Typing with one hand is hard :-(
About a week ago, the Flex team took the afternoon off to go to the park and play kickball. Yeah that’s right, the game for little kids, like baseball except that you kick a big red rubber ball.
Wheeeeeee *owwww*. Catching a fly ball (at least I caught it), I jammed my finger. Turned out I fractured the fifth metacarpal bone in my hand, and will be wearing a brace and/or cast for four to six weeks.
This is making it ridiculously hard to type. I don’t really want to take any time off work, because I just got back from a nice long sabbatical and am eager to get back to Flex Builder features. So I’m just going to keep plugging away, albeit a lot more slowly than usual.
Voice recognition software helps with email and the like, but not with coding. I even had another weird but creative idea that didn’t quite pan out: one funny thing about this is that with the brace on my hand, it is actually easier to type on my iPhone than on a computer keyboard. (I am writing this blog post on the iPhone.) So, I installed VNC software on my computer, and then installed Mocha VNC Lite on my iPhone. That way, I can use the iPhone got typing on my computer! But alas, when you do that, you don’t get the iPhone’s auto-correct capabilities, and without that, the iPhone was too tedious to type on.
Anyway, I am plugging away on lots of really cool debugger features for Flex Builder 4. I can’t tell you what they are, but I just can’t resist mentioning that our awesome summer intern, Sedat Akkus, has implemented one of the most-requested debugger features. So what is the feature? Well, that’s a secret, but it rhymes with “fronditional schmakepoints.”
There are one-handed keyboards out there. For 4-6 weeks, it might be worth it.
Mike, get better soon!
>> So what is the feature? Well, that’s a secret,
>> but it rhymes with “fronditional schmakepoints.”
I can’t rhyme it cool, but think this is long-awaited "breakpointness continuum" feature?
BTW, for Flex Builder 5, I think It would be great to have voice recognition! Let’s code with sound voice and free our arms.
Imagine all that people who code at the streets. Young man comes along, shouting in his cell: "Compile in strict mode, and this exclude classes in package named "trashcan"!
So. Coding with voice is far future, but what about supporting very basic voice commands like "Debug" or "Continue"? I think this will be at least great marketing feature :)
How about your finger, dude? You are just already two month not blogging. Hope you feel better, Mr. Kickball-Guy.
You’re right, I’ve been a slacker! Finger is better. Thanks for prodding me, I’ll get back on the blogmobile.