Today I will learn:

• What makes the Flex MXMLC (MXML compiler) tick.

I will be travelling to San Jose today to attend a week long internal developer’s conference at Adobe. In preparation for some minor compiler surgery I will be digging into the compiler guts on my flight there. I did learn this morning that a good portion of the compiler is based on Apache Velocity, so I’m snagging some research material and filling up the laptop.

While in San Jose I will also be attending a day long Hydra boot camp. If you aren’t familiar with Hydra (name to change soon), you can start here, or just Google around. Essentially though, it’s a shader language that will allow you to write to-the-metal (well, soft-metal anyways) pixel shaders for raster image manipulation. The sneak peaks making their rounds internally of potential use cases have been mind blowing.

So, lots to learn this week (and still make headway on my rework of the Flex State model).

Last week I learned:

• Internet Explorer will finally nix the ‘click to activate’ behavior it’s had for years.

Sorry, I forgot to post this earlier, but last week I did receive confirmation from Microsoft that they have in fact settled their browser plugin grip with Eolas and will be soon releasing an update that finally rids the world of the ‘click to activate’ step for interacting with web based plugins (inclusive of Flash). But hey..fwiw, don’t stop using SWFKit and family, they are still a much cleaner way of embedding.