Welcome to My Blog

Hello, and welcome to my blog! I’m not sure exactly what I’ll be writing about, but with the project I’ve been working on for the past 7 months recently announced, I felt compelled to finally start one. Of course, it has taken me almost a week to get my blog up and running – more on that in future blog entries…

I joined Macromedia around 9 months ago, and run the recently announced project code-named “Zorn” with Sho Kuwamoto. My prime motivation for joining Macromedia was that I saw incredible things being done in Flash that just blew me away, but every time I picked it up, my eyes would glaze over. Within this dichotomy I saw a tremendous opportunity to help make building these rich internet apps easier for people like me.

So Zorn is the new development tool that we’re building to make it easier to build apps that run on the Flash Platform. Zorn is built on Eclipse and I think will help make Flash more approachable for developers. I’ve got to say that as I typed that last sentence, I almost had to laugh. Developers, especially really good ones, are usually the type of people who don’t need things to be made more approachable – their whole reason for being is to figure out the hard stuff! Yet it’s amazing how many great developers I’ve met who can’t figure out how to do anything in Flash and just give up. The problem is that the Flash model, while very intuitive for animators and designers, is just completely foreign to experienced developers. Timelines? Movieclips? Layers with code? Huh? I’ll be talking more about how we will address these issues in the months ahead.