Mark Anders On The Zorn Team

David Mendels gave some great feedback:

Your feedback when we launched Flash MX 2004 had an influence on us. We stepped back and looked at where we were and by trying to be all things to all people, we hadn't advanced the expressiveness of the product sufficiently nor had we succeeded in really making it great for programmers looking for a more traditional IDE.

Now, instead of trying to do all things in one shot, we have some parallel efforts going on (there is another project coe-named "Zorn") that is aimed squarely at the programmer. We'll have a lot more to say about that soon. Folks like Mark Anders, who lead the .NET framework for MSFT are leading that.

Now, that said, there are two things here I disagree with:

a) Flash Professional 8 may not big advanced for programmers in the coding/debugging environment, but it is a radically more polished environment with very rich new APIs for programmers to do things that were simply not possible before.

b) Flex has been wildly successfull. We have exceeded our expectations dramatically and have over 400 enterprise customers. Major ISVs like SAP are depending on it and it is growing very nicely. We have always said that we were starting with an enterprise/server model and that over time we intended to tier the product line so we had the ability to individual developers and small business to take advantage of the programming model, as well as a high end enterprise product. We'll have a lot more to say about this too quite soon. (Note: one area we are late on has been the native .NET version of Flex. We've had an early beta in the labs for a long time but have not gotten it out the door yet.)

One thing that stands out most in my mind is the mention of Mark Anders on the Zorn team. Mark Anders definately stands out as someone who could really make sure that developers get what they need when Zorn comes around. I think Mark hits it right on the head in his blog with his comments on the current state of Flash development:

So Zorn is the new development tool that we're building to make it easier to build apps that run on the Flash Platform. Zorn is built on Eclipse and I think will help make Flash more approachable for developers. I've got to say that as I typed that last sentence, I almost had to laugh. Developers, especially really good ones, are usually the type of people who don't need things to be made more approachable - their whole reason for being is to figure out the hard stuff! Yet it's amazing how many great developers I've met who can't figure out how to do anything in Flash and just give up. The problem is that the Flash model, while very intuitive for animators and designers, is just completely foreign to experienced developers. Timelines? Movieclips? Layers with code? Huh? I'll be talking more about how we will address these issues in the months ahead. [1]

In any case, if you want to keep up with Mark's work at Macromedia, keep an eye on his new blog at: http://andersblog.com/. You might also be interested in his developer relations podcast interview at http://weblogs.macromedia.com/podcast/archives/2005/06/macromedia_podc.html

[1] http://www.andersblog.com/archives/2005/06/welcome_to_my_b.html