My work or yours?

I was talking with one of my mates the other day about using open source code for commercial products. We touched the subject of maintainability of it. One of the things I said was that if you are going to use it make sure that it is well documented, because most of the time the open source community code comments for any language is very lazily written. I was also going on about if you leave a company and not acknowledge that the code you used is open source and developed by someone else plagiarism might come into play.

Now I love open source code! The thing I am getting at though is make sure that you reference where you get it from, document it to the standards that you use – so you can understand it, and most of all understand how it works. If you don’t understand how the code works, and you just throw it in your work with out knowing the ins and outs, when something goes wrong! Ahhh good luck with that!

Just thought I would mention it because I get work that has been done by someone else who has used open source code, and you can tell that they used it because it only gave them the result they wanted. They didn’t care how it worked.

If you are trying to make money out of your software take the effort to learn how it works and take it to your level of coding, don’t sell your self short! Who want’s to be average? Be the best!

July 18, 2008
Tags: Open Source

Flex 4 available for download!

That’s right Flex 4 (Gumbo) is available for download. Of course it is only in beta as it wont be realease until 2009. I suggest that you download it anyway if you are a Flex or AIR head so you can get a feel of what the next version will hold.

Ely Greenfield has post a video on what is in Gumbo, you should check it out.

July 15, 2008
Tags: Adobe, Flex, Gumbo

ActionScript 3.0 a brief intro

Even though ActionScript 3.0 has been around for a while now, some developers are still hesitant to migrate to ActionScript 3.0.

Grant Skinner has put together a slide show for a intro into ActionScript 3.0. If you have every wanted or even got the inkling to have a crack at ActionScript 3.0, this is a resource you should check out.

ActionScript 3.0 Slide show!

July 4, 2008
Tags: ActionScript