I've really enjoyed having access to the Flex SDK subversion commits, so that I can see the actual changes going into Flex 4. I have an email subscription to the commits, which I read over when I find the time. I've seen a couple of interesting things go in:
Watchpoints for debugging
Compiler performance improvements
A new Flash format tag, DefineFont4, and generation from OpenType CFF font files
One gripe, however, is that it's obvious from the level of commits showing up that not everything is visible. The team must be working off of a branch, as there's not nearly enough activity showing up for the Flex team. Hopefully they'll change this practice soon and start using the public branch.
Comments (4)
I do exactly the same, very usefull.
even better you can even try for yourself some changes b compiling the SDK, cf asdoc changes/bugfixes.
Posted by zwetan | May 29, 2008 10:08 AM
Posted on May 29, 2008 10:08
Yes, we are admittedly working off a branch. We largely had to do this because we're working with Flash Player 10 which wasn't publicly available until recently. Now we're trying to put together some documentation that explains the overall work that we're doing, which will in turn open up the path for sharing more specifications along with the code that's been written so far.
It definitely is not the ideal scenario, but it's a compromise we've needed to make as we build a product that unfortunately is not in a 100% open source stack.
There is no doubt that some of this has taken longer to get public though than we want. We're still learning how to make this kind of thing work.
Posted by Matt | May 29, 2008 11:58 PM
Posted on May 29, 2008 23:58
Thanks for the info Matt.
Posted by Brian Deitte | May 30, 2008 9:57 AM
Posted on May 30, 2008 09:57
That's what i love about Adobe (and Macromedia as was) and their development teams. You post something about their product and they reply in person. I don't know about you, but this is as important as the quality of product and the speed of new development. The openness and amount of feedback from the development teams really makes me think of Adobe as a development partner rather than me just being another customer.
Top stuff. Thanks for the information Mat.
Glenn Williams
tinylion development UK
flex-ria.com
tinylion.co.uk
Posted by Glenn Williams | June 1, 2008 12:04 PM
Posted on June 1, 2008 12:04