NumbKnuckle » 2010

I have joined litl!

08/23/2010 in RIA View Comments

Looking forward to the next chapter…

I am stoked to announce that I have joined the great minds at litl as a Channel Developer. While I love the city of Boston, I will remain working remotely, for now. I can’t express how happy I am to be able to tele-commute and be able to spend more time close to my family.

I have been an enterprise developer at King Pharmaceuticals for the past 3 years and am ready to get back to the other side of the firewall. While King is a great place to work, both for East Tennessee and for the team members, there is little chance to do much public facing development. Also, I am really looking forward to working with a team of peers working on similar projects that I can contribute to and learn a lot from. To me, a new job is not only a chance to bring my own experiences to the table, but to soak up as much of the massive brain power of the other team members as possible.

I started my career in this industry working for a start up that was very innovative, pushing the boundaries of what could be done with the tools available, and had unbelievable talent. The group at litl reminds me somewhat about a start up I worked for so many years ago (pre dot bomb) and for so long ( at least the good parts ).

Since beginning my career in the mid 90’s I have been a 3D artist/animator, Flash and Director developer, web designer/developer, project manager (gasp) and an enterprise developer. After all of that Flash is still my passion and I am super excited to have the opportunity to help create some ground breaking experiences on the litl web book and soon the litl web-connected TV product.

What I look forward to most is being able to rub elbows with some of the Flash community’s most talented: Kevin Suttle [ @kevinsuttle ], Chuck Freedman [ @chuckstar ], Ash Atkins [ @razorberry ] and Kathryn Rotundo [ @krotondo ] just to mention a few.

My FlashBuilder 4 color scheme.

08/16/2010 in RIA View Comments

Something that still isn’t very intuitive to do is changing the color scheme on the editor in Eclipse. FlashBuilder 4 is no different, but hopefully this post will help ease the pain. To me a darker background with soft colors helps me concentrate more than a white background and black text. I once had a professor tell me that staring at a white background is no different than staring at a light bulb…light is projected from behind the screen.

Inspired by Kevin Suttle’s awesome instructions on how to customize the color scheme in FlashBuilder 4, I am listing my own settings below. I have always been a dark gray / blue type of designer and the colors I use in my editor work best for me. As with anything, pick what works best for you and if you want, share them. You can find these preferences in Flash Builder by following the links shown before each set of values below. I thought about posting my actual preference export, but there is a lot of personal system and software information saved in there. Instead of risking the removal of a key line in the preferences I am just listing the values that I changed within each section. This will give you a better idea on what changes anyway… You may notice that even my lighter fonts are still not white, but #DDDDDD.