Living the startup life in Atlanta, GA.

I’m a pretty avid video gamer. I find them fascinating and would rather be playing games than most other leisure activities. Therefore, I don’t think spending a few hundred dollars on a console, or driving around at 12:00 AM on a Sunday is excessive. My wife, on the other hand, thinks games are un-interesting and total waste of money at time. Or, I should say, thought.
Before I got the Wii, it was just another relative large expenditure by the techie husband. Now that we have one, she loves it. Along with pretty much anybody else who visited our house over Thanksgiving weekend. Nintendo wanted the Wii’s appeal to extend outside gamer-dom and they hit that nail exactly on the head. Not one person that played the Wii thought it was anything less than fun. This includes gamers, non-games, tykes and parents.
Wii Sports is a blast, especially in a room full of people. Seeing the avatars respond to your moves is a very neat feeling. Most of the non-gamers were thrilled that they could actually accomplish something in a game, without having to invest time in a complicated control scheme. Anybody could just jump in and start playing.
Nintendo definitely took care of the non-gamers and the party gamers, but what about us introverted folks who enjoy complex story driven single player games. For us, Nintendo created The Legend of Zelda: Twilight Princess. For the first 10 hours, the game has been just incredible. I haven’t enjoyed a game this much since The Ocarina of Time. The only complaint so far is the sword motion is a little counter-intuitive after decades of button mashing.
However, this last point is exactly why Wii has so much appeal. While Sony and Microsoft are off innovating on technologies (cell processors, next-gen dvd, hd, etc.), Nintendo focused on the interface. Sure the PS3 and Xbox 360 look more real, but playing the Nintendo is more natural. I know which one I’d rather have.

I just have been really busy with work and family stuff. It’s the holidays; time gets tight. I actually have a ton of stuff to blog about, from javascript design patterns to my new Nintendo Wii. If you look in the “Now Playing” section, you’ll see a few Wii games in the coming weeks. Once I get a form up to email me, I’ll post my Wii code as well.

Recently, in the course of my profressional life, I’ve had the “opportunity” to use Adobe’s newest attempt at web publishing, Flex2. On the surface, it looks like a pretty neat technology. One of the major faults with the standard web technologies (HTML, CSS, and JavaScript) is that they aren’t standard. Each browser has it’s own quirks. Another major downside is the lack of a solid visual layout tool that can create reasonable CSS and XHTML.

Flex2 promised answers to both these problems. First, the output is a Flash application, which means that it would run on a common interpreter in all browser. The paid version also comes complete with an IDE that will do code completion along with visual layout. Had Adobe managed to use these two features to thier full potential, they would have a leg up on the plain AJAX crowd.

But of course, this is Adobe, the company that would use legal means to secure ROT-13 encryption. It’s also the same Adobe that doesn’t seem to think Linux exists, a fact that tends to irk your’s truely.

The problems for me started at download, when I discovered that there wasn’t an IDE for Linux. To me, this makes little sense. The Flex2 Builder is based on Eclipse. Eclipse is plugin based and runs on Linux, however, the plugin was only available through the Windows installer. Eventually, I got the command line tools so I could, at very least, build the project. However, this meant that I was short the visual tools, making working with Flex no easier than HTML/CSS.

Flex’s next attempt to clutch defeat from the jaws of victory is the funkiness of ActionScript3. It’s not possible to pass objects around without shelling out for the $20,000 per CPU server component. Therefore, all data must be passed in XML format. This creates two problems. Many Flex components are very picky about the exact format of the XML that comes it and are not easy to use with a more generic object model. The second is that ActionScript3 tries to make your XML into an object that you can reference using dot notation (ex. element.child.innerchild[2].text). However, since this is just syntatic sugar on top of XPath, you are forced to deal with all of the quirkiness of XPath. One great example is that an array of objects becomes a single entity and causes error conditions when accessed in array form.

Overall, my impression of Flex2 was that it’s much like a trophy wife, expensive and beautiful on the outside, but rotten beyond skin level. It will eat your babies.