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Not like there hasn't been 100 zillion posts like this, but yay! Flex 2 is here, congrats to the Flex team. Y'all kick ass and here's a big shout out to your hard work and dedication. Thank you for being as active in the community and helping all of us make the leap onto the bandwagon a mere hop ;) If you don't know what I mean, then you should be checking out how the Adobe team is all over flexcoders, forums, and the blogs. Thank you for letting me style the DateChooser component now the way I want!!! And thank you for helping me solve some pretty retarded problems: Mike&Mesh, you two are lifesavers. --end of what appears to be blatant ass kissing but really is just pure excitement--

So in reference to my earlier post about flashcoders, you can buy a save flashcoders tshirt if you would like :) I pretty much have Large and Medium left, and I'll price them at 10 bucks ( that means I break even, yay!) Here's the pic: Shoot me off an email if you're interested.

So I was just called out by Tom Lee in his post A sad day on flashcoders. His post reverberates my sentitments when it comes to the state of my once beloved flashcoders. In April, I actually had some t-shirts made, and if I need to explain it, you simply do not get it. . Yes, I went that far. And now that Tom outted me out, I suppose I might as well say my two cents, something I have done in the gotoAndSay podcast I do with Leif Wells, and something I just generally do when anyone is willing to listen. I'm such a chick :) First, let it be known, I came to the flash community from Director. I am sure the Director community at one point was a wonderful, loving, supportive network of people. But as for my experience, it was very closed, very independant and well, any kinda resources for Director development were limited to perhaps 2 decent books and a couple of websites ( my beloved Director-Online, thank you Darrel Plant). Posting to a list ( Direct-L) and getting a good response was a rare occasion to celebrate as the list was like a ghosttown. I started off as a lurker on the Flashcoders list. Not a bad thing, in my opinion. Most of it seemed over my head at the time and I just kept on to absorb what I could. Flashcoders became a great resource for me, chances are if i was stumbling with a problem, someone else had too, and if I searched the archives I would more often than not find what I was looking for. Granted, searching the archives has never been beautifully executed in the history that I have used Flashcoders, but heh, it was there, and there to be used. I'm sure I posted my share of stupid questions. I'm sure I was quick on the draw in hitting the submit button. But I learned, and I learned what the line was, because often Branden Hall would post a " OT- the end" type of warning and the list be like hushed children in a library and back to being productive and focused. Now, OT is pretty much an everyday occurance on Flashcoders with people posting responses back to questions/postings that are more Craiglist than Flashcoders. Seriously. That made me giggle re-reading that, but I can't think of a better description. I'm still on Flashcoders, I still try to help out and respond where I can but I'm going to be right up front for the reason that I more often than not - don't reply. I don't enjoy getting 600 emails a day in inbox where many of them just have LOL!, or HTH! or some other random web etiqutte one liner response that does nothing but fire off a " You've Got Mail" signal to however many thousands of people are subscribed. I also don't enjoy the intellectual jousting that turns into a my wang is biggger than your wang, bring out the ruler to prove it, type of behaviour that seems to happen. Maybe I am particularily sensitive, since I don't have a wang, but it seems like I respond and actually put time and effort into my response and someone has to respond with the " you forgot this and this " and not in an " in addition to what someone said " tone, but in a " that last gold star is mine" kinda way. Fair enough. I think its great people expand on topics and add their thoughts/experience - but people forget, with emails, come tone. Its another form of communication - it will be interpreted. So when someone responds to a flashcoders post with a " right from the docs " , they aren't shitting gold bricks of happiness- they're a wee bit agitated that someone forget the golden rule - RTFM. After many discussions about this very topic, even one very late drunken debate at FITC with Ryan Matsikas ( www.chewtinfoil.com),Lanny McNie and Tony MacDonell - the conclusion was that you simply outgrow the list because at some point it no longer aids you in learning. I don't totally buy that either, there are still people posting interesting questions and challenges that stimulate great conversation. I just think people need to be told to shut it. Maybe not in those words, which is why i don't offer to moderate it... So we created tshirts. We being I kinda came up with the idea and Ryan did the illustration. I have some if someone is interested in picking one up. But the only way to save it is to banish the OT which will hopefully make room for interesting questions/problems etc.

I'm not typically one for being late, but punctuality had to be thrown out the door on this one. I guess now is as good as time as any to show people what has consumed me fully for the past couple weeks or so - the beta of my360Zone- a flex dashboard that allows you to compare achievements between friends in new ways to stoke the competitive spirit. Right now the data is static - but we are hoping for that to change soon. We have tons of additions and to us, this is merely a proof of concept for very few of the features we envision being part of the application. I'll have lots to say about this project but first, a little bit of a background on the project. my360Zone is the result of a collaboration between Jeff Conrad and myself. If you don't know Jeff, you should. Dude is smart in that annoying smart kinda way, that you can't help but be envious of. Jeff masterminded the whole idea, and I just jumped on board. Jeff and I collaborated digitally - we've never really met in person, unless a halo lobby conversation counts. We live in different countries. MSN, Flex, trac and svn are our friends. This project d proved to me, if nothing else, that working in a team environment for a Flex project is entirely feasible with the given tool set, if not even efficient and productive. There is a lot to say about the development and collaboration process, things we learned and how we managed to work together which I can hopefully spread across a couple of blog entries. We learned a ton of stuff ( like skinning can be a real bitch for some things...) and it'll be nice to share that with people and share the vision of the project and its evolution. Thoughts, comments etc always welcome. More to come as I plan to break down the process, architecture, tips and tricks etc. We're late for the derby but right on time for the vision.