04Jan Now=new Year(2010)

As the new decade begins, millions of people reflect on their situation and ponder how to proceed into the future. In many ways, 2009 was a game changer for the multimedia industry. We have seen Unity and the Unreal engine open to their doors to free indie developer licensing. This illustrates that corporations are realizing that even a great multimedia software infrastructure can be shoved aside for lesser alternatives that however have the strong community around its platform.
We have seen also a greater focus on one language compiling to multiple platforms. Adobe is pushing for Flash to compile natively to the iPhone and pushing the Flash player to all other mobile devices. Unity also aims for compiling to PC, Mac, and iPhone with little changes needed to the source. Microsoft continues to push XNA that has the boon of both PC and XBOX360 support. Of course, haXe continues to gain in popularity as it is a single language that translates into other platforms (Flash,  PHP, Neko, and C++ SDL).

Over at Bill Sander’s blog AS3 Design Patterns, he talks about his journey into design patterns and that his New Year resolution is “Improve nailing down relationships between classes in design patterns.” This year I have expanded my knowledge of design patterns in areas that I do not normally require in my everyday work, but just learning their existence has given me the enlightenment of not just how the design pattern works but ‘why’ it exists and what would happen to a system built without it.

My personal development New Year’s resolution is: “Learning to prototype quickly while keeping modular using loose coupling.” Being able to produce a skeleton of a system quickly helps to a keep the momentum of a project going and to isolate design flaws. However, rapid development can cause a system to be become stagnate and locked into a certain implementation. However, wise programming decisions like using the acquaintance relationship between classes and employing design patterns like strategy or template will make my prototypes open enough to evolve into the final product without infrastructure rewrites.

Update: While technically the new decade starts in 2011, I find the debate mute as people will refer to this era as the “2010’s“.

Image (c) to mattthesamurai.deviantart.com

Author: Jonathan Dunlap Jonathan is an experienced software engineer, sole blogger of JADBOX, author of FlashMVC, humanitarian, and has contracted work for Microsoft, Coke, and Disney.