Radley Marx

You know that coffee you’re drinking? It’s really Flash

Remember those coffee commercials in which a fine restaurant would replace really good coffee with a mega-corporate canned version and nobody would know the difference? (or maybe they would…)

This weekend Adobe Flex evangelist Ted Patrick officially leaked the upcoming name & branding change of Flex Builder to Flash Builder.

While most of us Flash developers know that Flex runs on the Flash Player, this info isn’t known to a particular group: enterprise managers.

For years, Adobe was doing a “reverse switch” – packaging their premium blend of Flash as a common enterprise IDE (Flex Builder) to attract the Java crowd with corporate swill that was actually yummy and visually gorgeous. 

 Flex on Flash Player wasn’t a secret. But enterprise developers have had to be careful to avoid mentioning this detail for fear they’d be forced to switch back due to prejudices and misunderstanding of their higher-ups. In their minds, Flash was bad: a proprietary platform used by memory-leaking, processor-sucking, SEO-less eyesores. In contrast, Flex Builder was a true application IDE with dev-happy concepts like Eclipse under the hood and the open source Flash SDK.

Many of the Flash/Flex technorati have weighed in on the change and all offer full support.

My only regret is this is one more nail in the coffin of Flash maintaining it’s artful nature and slowly dissolving into “just another” Java project. The good news is that the Flash Builder naming debate can start now… and be old news by FlashCamp. This debate has already impacted a few events for me, and I prefer FlashCamp to remain productive and fun.

I embrace Flash Builder. But I’ll miss the awesome Fx logo (and stickers).

Doggie Handbag Mix

This is a warm-up session mix I did for the It’s (for) the Dogs Knees benefit last Saturday. It was recorded on the fly on the day before the party, so it’s almost everything I played with just a couple of exceptions.

For those who may not know, handbag is a common term used by DJs (etc) that refers to a type of popular dance music produced in such a way that women are inclined to go out in groups on the dancefloor and dance around their purses.

In this case, a lot of the tracks are electro and trance released over the past few years. It’s a little enthusiastic – I went nuts with the filters because I was having so much fun and even tossed in a couple of super cheesy bits. Artists include Ils, 30Hz, Midfield General, Kidda, Underworld, Fatboy Slim, and Book of Love.

Here’s the mix: Doggie Handbag Mix (1:30, 207MB, 320k)

It’s (for) the Dog’s Knees

Over the weekend I played my first “live” DJ gig in over 5 years for a benefit for a friend of a friend’s dog. Dino needs expensive knee surgery, so like most folks in SF they held a party and asked everyone to donate. The Stargaze crew provided sound, beats, and lasers for the night and we all had a lot of fun playing on a real sound system in a warehouse.

One main highlight for the night was playing with Kevin’s full-spectrum laser. It’s been a while since I’ve been to a rave — when I left blue lasers were just making an entrance. I’d seen his laser once before, but that was a few years ago and I didn’t really get to see it as well as last Saturday. I couldn’t shoot video from my iPhone, so I took some stills and made a fun gif animation.