I’ve always wanted to learn to make nice shiny things in Flash. I had a need for an indicator light this afternoon, and did a google search for “Flash radial gradient shiny light” and found Shiny Orbs — step by step instructions that helped me befriend the Flash gradient tools.

You can see the results of my learning experience:

Isn’t the Web grand? just makes a person want to give back… if you have a need for a shiny indicator light in your app, feel free to borrow red, yellow or green.

It’s the simple pleasures in life that make all the difference.

On Thursday night’s OpenLaszlo developer meetup, Don Hopkis showed off his latest creation, an interactive news network, offering a “fair and balanced source of shameless spin and political propaganda.”

Click the buttons along the top to see different views. The scene below is the “Q” channel:

Naturally you can modify views using Don’s famous pie menus (just click anywhere, choose “go away” then “camera’ to change what can be seen in one of the views)

Although Don’s presentation was my favorite, it was awesome to see such a variety of Laszlo applications presented from developers far and wide. Antun gave a great little introduction to LZX showing off how to write a layout to do fancy interactive filtering. It was great to see so many folks there. For more details on the meetup, check out TikiRobot’s liveblogging of the event which has lots of pictures too!

Nice (lengthy) article about by Jack Reeves about the whether software development is engineering. If its too long for you skip to the bullet points at the end. I enjoyed much of the prose. I thought he made some interesting points…

The final goal of any engineering activity is the some type of documentation. When a design effort is complete, the design documentation is turned over to the manufacturing team. This is a completely different group with completely different skills from the design team. If the design documents truly represent a complete design, the manufacturing team can proceed to build the product. In fact, they can proceed to build lots of the product, all without any further intervention of the designers. After reviewing the software development life cycle as I understood it, I concluded that the only software documentation that actually seems to satisfy the criteria of an engineering design is the source code listings.

…There is one consequence of considering code as software design that completely overwhelms all others. It is so important and so obvious that it is a total blind spot for most software organizations. This is the fact that software is cheap to build. It does not qualify as inexpensive; it is so cheap it is almost free. If source code is a software design, then actually building software is done by compilers and linkers. We often refer to the process of compiling and linking a complete software system as “doing a build”. The capital investment in software construction equipment is low — all it really takes is a computer, an editor, a compiler, and a linker. Once a build environment is available, then actually doing a software build just takes a little time. Compiling a 50,000 line C++ program may seem to take forever, but how long would it take to build a hardware system that had a design of the same complexity as 50,000 lines of C++.

I found this article while noodling around on the old software engineering as building architecture analogy. Despite Christopher Alexander’s views on building patterns that we borrow for software patterns, I tend to agree with James Shores’ reflections on That Damned Construction Analogy:

In the software world, there is no reason for us to follow the practices of an industry limited by Newtonian laws. We have no gravity. There is no inertia. Lines of code have no weight.

If we want to dig a metaphorical hole after pouring metaphorical concrete, there’s nothing to stop us. If we want to flip the software upside down and build a foundation after we’ve built the building, we can do it. Our only limits are in our heads. Once we stop thinking that software development is like construction, we’ll have one less limitation to struggle with.

His words inspired this silly cartoon which was much cooler in my mind’s eye than it came out in pixels, but I include it here to break up the large number of words that are referenced by this post :)