Blog Pav Blog – Page 14 – "A great leap in the dark" Thomas Hobbes

It’s been a couple of years now since I wrote a Flash game. They’re fun and easy to write and don’t take much time. For me the fun is in the design and programming. The result of the process might be a playable game–but I make no promises.

I’ve taken down all my old work, since it was out of date and I barely functioned anymore. That’s the problem with programming: The platforms keep changing. The Flash CS 4 of today is a whole new ballgame and I need to get up to speed quickly so turned to my favorite Flash platform how-to author: Colin Moock. I think I have every book he has written on ActionScript that is published by O’Reilly. Since beginning of the 21st century Mr. Moock has exhibited genius when writing about Flash programming.

Moock’s current Flash programming book is Essential ActionScript 3.0 from 2007 which is old by Internet standards. But I’m a couple of years behind the times and EAS3 got me up to date quickly: Subclass Sprite and Shape not MovieClip, how to use events, how to animate, how load resources, how to redraw the stage intelligently. Nice stuff that is scattered all over Adobe’s support site. Apparently there is more Internet info on Flash and its buddies ActionScript, Flex, MXML, and Air then on the Mac OS X APIs!

One technology I want to use in my game is Moock’s Union Platform. It looks like a quick and elegant way to incorporate multiple users into my game. We talk a lot about the power of social networking and data mining but under all that talk is the power of multi-user applications. I remember years ago when I worked at Apple asking Kurt Piersol what comes next after OpenDoc (the hot technology of 1997) and he said MUDs: Multi-User Dungeons. And I said Huh? Isn’t that a buch of guys fooling around in a fantasy world online? Yep, he replied and smiled mysteriously.

12 years later I get it. Any with Moock’s help I’ll put MUD goodness into my little Flash project 🙂

You need to stop reading this blog post and do some sorting. I don’t mean later today, when you have spare time, I mean right now. Don’t worry, I’ll wait.

OK, did you do it? If you did leave me a comment about what you sorted (prioritized, categorized, arranged, screened, rated, grouped, graded…). If you didn’t leave me a comment about why you didn’t.

Enough with the homework.

It took me a long time to figure out that sorting is the most important thing to be done.

If it didn’t take you as long as me to figure it out gratz! You are winning the game of life.

But if you need more hints here are my reasons (in order of importance) why sorting is the first thing you do at in the morning and the last thing you do at night.

If you don’t sort the odds are that you won’t do the most important thing first. You’ll most likely do the most urgent thing first. There are wickedly huge differences between urgent and important. Ask Keen PDA if you don’t know the difference.
You have to do a lot of sorting to get good at it. Putting your priorities in order is actually hard work (I think that’s why most people don’t do it). You need to become an elite performer in sorting and that takes practice–lots and lots of it.
Not everything you want or should do is going to get done in your life time. You have to make choices. I know, making choices sucks. But that’s the way it is for us mortals.

I have this great book, The Order of Things (There is one other, more important book, by the same title and you should read it first). I bought TOOT back in 1999 from the discount bin of a bookstore in Palo Alto. I was working at a startup, BitLocker, and we thought we might want to create an online database with most of the world of things already represented. The big problem with databases, after you have the right schema, is data entry. Its boring, easy to screw up, and not fun to double-check. So I wanted to pre-populate the BitLocker with all the bits that a consumer might want to track–All the CDs ever released, all the comic books ever published, all the automobiles ever manufactured. Then when you wanted to track your collection of comix it was just a matter of search and selection (something that is actually fun and easy).

I thought TOOT might help me design the UI of BitLocker and prioritize the search results so that the bits would appear in a natural order that the majority of users would find sensible to navigate. But I was doing things for BitLocker in the wrong order. What we needed first was a good business model. Instead we build a cool Java-based online object database with an early version of an AJAX UI.

Naturally BitLocker’s bubble burst along with the rest of the dot coms. So stop reading this and go sort your to-do list!