Articles by Jesse Randall Warden

AJAX World – Personal Branding Checklist

Tue, 27 May 2008 15:30:00 EDT

This is a checklist of items you need for an all-encompassing personal branding strategy. Personal branding is the process of marketing and selling yourself as a brand in order to gain success in business. Personal branding is a continual process just as knowing yourself is a continual process. As you grow, so does your brand. The need for personal branding arises from the fact that globalization has increased competition in the workplace. As the wheat is separated from the chaff, if you are left standing, you are left standing with others of good caliber. The playing field is now that much more challenging since your competition is as good as, or better, than you.

Top Ten Tips for Working with Cairngorm

Wed, 10 Oct 2007 13:45:00 EDT

Since people's programming background varies in Flex, these are not facts, just my opinions based on my experiences using ARP & Cairngorm for over 2 years. Furthermore, there are alternatives to Cairngorm, I just cannot try them as much as I like. Now that I'm doing product work, I can't just 'try this framework on this new project'. I live in the same code base longer supporting existing clients, and can't do dramatic re-factoring without getting fired.

Adobe Flex Builder Tracer Bullets

Tue, 21 Aug 2007 16:45:00 EDT

So how do you write Flex Builder Tracer Bullets knowing that Flex can be a RAD tool and Tracer Bullets are good to do? Flex Builder can render MXML components pretty accurately, whereas ActionScript components are not so accurate. This means you can see, in the Design View, your application as it's coming together. This includes GUI controls and your use of states. Having to compile your app just to see one component visually is slow. Build in MXML because it's faster to write, and faster to see.

Job Interviews: Adobe Flex and Flash Career Guidance

Wed, 15 Aug 2007 12:45:00 EDT

Some things that I learned early in my career that originally helped me succeed, I believe are now hurting me in job interviews. One of the pros to typing via dynamic languages and forgiving compilers such as ActionScript 1.0, Ruby, JavaScript, and others is that you can quickly code things that work. In a lot of the early agency, multimedia, and small software company work that I did, these technologies were great. They didn't get in your way, and they empowered you to quickly create programmatic solutions that were enhanced or even driven by good designers. You could hit insane deadlines, recompile changes quickly for a client, and react flexibly to ever-changing, almost fluid requirements...if any.

Integrating a Flash Interface into Flex 2

Thu, 08 Feb 2007 11:00:00 EST

My goals here are to integrate www.adobe.com/products/flash/ Flash with www.adobe.com/products/flex/ Flex, i.e. not just treat it as a design asset tool, but as a contributor to the functionality of the client; using Flash for enhancing the design, and helping reduce transition code which tends to be verbose in Flex.

Jesse Randall Warden's JesterXL Blog: Binding in the Trenches

Tue, 01 Aug 2006 11:45:00 EDT

For those of who know of Flex 2, Adobe's tool for programmers to create Rich Internet Applications, it has this one feature that sets it apart from Flash, and incidentally, its brother Spry shares. It allows you to put a variable surrounded by curly brackets, and at runtime, anytime that variable changes, it'll update whatever variable is being set to it.

My Website + Google = My Online Identity

Thu, 20 Jul 2006 12:45:00 EDT

I just got an e-mail from a recruiter of sorts. They want me to do phone Flex/Flash consultation for a 20-40 minute paid phone call. Apparently, Ether (www.ether.com) could make money if they employed some sales teams. It seems all of California is reaching out worldwide, looking for people to come to live and work there. The reason? To be tech lead in their startup and manage contractors and outsourced individuals to make bling and fame in Web Deux Point OMG. If my hunch on what this call is about is correct, this'll be the third startup this month looking for Flexcoder meat.

Code Reuse - Pros and Cons

Mon, 17 Jul 2006 10:15:00 EDT

Depending on the scope of your project, you may have the opportunity for code reuse. The reasons you might want to do so are two-fold. First, you reduce duplication of efforts. If you have already created a hyperlink enabled CellRenderer for your DataGrid once, why do it again? Second, you create, or build upon, an ever growing utility code base. While it may not be in the 'utils' package per se, you'll soon end up with re-usable events, common GUI controls and widgets, and yes even utility classes. Whether by merely being in a different folder means the client doesn't own it is up to you or your sales team.

Delivering Captivate Content on the Web

Thu, 11 Aug 2005 11:00:00 EDT

With Macromedia Captivate, you can create interactive tutorials with recorded narration, built-in testing, with an easy, painless, and quick process. But now that authors can so easily create tutorials, they have time to think about the best way to deliver their content to end users, and to think about what works well with the Captivate workflow.

Why Central Matters

Wed, 07 Apr 2004 00:00:00 EDT

Central is important to developers for a number of reasons. First, Central provides an application framework with which you can sell the applications you make. You just have to add a few purchasing details to an XML file and edit a Web form. Additionally, the user is presented with information about how to purchase.

JavaScript and Flash Panels

Mon, 02 Feb 2004 00:00:00 EST

Macromedia products are ever more extensible in the 2004 releases. They make it easier for developers to create custom tools and extension scripts and then package those scripts and interfaces to distribute to their fellow designers and developers.

From Design to Reality

Mon, 17 Nov 2003 00:00:00 EST

This article will cover techniques in dealing with application state and complex animations. Additionally, I've included a few quick primers on how to implement some of the designs a Flash developer can be expected to put into Flash as well as a sample application file.