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I like to tell people I was a professional ActionScript developer at Microsoft. This was during peak Silverlight days. I was working on the MyFordTouch system

I like to tell people I was a professional ActionScript developer at Microsoft. This was during peak Silverlight days. I was working on the MyFordTouch system and the UI was written in Flash by a contractor, then handed off to Microsoft to fix the bugs. It was a nightmare to work with and flash in a car worked about as well as you'd expect it to in 2012 (badly).

georgemcbay 1y ago
I worked for a company called Chumby ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby ) a few years before that and our device was Flash focused. It was basically an "Internet Alarm Clock" that could run Flash apps. Having a dedicated "Internet Alarm Clock" made sense back then though after the iPhone caught on it became a pretty hard sell to have a dedicated device for this purpose. At the time I found ActionScript 3 to be a very good language that one could structure programs in very nicely, but ActionScript 2 was kind of nightmareish and any project in AS2 that had grown to a certain size was bound to be horrendous unless the person creating it was extremely meticulous with how they structured everything. Chumby devices were stuck on the AVM1 (ActionScript 1 & 2) virtual machine for most of the company's lifespan though we did support AVM2 (AS3) very late in the game when the larger 8" devices were released. For most of my time there I worked in the Haxe language because it allowed you to have an ActionScript 3 like language that could be compiled down to AVM1 bytecode (among other targets) and it had a pretty amazing compiler macro system that was great for doing all sorts of precompute optimizations which were very useful given how anemic the hardware we were running on was. Its been years since I've used Haxe but it appears to still be a thriving, if somewhat niche, language targeting a lot of different platforms. We also had access to the underlying Flash Plugin C++ code as part of our deal with Adobe and I worked in that code directly for a while to extend a custom Chumby flash player to support braille devices as output for a joint project accessibility demo we did with NPR. Whatever suspicions people who have worked with the Flash Player as a blackbox might have about it being a horrible ball of spaghetti inside, I can vaguely confirm.
- RandallBrown 1y ago
  I had a Chumby One! I loved that little alarm clock. Being able to wake up to Pandora felt magical at the time.
- detaro 1y ago
  fun, googled for the braille thing and the best google hit was an old post of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287689
  - georgemcbay 1y ago
    Yeah unfortunately (in this case, but probably fortunately in others) the Internet isn't as "forever" as we once thought. Looks like the link I provided in that post is dead, but there's still a wayback machine snapshot of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20160624205520/https://sites.duke.edu/nab2012/2012/05/03/npr-demonstrates-technology-to-make-radio-more-accessible/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160624205520/https://sites.duk... The device with the card "Captioned Radio" under it in the 2nd photo is an Insignia Infocast 8", which was basically the same thing as the Chumby 8", just a white-label version produced for Best Buy with a cheaper plastic outer casing and a customized dashboard app with their branding all over it. Best Buy/Insignia was a retail partner of chumby for a time (they also sold a rebranded version of the Chumby One). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuNIUkg3GZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuNIUkg3GZc

georgemcbay 1y ago

I worked for a company called Chumby ( https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Chumby ) a few years before that and our device was Flash focused. It was basically an "Internet Alarm Clock" that could run Flash apps. Having a dedicated "Internet Alarm Clock" made sense back then though after the iPhone caught on it became a pretty hard sell to have a dedicated device for this purpose. At the time I found ActionScript 3 to be a very good language that one could structure programs in very nicely, but ActionScript 2 was kind of nightmareish and any project in AS2 that had grown to a certain size was bound to be horrendous unless the person creating it was extremely meticulous with how they structured everything. Chumby devices were stuck on the AVM1 (ActionScript 1 & 2) virtual machine for most of the company's lifespan though we did support AVM2 (AS3) very late in the game when the larger 8" devices were released. For most of my time there I worked in the Haxe language because it allowed you to have an ActionScript 3 like language that could be compiled down to AVM1 bytecode (among other targets) and it had a pretty amazing compiler macro system that was great for doing all sorts of precompute optimizations which were very useful given how anemic the hardware we were running on was. Its been years since I've used Haxe but it appears to still be a thriving, if somewhat niche, language targeting a lot of different platforms. We also had access to the underlying Flash Plugin C++ code as part of our deal with Adobe and I worked in that code directly for a while to extend a custom Chumby flash player to support braille devices as output for a joint project accessibility demo we did with NPR. Whatever suspicions people who have worked with the Flash Player as a blackbox might have about it being a horrible ball of spaghetti inside, I can vaguely confirm.

RandallBrown 1y ago
I had a Chumby One! I loved that little alarm clock. Being able to wake up to Pandora felt magical at the time.
detaro 1y ago
fun, googled for the braille thing and the best google hit was an old post of yours: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287689 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=13287689
- georgemcbay 1y ago
  Yeah unfortunately (in this case, but probably fortunately in others) the Internet isn't as "forever" as we once thought. Looks like the link I provided in that post is dead, but there's still a wayback machine snapshot of it: https://web.archive.org/web/20160624205520/https://sites.duke.edu/nab2012/2012/05/03/npr-demonstrates-technology-to-make-radio-more-accessible/ https://web.archive.org/web/20160624205520/https://sites.duk... The device with the card "Captioned Radio" under it in the 2nd photo is an Insignia Infocast 8", which was basically the same thing as the Chumby 8", just a white-label version produced for Best Buy with a cheaper plastic outer casing and a customized dashboard app with their branding all over it. Best Buy/Insignia was a retail partner of chumby for a time (they also sold a rebranded version of the Chumby One). https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuNIUkg3GZc https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tuNIUkg3GZc