two people: Apple's and Adobe's CEOs.

Lee Brimelow, a respected Adobe evangelist published a really cool blog showing how some Web sites will look like if the Flash Player support is turned off in the Web browser. So? There's an iPhone version of CNN that shows videos using Apple's QuickTime instead of Flash Player. 

If Apple will insist on having 100% control as to what software can run on iPhone/iPad, they'll force third-party developers to bend and find the way to play by the rules. If you are a small software vendor, do you want to ignore the market of 50 million of hot devices (iPhones)?  Even if you are a large software vendor, you still don't want to ignore this market, and Adobe found a brilliant way to get into developing software for iPhone OS and offering it in iStore in ActionScript in CS5. 

Something's gotta give.

Yesterday, there were two major shows on TV: Steve Jobs presenting iPad and Obama with his first State of the Union address. Obama got really lucky that Apple’s announcement was not scheduled at the same time.  You know what I mean.

By now, you should be warmed up and irritated enough thinking, “Enough already, what about the iPad?” OK, I’ll give you some random thoughts.

1.    iPad is not a replacement of any notebook. It doesn’t have Microsoft Office. Most of the computer users can’t live without it.

2.    It doesn’t have Eclipse IDE either. This will make it useless (as a computer) for half of the software developers of the planet Earth.

3.    They claim up to 10 hours of battery life. Based on the history of Apple, I would assume that you’ll achieve such performance only if you turn that device on, put it on the table and leave it alone. The light will go off in 10 hours. If this doesn’t sound like a reasonable usage pattern, the battery in the new iPad will, probably last for 6 hours, which means three movies on my plane to Belgium. I’ll spend the remaining two hours drinking wine and eating other airplane gourmet food.

4.    Now I’m going to have  to pack into my bag both MacBook and iPad. The latter doesn't have USB so it needs the mothership computer anyway. Don’t  try to sneak through the metal detector carrying iPad in the pocket like this.

5.    The Sony eReader becomes the most useless gadget I have in the house. People say that Amazon’s Kindle becomes a joke too.

6.    Flash Player is not supported. Because of this I lost my $20 bet with Jesse Warden. Apple is afraid of letting a plethora of the Flash applications and games without getting their cuts as they do with all applications in iStore. Excuses that Flash Player drains the battery and takes all CPU (who cares on a single-process OS?) are not serious. To get yourself prepared to the iPad experience, got to Safari Preferences and uncheck the Enable Plugins. You'll see how the Web sites that use Flash Player look like. If you are too lazy to do this on your own, enjoy the ultimate browsing experience over here. But this picture with broken pictures in place of Flash Player content doesn't give you the real story though.The popularity of the device will force some of the third-party software vendors to change the way they deliver their content. For example, CNN Web site has an iPhone version, where they display videos using Apple's QuickTime player instead of Flash Player. 

7.    If you are in a software development, learn how to program for iPhone/iPad. I’m getting there. No need to learn this ugly Objective-C. Adobe’s CS5 and ActionScript is all you need.

8.    Yesterday, I went to Staples (they have low prices) and noticed a sexy 10” Toshiba netbook for $399  with a 10-hour battery. So? Where are the killer apps? Not cool enough.

9.    Five years from now, most salesmen, UPS drivers and police officers will carry not those sturdy-and-ugly pads they have now, but iPads.

10.    The iPad doesn’t have a Webcam. No video “Hi, mom!” on Skype. No funny faces on instant messengers either.

11.    The next version of iPad can be customized. No, I’, not talking about pink iPads for girls. The spot where you’d expect a WebCam can be used to hold a nice size diamond. Since every woman will carry an iPad anyway, a diamond will indicate that she’s engaged.  

12.    The cheapest version (Wi-Fi, no 3G) goes for $499. This all you need as long as you won’t think about this device as a replacement for your main computa. Of course, if you are a commuta, spending long hours on the bus or train browsing through a fresh newspaper  on iPad makes sense if you can shell out yet another $30 for the 3G data plan (a funny option of $15 for 250Mb can be ignored) . Otherwise, go with Wi-Fi iPad. By setting the entry price so low, Apple wants to kill the competition - why get something regular for $399 if you can own a high-end accessory for just one bill more?

13.    If you are a music fan, you have you 160GB iPod anyway, so it’s hard to justify why purchase more than 16GB of storage in iPad? OK, get 32GB model if you have some spare cash.

14.    Remember, an iPad is an addition to your gadgetry, not a replacement for anything.

15. Twenty years ago, back in Ukraine I dreamed of having a personal computer at home. What kind? A computer, you, moron! Any computer would make me happy. Here in America, people are dying from making choices each day and now we have one more - the iPad. Please do me a favor and watch this 20-min talk by Barry Shwartz, which, hopefully, will help you in making this choice.



The day before iPad announcement,  after reading about Apple’s quarterly results, I purchased some AAPL shares at $203.  The last time I purchased any stock was 9 years ago. I’ll keep it for a while.
 Let's see if I should've stayed away from the stock market for another 10 years.


Consume, consume, consume. Edward Berneays (Sigmund Freud’s nephew) has great followers who know how to convince you that your life will be miserable unless you purchase yet another gadget. This time it’s iPad. Don’t think too much. Just get it, will you? I sure will.

Our plane with about 20 amateur kamikaze landed in Geneva, Switzerland on time and our old time friend and travel agent Dora was meeting us with the bus with other 30 people who came to this pretty boring city a day earlier. Our ski resort is located in up French Alps in two hour bus ride.

BTW, Seatguru lied about electric outlets on our plane. Second time in then last month.

The plane landed on time, but our ski bag didn’t.  While submitting  the claim at the lost and found, I explained that we are kinda need skis as we are planning to start skiing tomorrow.  They politely answered that if the bag won’t be delivered to your hotel within than 24 hours, we’ll get 100 Swiss francs.  I asked, “What if they’ll never find our bag?”
“Don’t worry, they will. If not, call Swiss Air for further arrangements.”

The problem was that my wife has also packed two pairs of ski pants , gloves and socks in the ski bag. This is the case when traveling in a large group helps. We’ve borrowed most of the stuff we needed from other people and rented skis.

The bag has arrived to our village two days later.  Now I want more than a hundred franks.

I’m writing this after four days of skiing and the weather was great. I’ve been wearing wide stretchable belt, which helped with my back. So far there were not too many casualties in our group: one twisted knee, one bronchitis, and one serious lower back pain (not mine). These poor three things watch TV, eat, drink and try enjoy seeing happy red faces of skiers returning back from the slopes daily.

Actually, there was one more accident that we witnessed and participated in. Our group was sliding on the narrow but almost flat slope. All of a sudden, two of our ladies noticed legs and skis flying down into the woods. We stopped and told our instructor about this. He went into the woods. Sure enough, there was a 65-year old women laying in the snow between the trees. She was scared, her face was scratched, but she was alive!  Here’s the picture of our instructor (in red) helping her out of the woods.

On one slope there was a large bump followed by a smaller one followed by a steep slope.  A group goes one by one and this lady passes the first bump, but makes a sudden stop in a doggy style scared by an unexpected steep slope.  The man who was skiing behind her passes the first bump and then hits this lady’s ass with his head.  The man fell but the lady didn’t. She said, “No wonder, this is my favorite position”. This was funny.

One day, I was boarding the chair lift with two women from our group. We spoke Russian, and noticed a guy who clearly wanted to talk and jumped into our chair lift the last minute. We asked him in Russian,"Where are you from?"  He proudly replied in Russian, "From Moscow. And you?". I said, "We are from the USA". The guy exclaimed, "It's so horrible!".

Today, I was sitting at the chair lift with five other people. When the lift is about to arrive to the top, someone usually raises the bar so everyone can get off the chair.  I said, “Raising the bar.” A teenage girl sitting next to me immediately replied, “AT&T”. Originally, this was the motto of  Cingular , but AT&T purchased both Cingular and their motto.

Two more days of skiing and back to work. I love France in general, and Alps in particular.

Drinking coffee and not in Starbucks:

Heineken promises to entertain me. Yeah, right! As you can see, I'm not a college kid anymore. My fun begins with Hennessy XO.

On the way back, Swiss Air offered a wide variety of movies to every passenger. Unfortunately, the software development has been outsourced, and French, Germans,and other passengers had to make a tough decision while selecting a language of the movie. 

My blogs about last year's skiing are over here . 
 

1.    Joe should apply for a telecommute job. After getting and accepting an offer, he should hire a school or college student to be his hands. In this scenario, the employer doesn’t even have to know about Joe’s problems as long as the job gets done. Not too kosher, I know, but who said that the process of finding jobs is a kosher business?


2.    Joe can apply for a regular job in software, pass all the interviews and at the end honestly tell about his problem. Most of the potential employers won’t like it, but hey, every rejection brings us closer to our goal, right?


3.    Experiment with  Speech-to-Text programs that would allow Joe to turn the voice into the code. 


4.    Write the code manually, on paper, and use some OCR software to turn handwriting into code.

Now I’m asking for your advice – do you have any other than changing career suggestions to Joe? Please leave a comment to this blog or send me an email.

If you need a passionate C++/MFC developer, please write me a note at yfain11 at yahoo.com. Joe can either work in your office or telecommute. He may not be the one who types the code, but trust me, you can rely on this guy! Unfortunately, our firm doesn’t need C++ developers, but if Joe will decide to master Flex and Java, I’ll have better chances to help him out.

Updates.

Kids, do not try to improve your typing speed by enrolling into these special training programs or buying specialized software. One of the commentators stated correctly that software developers spend most of the time thinking, not typing. Speed typing can damage your life!

After publishing this blog I received  suggestion below from kind people from around the globe. I didn't put their names here as I don't know if they would approve this.

1. Start communicating closer with mother nature using the system of living by Porfiry Ivanov http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Porfiry_Ivanov.

2. One person contacted me suggesting a specific psychic who can cure Joe's hands.

3. I've just read your post, I've recently went through a lot of pages looking for some equipment for my grandma who has lost most of her sight. There are a few ways you can try to work on a pc. Voice recognition is fine, but it usually works better for natural languages. But I'm thinking that even even if variable names would need to be typed letter by letter, it could still work. Depending on the exact kind of disability, you can also use big onscreen keyboards - used either by touchscreen or mouse, maybe keyboards with bigger keys. One great thing is http://www.comfortkeyboard.com/foot_pedals.html which shouldn't be missed while taking about inputting code, as you can press shift, alt, ctrl without using you hands. Anyway, apart from looking through sites like http://www.enablemart.com/ it would be probably best to contact people who run them, as they have far more knowledge than programmers.
Hope everything goes well.

4. Google on baoding balls and keep using them constantly for a while:
http://www.baodingballs.com/healing_philosophy_of_chinese_health_balls.html

5. New Input interface from Tokyo:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=e5rDnSeRzwA

6. Play table tennis during lunch breaks

7. Voice recognition on iPhone:
http://www.dragonmobileapps.com/apple/dictation.html

8. Use the upcoming tablet from Apple called iSlate:http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=r0MFoW-_y78&feature=fvw
Typing on virtual keyboard may be not as painful as on a regular keyboard.

9. Consider yourself lucky - this was a signal from above that you need to change something in your life. Change your attitude toward yourself and your body and change your career.

10. Go to http://www.xtremesystems.org and ask someone to creat a keyboard with keys of the fish size each so there is no need to use fingers. Type with fists or the bottoms of the palms.

11. Start wearing red wool strings around your wrists: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_string_%28Kabbalah%29

12. Type with the other side of the pencils (the eraser hits the keys).

13. Use Algo Guide mouse: http://www.gizmag.com/algo-glide-mouse-z1668/13846/

Thank you for caring and keep'em coming!
If any of the above suggestions helped anyone with carpal tunnel, please add a comment here.''

Feedback from Joe:

Mr. Fain,
 
Reading this blog post was very heartwarming.  Thank you very much for your kind words and for reaching out to the programming community for help.  I have just read through the page and all the comments and will be reading up on all the suggestions given.  I'll let you know what I find out.  Thanks again for looking out for me.

In enterprise IT no one just raises salary if there is a way to hire someone else for less money.  It's just not in the corporate culture where people are treated as nameless resources. Have you ever wondered why policemen get lower salaries than Java developers even though people in the uniform risk their lives on daily basis?  It's because there are many people who apply for jobs in the police.  Preparing a mediocre policemen takes about the same time as preparing a mediocre Java programmer. The same holds true for good policemen and Java developers. Market rules.  If no one will want to go to police, their salaries and perks will increase. 

Today's trend is to move software development to India, where potentially 1.2 billion of people can become Java developers (they'll outsource all other trades to Philippines, Malaysia and Thailand). Not all of them will be good Java developers, but applying 20/80 rule, 240 million will, and they will lower the prevailing wage for sure.

Luckily, things are different in small companies and startups where GOOD Java developers are still treated nicely. So, if you need better pay and are ready to work harder, leave the corporate world and find a mom and pop software shop (make sure they have stable and positive cash flow).

To take advantage of the early bird prices register early at http://bit.ly/59DdIU.

If you can't make it to Brussells, I'll be glad to meet with you at 360 Flex in San Jose, CA on March 7-10, where I'll be presenting on one of the topic from this master class.

If you can't make it to San Jose, I'll be very happy to meet you at Flash and the City conference in May in New York City. Most likely I'll show you a really cool way of embedding a Flex application into a PDF file to be played by Acrobat Reader.

If none of these dates/locations work for you, you can always invite us to teach this class privately on site in your organization almost anywhere on the planet Earth.

Happy New Year!

Yeah, it's this time of the year. Again. Making predictions is so tempting... This year I'll cover just the iPhone.

1. Apple will let Flash Player on iPhone no later than October ’10. They don’t have a choice, if they want to stay competitive. Enough of a crippled Web browser already.

2. ActionScript won’t kill, but will seriously damage Objective-C as the language of choice for development of iPhone applications. The programs written in ActionScript will be a lot more entertaining and engaging than today's iPhone applications.

3. The next version of the Droid phone will be so cool, that I’ll switch from iPhone/AT&T to Droid/Verizon. Verizon’s phone service is clearly better. I just need a modern device. Lots of people in the USA will do the same. Should I put the money where my mouth is and purchase some VZ stocks?

OK. Two more. Not exactly about iPhone.

4. I'll still have to work for living in 2010.

5. I'll convince myself to get a new MacBook Pro. This time I'll try a large one cause it goes with 7-hour battery.

 A boss asks an engineer, "Do you like sweaty women and warm vodka?"

"No, both are disgusting!"

 "OK, then I'll schedule your next vacation in winter"

I'll be going there next week and, guess what, the Delta plane I'll be on has electric outlets! On a 11-hour flight this is called happiness!  

About a year ago Joel Spolsky and Jeff Atwood released a well designed and easy to follow knowledge exchange stackoverflow.com, where people earn reputation by suggesting the right solutions to people’s problems. Flex/Flash/Air developers started to post their questions there among the plethora of questions on other technologies and programming languages.

Joel and Jeff went one step further and are offering the engine (stackexchange) for creation of similar knowledge exchanges for discussion any kinds of subjects. Using this engine is not free, but our company, Farata Systems continues contributing to Flex community and will pick up the cost involved with running the knowledge dedicated to RIA technologies that produce applications to be deployed with Flash Player.

We are just starting and created a an exchange Built4Flash on stackexchange engine and would like to invite Flex, Flash, AIR, and Coldfusion developers to post questions there and provide answers to others. The URL of the Web site is http://built4flash.stackexchange.com.

Your questions and answers not only will help others in solving their issues, but you’ll also have a chance to  become visible and reputable person in this lively and Flashy community.

I really hope you’ll support this initiative.

This upcoming Monday, I’ll be speaking at the Flash Camp Wall Street in New York City. It has great speakers and the best part is that there’s only has one track so attendees will have nowhere to hide from my talk described below:

A boring presentation on Flex libraries and modules

Everyone have heard of RSLs and "Merged into code" link options. But do you really see the connection between the library linkage and your enterprise application performance? Do you know what and when goes over the wire to your users? Do you really understand the difference between the RSL and External linking of Flex libraries? Do you know when to use libraries and when to use modules? Do you know the difference between modules and sub-applications? Do you know how to arrange for a smarter RSL downloads? If you answered "Yes" to most of these questions, don't waste your time attending this presentation cause it’ll be so boooring for you.

In two weeks my colleague Victor and I will be teaching our advanced Flex 2-day workshop that becomes more and more popular. Moscow, Russia becomes our next destination after New York, Boston, Toronto and London.  If you can read Russian, here’s the link for you. In the first quarter of 2010 we are planning to run it in Warsaw, Poland and Kiev, Ukraine.
One person told me that it’s stupid to go to freezing Moscow in December. No biggies. We like cold vodka.

In March, I’ll be presenting at 360 Flex in San Jose . I love this conference for developers and by developers. If  I’d be sentenced to spend the rest of my life in a desert island and was allowed to take only one Flex conference with me, I’d take 360 Flex.  During this event I’ll show a cool little Flex application that lives inside the PDF and is played by Acrobat Reader.

Flash and the City is the new kid on the block.  Check it out: http://www.flashandthecity.com/#page=AllSpeakers .  Excellent faculty and aggressive pricing will bring several hundreds of Flex and Flash developers to New York City.  If everything goes as planned, I’ll be able to demo something that’s slowly brewing at Farata Systems under the working title “Fluid PDF Forms”. Duane Nickull’s band 22nd Century will be on stage helping attendees to forget everything they’ve learned in the classrooms.

I’ve mentioned just the conferences where I’m involved as a speaker. But there will be plenty of other gatherings of Flex developers during the same period of time. Be there.

I was able to find a similar image at http://ripsaw.cac.psu.edu/~mloewen/Oldtech/ASCII/Mona.jpg

These days anyone could do it using so-called ascii-art generator programs, and you can find lots of them by following this link.

But no matter how far technology goes, there's always a place for creativity. Today, I ran into an amazing image of Steve Jobs made out of the images of Apple's paraphernalia. This is a creation of the Flikr user tsevis.     Here's the URL. To really appreciate this piece of art, select the original size on top. My hat off to you, tsevis!

I've recorded the episode #14 of my No BS IT podcast where I explain my point of view: http://nobsit.libsyn.com/ .

But take a look at the ratings to the people's comments discussing this news http://bit.ly/2tIZQg.  Look at the massive negative ratings in comments to the post on new devices (this is just a tiny fragment of all negated comments):

One guy in the middle (-14) is asking, "What are we getting all these minuses for? Is this an anti-Apple campaign?"
The last post (14) in the fragment above reads,"I see that they are negating here, but I'm not afraid! The adequate people will come and will bring my comment to the positive territory, which will start the liberation of this topic from the evil forces! Apples will overcome!"

This picture worth a thousand words. How much hatred is there in that country? Unfuckingbelievable!  And this time you can't even blame the rulers of this country. Regular "IT-literate" citizens speak up by voting negative...

Reagan was right - it was an empire of evil 25 years ago and it remains the same.

In this interview we are talking about recent Adobe MAX 2009, using Flash for developing application for iPhone, upcoming Flex 4 framework, open source Clear Toolkit framework, the new book on Enterprise development with Flex  and more.

The other episodes of Speak Rich podcast are featuring the following well known software engineers:

Chet Haase, a member of the Adobe Flex SDK team
Stuart Stern, creator of a testing framework Flex Monkey
John Resig, creator of the famous JavaScript library and toolkit — jQuery

You can subscribe to this podcast at http://riarevolution.com/category/speak-rich/  

Imagine there's no iPhone
It's easy if you try
No hell below us
Above us only sky
Imagine all the people
Living for today

Imagine there's no iPhone
It isn't hard to do
Nothing to kill or die for
And no religion too
Imagine all the people
Living life in peace

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope someday you'll join us
And the world will be as one

Imagine no iPhones
I wonder if you can
No need for greed or hunger
A brotherhood of man
Imagine all the people
Sharing all the world

You may say that I'm a dreamer
But I'm not the only one
I hope Flash Player'll join us
And the world will live as one

Sorry, John :) 

This is our first attempt to run advanced training in the countries that are mainly considered as the source of the software developers for the USA and Western Europe. You might ask, “What difference does it make? A training is a training.” Actually there is a big difference for several reasons.

I've heard from some of the developers that employers in theses countries might not be interested in paying for advanced training classes.  Many of them are mainly interested in offering their employees an introductory training whenever the new technology becomes in demand (not to be confused with "becomes popular", i.e. ROR is popular among developers, but not overly demanded by the enterprises) so they can put their software developers on billing. But if a person is already billable, sending him/her to an advance training would increase marketability of this developer in the domestic market, which may not be exactly what managers of the offshore IT shops want.

US employers understand this too, but they are willing to take this risk realizing that their own firm would benefit from people with advanced skills, who are not immediately start looking for new jobs after attending such training. The mentality is different in countries-outsourcers. A large portion of offshore developers considers software development as a way to make a quick buck rather than a long term career. Hence, sell your skills today as if there may be no tomorrow.

Last year, I was presenting at a large conference for software developers in Bangalore, India. One of my presentation was not technical, but on what does it take to be a professional enterprise software developer.

After this presentation, a guy stopped by asking for a career advice. He’s an experienced programmer but was asking what’s the best way to switch from developing software to project management. I went, 
“Do you like programming?”
“Yes, I really do”
“So why do you want to switch?”
“I am 35 years old, and when relatives ask me what do I do at work, and since I’m not a manager yet, they think that I’m underachiever”. 

I can’t imagine that in the USA a person would want to become a manager just to please family members and neighbors. After that conversation I started asking other Indian developers if the story of that guy was an exception or the rule? They confirmed, “If there are no people working for you – it’s not considered a successful career”.
After having lots of communications with developers from Eastern Europe, I see that being a software developer is respected, but still, making a quick buck no matter what is an ultimate goal there.

In the Western countries, it’s normal for individuals to pay for training, which is not the case in the developing countries. They enroll into classes when their employers pay for it.  While Moscow is considered one of the most expensive cities in the world, we’ve set priced the training there at 50% of what we’ve charged in London. Different culture.

For us, this Moscow-Kiev training is not a money making project – we’ll be happy to cover expenses. We are mainly interested in getting more connections in that part of the world that, hopefully, may turn into something more tangible. I really hope that people will enroll into our classes, and I’ll have chance to visit Moscow, and Kiev, where I’m originally from.

If you are an employer operating in Eastern Europe and you do run projects that require software developers with advanced Flex skills, consider sending them to one of our master classes in December. The registration links are listed below:

Moscow: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/458588651

Kiev: http://www.eventbrite.com/event/459726053

Stay tuned.

Started while driving to the airport and finished in LA. How I spend my first day in LA, and the first major software announcement at Adobe MAX 2009: http://flex.sys-con.com/node/1130905

Till tomorrow...

 Stay tuned.