FITC Video: Jim Corbett and Colin Moock
One FITC video stands out for me, Jim Corbett and Colin Moock. Jim Corbett has some real historical perspective and technical details about Flash back when it was Macromedia Flash—and they talk about what is happening today with Flash. This past-present coherence wrapped in technical details is what attracts me.
So, these two uncovered many details about Flash that I have inferred or felt over the years. Here are some I can remember right now:
- Macromedia Director functionality was systematically cannibalized and moved into Flash. The technical reason for this was a design ‘flaw’ in Director: it was designed for high-bandwidth CD-ROM applications—not the low-bandwidth 1990s Web.
- Jim Corbett admits that the culture at Macromedia was very different than the Adobe company culture. Macromedia was more hippie than Adobe. This might explain why I was contacted by David Edwards from Authorware team back in 1995.
- There is a sizeable chunk of the Flash “developer community” that will probably never deliberately use ActionScript 3. Some code-generation magic is definitely out there—maybe a product like Adobe Flash Essentials or another domain-specific offering like Breeze.