Farata Systems      

For some (good) reason we are getting bombarded with Flex training requests of various kinds. Not sure if this is a side effect of our recently released book Enterprise Development with Flex (it stays in the Amazon’s bestsellers list in several categories) or maybe it’s just something in the air…

Here’s my current calendar:

April 26-30: Teaching a week of Flex intro at Home Depot, Atlanta, GA
May 10-14, Teaching Adobe Certified Flex 4 (!) class at AT&T, New Jersey
May 15, Speaking at Flash and the City in New York on LCDS alternatives.
May 17, Teaching a one-day workshop on modularization of Flex applications (btw, if you enter discount code saynotowifi you’ll get $100 off the price)
May 20-21, Teaching a 2-day Advanced Flex seminar at AT&T in New Jersey
May 24-28, Teaching an intro Flex class at Home Depot in Atlanta, GA
June 7-8, Teaching a 2-day Advanced Flex seminar for a private client in
Casablanca, Morocco.
June 21-25, Teaching an Intro Flex class to a private client.

My colleague Victor is finishing consulting project and will be running two two-weeks training engagements for a private Middle-East client. This will be a a mix of formal classes and one-on-one mentoring sessions.

On our waiting list, we have two requests for a one-day Modularization workshop from and two-day Flex overview from private clients. They want me it in May…

Also, we’re planning to start running online live Flex and Java training classes, but that’s in July.

And let me tell you, I love being overloaded with training requests!

Yakov Fain

We’re proud to announce  a new consulting service by Farata Systems:

We suggest a solution to your Flex problem within two business days. You pay us after that whatever you feel is fair.

Here’s how it works:

1. You contact us explaining the issue your enterprise Flex RIA is facing.

2. We analyze your issue and within two business days suggest a solution to your problem.  Most likely we’ll either need to review your code or will ask for a test application that reproduces the issue you’re having.

3. We’ll send you a link to pay for the service with an empty field “Amount”. You enter the amount and pay whatever you feel is fair. No matter what amount you are going to enter (including $0), we’ll take it, no questions asked.

This offer is valid only to enterprise teams working on Flex/Java projects. This is not an offer for fix bugs of every software developer working with Flex .

Why have we decided to announce this new service? Well, technically it’s not new. Pretty often we are presented with a problem by a perspective client, then we spend some time finding the proper remedy, present it to the requester, which pretty often turns into a new contract. It just seemed the right thing to explicitly offer this service when many project managers may not even know that there is an affordable solution to their problem.

Too good to be true? Try it. Fill out the Contact Us form at faratasystems.com. New clients only.

Here it goes – Apple officially locked itself out from majority of development community again. While people are trying to find justification for such move ( http://www.taoeffect.com/blog/2010/04/steve-jobs-response-on-section-3-3-1/ ) and while it came as a shock to some Adobe developers ( http://theflashblog.com/?p=1888 ) I actually have deja vu of 1991 / NeXT Computer fiasco. NeXT was the best PC of 1991. First browsers/servers were developed on NeXT platform. I took time to learn Objective-C and developed for that platform. But proprietary language and hardware lock drove the company in the ground. The truth being told, people make the same mistakes again and again, and Steve Jobs is no different. So the only question remains – will it will be fixed soon enough via Adobe/Apple negotiations and public outrage or Apple will win this battle and loose the war to Google, RIM and Microsoft.

Technically Apple’s terms and reasonings are absurd. The quality of the code is not related to the language. Specialized p-code languages sometimes outperform native ones by highly optimizing (even writing in assembly for specific CPUs) critical parts. In case of Flash/AIR a lot was done to support GPU that would take ages for regular C++ developers to even approach. P-code toolkit can include generation of C/C++ code – however it would be just a waste of developers time to do so.

I have been using Apple products exclusively for the last 3 years and I really enjoyed ability not to deal Windows problems during the development process and still reliably deploy (thanks to Adobe) on 100% of PCs regardless of OS. Performance was never an issue for our apps, and we had steady job helping others to achieve good/excellent performance.

Apple has 3 month to fix this mistake. After that developers will make choice – Adobe or Apple. It will mean significant boost for Google, RIM and Microsoft – and end of Apple growth. At that time, if not resolved, I will be selling my Apple stock. Reasons are simple : in the last 3 years I personally spent about $15K on Apple products, planning to spend at least the same amount over the next 3 years. I was planning to replace my development machine Mac Pro dual Xeon/20GB/10TB for faster one by the end of the summer – looks like it will be Linux server as without platform neutrality it will be easier to at least have development and deployment platforms the same. With developers fallout getting tools and new software for OSX will be even more difficult, so developers need to move toward growing platform. It is really a shame, as Apple really had a chance to become the biggest player in the new market.

In meanwhile, it is time to shop for Nexus phone and Linux development machine.

Sincerely
Anatole Tartakovsky