Yesterday a colleague from downstairs (where .NET folks huddle in the dungeon-like darkness and pretend to enjoy using Visual Studio … unlike on my floor where designers and Flash devs flit about in a world of sunshine and butterflies) asked me to make a very simple little SWF … just a marquee basically, similar to the Windows “Marquee” screensaver with text scrolling past and wrapping around.
I approached the job with totally the wrong mindset. I wrote classes, and an XML schema, and planned on making the text fields dynamically generated on-the-fly and to read in a stylesheet, and the text from an XML page. Then I started thinking about how different amounts of text would change the size required for the TextFields – and how I could relate that to the SWF – which should, of course, work on a variety of screeen sizes …
Luckily at that point I went to the cafe and got a large latte. Under the effect of the caffeine I realised the obvious truth: I didn’t need flexibility, extensibility, or to attempt to solve a whole class of marquee-style problems. I just needed one five-minute job with named stage instance TextFields and a single document class (not timeline – even in a hurry there are some depths I won’t stoop to). Hard coded text. Ta-da, problem solved, and didn’t distract me away from my main project, a big 3D-based Flash site.
Classic sledgehammer-nut scenario. Sometimes you just have to forget all your good habits and knock something together …
HAHAHA “downstairs (where .NET folks huddle in the dungeon-like darkness and pretend to enjoy using Visual Studio”… love it.
Yeah the problem stems from the developers mindset to be lazy and productive at the same time. the “I know they will want to do…. so I may aswell just break this into a class” mindset when all they really wanted was text dropped on the stage and animated.
I personally try to say “Ill can hack it together but don’t expect great things” and the combination of the word “hack”and “dont expect” usually triggers their expectations to bubble to the top.
Whats your 3d flash site… tell us more!
You’re right Campbell – it’s Larry Wall’s three programmer virtues – laziness, impatience and hubris!
Unfortunately I can’t say too much about the 3D site .. apart from the fact it’s based on Papervision3D, it’s due at the end of the month, and it will probably require a lot of caffeine and brain straining! :) I’ll post when it’s done.
What has happened to all of the civil drafters with MX and 12d knowledge?!
it’s cool~