My post yesterday on the Flash v. HTML 5 “debate” managed to get this blog a lot more eyeballs than it’s had in years – probably since 2003 if I’m honest. And yeah, that was kinda fun – I haven’t really stirred up a hornets nest like that in a long time. What I really appriciated was that some people actually wanted to TALK about the issue and just yell over each other. I actually learned a lot from the discussion – both in terms of better understanding other’s views and in finding out about some pretty damn cool projects.

On the views side – I heard from a Flash “hater” that was very, very clear in why he disliked Flash down to a use-by-use level. He’s on linux, and while that is a distant minority platform, his experience with Flash has been appalling and I totally understand his frustration. When Automata builds Flash-based projects we always work to provide the best solution we can for users who can’t or don’t want to run Flash, but this is far from a universal technique. To see or do many things online you just HAVE to have Flash – many times when it, quite frankly, makes no damn sense (I’m looking at you Chipotle, and no, you don’t get a link). I think we, as Flash developers, need to advocate better for the PROPER use of Flash – since quite frankly, every bad use of Flash makes all of us, and our favorite platform look bad in the eyes of a growing number of users.

On the project site, one of the most interesting projects that was brought to my attention was Raphaël – a JavaScript library that wraps up the various vector drawing/animation functionalities present in modern browsers (VML in IE and SVG in everything else) into a single library that works just about everywhere. It looks quite easy to use and it is quite suitable for production work (as evidenced by this site for the the new Nissan Leaf).

I feel like I was more organized when I was younger (high school, definitely not college!) but I think that may just be a case of selective memory. After all I do remember spending more than one lunch period in the library doing homework or an essay that was due that afternoon. Maybe back then I just didn’t know how poorly organized I was so it didn’t bother me as much as it does now.

Anyways, the source of my scheduling issues seem to stem from a strange artist-like quirk of my personality – I really need to feel inspired in order to sit down and code. If my muse is there it can be scary how much code I can write in just a few hours. On the flip side, forcing inspiration can be hard – very hard. I seem to want to mentally sabotage the effort – there’s always something more interesting or more important I should be doing.

I think taking the next step to better self-scheduling/not procrastinating is difficult because I’ve been very successful at slaying the first dragon in this quest – hitting deadlines. I’ve been really good over the past year with the vast majority of my deadlines. There have been a few nasty outliers, that’s for sure, but for the most part I’m getting quite unaccustomed to the lovely sound a deadline makes as it whizzes past.

Now that I’ve dealt with my issues well enough to not hurt other people, the only person I’m still negatively affecting is myself. I still have to put in a good deal more stressed-out crunch time and heroic efforts than I would like. It’s one thing to beat my muse into submission so that I don’t negatively affect someone else and a whole other thing to try to smack my muse down to the point that I don’t have to work late to make that happen.

The technique I’m currently trying is a combination of better/earlier delegation combined with daily or near daily minimum levels of effort for ALL projects I’m currently working on. I sure do hope this works because I’m getting really tired of working late but at the same time I actually love the pace of my schedule!