There are no GUI widgets in Flash / AS3. Everything is actually drawn on screen using vector or bitmap graphics. There are components that you can use that emulate widgets (drop downs, date pickers, etc) but those are not native. This means that they will work consistently across all platforms.

This demo is perfect because it shows a Flash / AS3 developer what they need to do to make sure their app works well across devices.

1. Figure out how your app elements might reposition themselves depending on screen dimensions.
2. Figure out how to scale your application and elements so things are usable.
3. Use interactions that work on press and not on MouseOver.

The rest doesn't matter. As long as the framework can draw graphics to the system consistently across devices, nothing else really matters. Flash is become the ultimate platform for GUI development.

As a Presentation Layer guy I can tell you that I’m seeing a shift of the types of successful developers out there in the field. Those developers that can bounce around between different API’s and syntaxes are the ones that are in demand and those developers that know one technology or platform well aren’t.

I personally think it’s because of the fragmented nature of our target platforms. Programming for one platform is a luxury most programmers don’t have nowadays. This is why frameworks came to be and are used so heavily. Just abstracting the differences between platforms is enough for most developers to ditch “hand coding” and deal with the integration issues. Look at the popularity of Javascript frameworks like jQuery. Nobody coded in the way jQuery works before jQuery (the whole chaining thing, and anonymous functions), yet now more than 50% of websites (made up number) use jQuery.

To become a successful developer in the next decade, you must be a generalist. It’s a completely different way of thinking. You have to actively try NOT to learn too much of one platform for fear that it’ll bias you against all the other languages you’ll have to work in. For example, coming from more structured languages, seeing the jQuery chaining and use of anonymous functions would turn off most developers and they’d shy away from using it. However, it’s the best tool for the job currently, and not using it based on it’s weird syntax would be a mistake. Same thing applies to MXML, WPF, LINQ, C#’s var, etc and all sorts of new improvements to languages that people don’t use because they’re “different” and give you “less control”.

But unemployment went up by how much? It's a bit under 10% now... that's 4% over a normal economic period, who knows what it would've been if it wasn't for the bailout.

The money wasn't supposed to completely stop the recession, just lessen it's impact, so we can recover faster.

Wait... we won Vietnam?

On the other hand I get 1-2 a week from big and small companies. I have my current job because one of those offers.

So it must be you :-p

In all seriousness, I actually ask each one of those recruiters to be "LinkedIn" with me, because when it's time for me to start looking, I have a bunch of contacts I can talk to immediately, and they've already looked at my resume and thought I was a good fit for a certain type of position.

It took about a few years to go from "never been on LinkedIn" to my current situation, so it's not like its something that happens over night.

Page me when you can write Facebook in ASM :-P

Right tool for the right job.

Well, it's "normal use" in Manhattan, or Boston, or most downtown areas of major cities (especially in the middle of the work day).