I will consider an appropriate response. It will come without warning.

That is very well said. I’ve changed blogging tools a ton. I’m always switching between Adium (with the new Facebook chat option) and iChat. I’m an on-again, off-again Tweeter. I haven’t tweeted since before Christmas, but I have updated family and friends on Facebook quite frequently. I have to agree with Tom and Mark here. I tend to dislike those who use Twitter to update their Facebook, and then use Twitter a lot. It’s overkill, especially if I already follow that person on Twitter.

But, to each his own in this sense, and like you said, it’s all beta anyways, so we’re constantly changing how we use these tools.

I use MarsEdit, and like it. I use Scribefire at work, too. It works okay for most things, especially when browsing and re-posting stories.

Happy New Year. Geeks rule!

I think a lot of courses end up in SWF as many of the “easy-bake” tools output that format. Those tools make it faster for the non-developer to make changes. It’s not so much arbitrary as focused on the short term cost (gotta get this done on the cheap) and less with the long term issues of updates/new features. Although i know people who have full catalogs built with those tools and update them each year. But their expectations are measured and they know the trade-offs they accepted when they standardized on the tool. So i think for Phillip not using flash speeds things up, for an SME not using articulate in PPT will slow them down and cost them more since they need to build the elearning some other way. That was my badly written point.

I agree that the potential increases the more skilled a developer is. But I know a whole lot of very talented developers that don’t comment their code — period. Someone else can’t easily maintain code that has no documentation. I comment the hell out of my code, which looks like amateur hour until someone who’s never touched my projects has to inherit it. I’ll take a copy-and-paster who at least documents well over an ActionScript deity who’s insanely versed in design patterns but can’t relate to a project manager what the hell his/her code does.

The development is fast for a developer in their chosen platform. I guess what’s bothering more than the arbitrary use of Flash for E-Learning development is the development that’s done with no thought as to the maintenance of the product.

I think I may have just added to my list

Things like articulate, captivate, qarbon and adobe presenter make it REALLY fast for middle mgt to produce ppt based page turners with some nice extras. For them that is really fast. Boot up PPT, make changes, re-export. So it really is your skillset and the time you have-a lot of those roads end up running through flash player.

For guys who have invested the time to get the ajax thing down-using jquery or rolling their own etc then they will be faster with that. But in my experience-something like Lectora was a pain in the butt to build courses for Chrysler a couple of years back. The output of a couple courses was over a thousand html files. Just awful to maintain and patch.