Who'd be an early adopter?
In the aviation industry the test pilots get danger money (and the love of the airline's vice-president according to Green Lantern comics). In the chemical industry early adoption is only ever inflicted on animals. But in the world of software, geeks just love playing guinea pig; they will eat each other for a sniff of new technology.
This is nothing to do with 'cool'. It's not like the music industry's early adopters; who instantly go off a band they've raved about as soon as they 'sell out' by getting a song on the radio. It's computer software, it's the antithesis of cool. Don't get me wrong, I make my living as a programmer, and I love what I do, but it doesn't matter how many times you've re-read Neuromancer, computer programming still isn't cool. And the early adoption urge is what separates geek from uber-geek. There is kudos in certain circles if you are one of the first to have installed Linux 2.6. These aren't circles most people would admit to moving in though.
But the early adoptors provide a great service to the developer community. They are the only ones crazy enough to leap in at the deep-end, into muddy waters. When an early adopter encounters a bug, they can't just google it, they have to come up with the work-around themselves - and then hopefully write it up on their blog so the normals can google it when they get to that point six months later. But for what? What is their reward for fearless wrestling with half finished software?
These are the thoughts that have been going through my head the last few months playing with the Flash 9 Alpha, trying to get a head start on ActionScript 3, with nothing but online documentation and the blogs of even earlier adopters than me to help. And they are the thoughts I have been having this week bashing my head against the Alpha of Adobe's Apollo.
Article comments
1 - Stefan Schmalhaus
Very entertaining thoughts on early adopters. I enjoyed the reading!
You should have mentioned that this book is also available as free PDF download from the Adobe Labs site.
2 - John Dowdell
Hi, the O'Reilly intro to Adobe Apollo alpha is indeed "a gentle introduction and a very quick read, just about enough to get you started and give you the idea", and I believe its text was finalized before the alpha release was locked down.
For ongoing discussion of usage, I'd recommend the Apollocoders mailing list on Yahoo Groups, which seems to have a bit more action than the Apollo webforum on Adobe Labs.
Here's one forum discussion on configuration issues, which may contain the missing key on your situation.
There are other Apollo discussion groups springing up, but the Apollocoders mailing list currently seems to have the most interactive conversations.
jd/adobe
3 - zenbullets
Thanks John,
If anyone does want a go at fixing my Apollo issues, the bugs are detailed here.
4 - John Dowdell
That link goes to the Adobe webforums on Apollo, and the question turned out to be "Can you tell what is preventing me from HelloWorld to work?" There were three replies from Mike Chambers trying to clarify what might be different there. Mike wrote that book on Apollo, and travels the world showing people Flex, writing new projects, writing new tutorials. You've gotten attention right from the top. :)
For that question, you might post a short little bump to that original thread... you already had The Man working to get the details on your setup, and I suspect it's a mere work overload which caused that last set of basic background info to remain unanswered. Does that sound good, or are you past a HelloWorld app already...?
jd/adobe