Lieven Cardoen

Last months I started blogging, and until now, I’m still doubting if it’s an interesting medium… I’m still searching what’s interesting to post, and what’s not interesting to post. Having a blog for me is not like having a diary, which mostly is never read by others. A blog for me should be something that’s usefull for others. But what is usefull? Maybe funny posts can be usefull too. So comes the question to my mind what it is that I know or could post that can be usefull for others. I could write about Music, Sports, Philosophy and my work, Multimedia. I think most of the times I will be speaking about Multimedia. Three years ago I started working at Indie Group in Kortrijk, Belguim. I had studied Master in Computer Sciences and wanted to program. However it had to be creative, so Multimedia was a good way to start. In my studies I never saw Flash nor a line of ActionScript. In those days, Flash was mostly used for little animations in WebSites. But I did like it, more than Java of C++, things I had studied. In the first year at Indie Group, I learned ActionScript2 and the frustrating job of creating Desktop Applications. We had a learning platform in ASP where Companies could create trees with several types of exercices. These trees were exported to xml and used in Flash to create Desktop Applications. In Flash we had some ten modules (swf), each representing a sort of exercise. Speaking to the Operating System (PC & Mac) was done with Director). So we had Flash to show content, interact, keep logs and Director to write things to the hard disk, open docs, access databases (V12). It was FRUSTRATING. Those Flash modules had identical classes, so if one of these classes changed, you had to compile ten Fla’s, Director was not very friendly, neither was Lingo (Language of Director),… Creating a Desktop Application was an Art, and I think it still is up to today. Making it work on PC and Mac, creating an installer that’s working on PC and Mac (and yes, also Vista), having no testpc’s (that made the test process easy, because there was none),… Sometimes I had to go to a school to go and look what went wrong. So, after a couple of cd’s, I knew most of the problems, but your boss doesn’t really take arguments like ‘Director is the cause’, ‘There are no Desktop Applications without problems’,…

The second year I continued creating Desktop Applications, but now we had MDM Zinc, which wasn’t fantastic, but it was better than Director, certainly if you were working with Flash, and you didn’t need that much access to the OS. I think we created some of the best Desktop Applications in the world, but it took a lot of effort, frustrations and budget! And on top of that you get frustrated Clients, because Flash was still buggy, Zinc could have updates where one thing was solved, but another thing stopped working, installers crashed on certain updates of Windows, opening URL’s from Flash or Zinc stopped working due to more security in Internet Exporer,…. Really, Deskop Application Developers have to handle tons of stress, work with scary third party tools  and never get much credit… Anyway, hated a bit that year…

The third year, I started off with a really great project for Bekaert using Flex, Remoting and .NET. It involved drawing in Flex, getting a lot of information from the user, storing it all in a database, doing complex calculations by a DLL, taking screenshots to create pdf’s, … At that time I had a rather good understanding of Design Patterns, OOP, Remoting Technology, .NET, Databases, … and the project was lots of fun, extremely interesting and the customer was satisfied! The second part of the year I started being more of a teamleader and project manager (mainly architectal analyses and following up certain projects). In the future I hope to do larger projects, involving more people, more structure, more analyse, more following up…

So, what about the blog, well, I will first try to think what people need the most out there. In the Flash/Flex/Desktop Applications world I sometimes miss clear examples, clear tutorials, good summaries of tools out there. So what I will try to do is take out some projects I done, and explain a little what technologies we used, why we used it, what I would use now I now more… Also some examples about Flex, NSIS, Fluorine, WebORB, .NET and thoughts on the world of multimedia.

Hasta la proxima! Ciao!