Mellow Machines

I finished reading the Objective C 2.0 Language Reference from beginning to end. Great documentation, but reading this probably wasn’t the best way to actually start building an app.

The iPhone itself isn’t as interesting as the coming change it represents . It’s a harbinger of a new lifestyle (well, more new to Americans), regardless of which carrier or manufacturer “wins” the market. I look forward to spending less time tethered to the PC and spending more time interacting in the real world.

In the three years since my last blog post, I have shipped some Microsoft products, co-founded a newspaper web startup, co-founded a Flex consulting company, did some traveling, and lots of other stuff. I want to start blogging again, so it’s time to archive the old blog permanently and create a new one. As Picasso said, “Every act of creation is first of all an act of destruction.”

Why did I stop blogging? Participating in the Flash community has been a big part of my life since 1999, so going offline in 2005 was a hard choice. Earlier in 2003, I had joined a Microsoft team in incubation to create UI design tools for a hot new Windows framework. The work focused exclusively on desktops, so permission came easily to continue blogging and speaking at Flash conferences on my own time outside of work. I naively saw a clean separation between day job and hobby, but a couple years later, Microsoft modified its desktop technology to compete directly for Adobe’s browser plugin market, while Adobe adapted its browser plugin to compete in the desktop and enterprise markets. Perceptions about this new competition really affected the tone of my community interactions, so I decided to stay out of the growing rhetoric, and focus on helping my teammates finish what we started. The v1.0/1.5 product cycle ended up taking over four years…  I was the only original program manager who stayed for the entire march. After leaving Microsoft, I had a lot of fun and success doing Flex and Flash consulting again with some talented people, but I never managed to resume blogging or to participate in the same way again. This will be a different blog for a different time. Bye old blog.

“You can always come back, but you can’t come back all the way
Only one thing I did wrong
Stayed in Mississippi a day too long” — Bob Dylan

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P.S. Many thanks to Sarah for continued encouragement to get back into the blog conversation again!