June 27, 2005
Macromedia Podcast #1
Check out the first Macromedia podcast, which can accessed here. I was interviewed by Mike Chambers for it, and Mike and Christian Cantrell also discuss a number of topics that may be of interest to people. Be sure to let them know if you like the podcast format!
Posted by Mark Anders at 01:07 PM | Comments (3) | TrackBack
June 17, 2005
Zorn Is Hiring!
Zorn is the codename for a groundbreaking RIA tool that Macromedia is building and that I’m leading, and the Zorn Team currently has an openings in both development and QA! Here are links to the job descriptions.
Developer Job Description
QA Job Description
It’s rare that one gets to work on 1.0 versions of major products, and believe me, Zorn will be a very important product. If you're a talented developer or qa engineer, I hope you'll apply!
Posted by Mark Anders at 03:42 PM | Comments (1) | TrackBack
Welcome To My Blog
Hello, and welcome to my blog! I'm not sure exactly what I'll be writing about, but with the project I've been working on for the past 7 months recently announced, I felt compelled to finally start one. Of course, it has taken me almost a week to get my blog up and running - more on that in future blog entries...
I joined Macromedia around 9 months ago, and run the recently announced project code-named "Zorn" with Sho Kuwamoto. My prime motivation for joining Macromedia was that I saw incredible things being done in Flash that just blew me away, but every time I picked it up, my eyes would glaze over. Within this dichotomy I saw a tremendous opportunity to help make building these rich internet apps easier for people like me.
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.
Prior to joining Macromedia, I spent 10 years at Microsoft. During that time, I co-founded the ASP.NET team with Scott Guthrie in 1998, and led the development of both ASP.NET and the .NET Framework for the 1.0 and 1.1 releases. One of the things that I really enjoyed about my time on NET was that the technology I was working on really helped developers build things more easily than they were able to before. I think that Zorn and the Flex framework, which is the underlying programming model that Zorn targets, will do similar things for developers looking to create rich internet applications.
Apart from work, I live in San Francisco with my wife Rosemary and our two pet Parrots, Kiku and Tank, and enjoy playing the guitar and photography.
Posted by Mark Anders at 02:54 PM | Comments (9) | TrackBack