The CC generator even had a little bit of assembly code inside of it (to change the appearance of characters, and to use text colors other than the 16 standard ones). It used part of my screen framework too, for the buttons. Overall that app was a moment of brilliance despite its, err, shady reason to be.

The sign one was “Watersig”. That was also pretty cool. I remember I even released it as shareware but I ended up sending it for free to whoever asked. I don’t think it used the mouse though — I had a hard time getting mouse input in QB, I used some assembly to do that but it was pretty flaky so I never really employed it anywhere.

The Maiden app (and the e-mags I created using part of the code) was awesome, it even had the doom-like “page switch” animation where text would just slide down the screen. And the e-mags would fade in and out *smoothly* from screen to screen, also using assembly, and were all programmed by changing a text file — the emag exe was just an engine to the dat file. Much similar to what I do with XMLs and sites in Flash today!

My biggest app was one I never released, “Watermail”. It was a QWK reader. It was pretty awesome looking. But I started running into memory problems and just abandoned the project. Learned a lot from it though.

You know, sometimes I find it really hard to believe some of the stuff I created. That was around 12 freaking years ago. I look back and say “holy fuck that boy was a genius” but then I realize it’s me and then it seems like I’ve been moving backwards. I’m creating some fun stuff, but programming shit for myself and a few nerd friends for no reason at all, and still adding every little detail and perfecting the code and making it super beautiful just because I wanted to… THAT is amazing.

I don’t know. It’s crazy.

And your (i think…) bluewave addon/plugin to select your sig with the mouse?

and ofc, the super cool MAiDEN app

damn.bas

I’d like to think of myself as having more to offer than just programming and learning the latest language.

If I have to go back to testing how my applications work in multiple browsers, I’d rather open a milkbar!

I guess it’s difficult to know exactly why there’s no love for flash on the ipad.
I would love to be building web UIs that leverage multi-touch.

Great post.

- Tahir.

This post was mentioned on Twitter by Zeh: Something I just remembered http://zehfernando.com/2010/something-i-just-remembered/...

Along all the tools you mention, I still remember the trepidation coming back home to unpack and install the fifteen 3.5″ Disks of Visual Basic 3 (paid roughly a 1000$ of today….) and how can I forget the marvel when I realized that Delphi 1 was compiling everything into a single exe with no DLL, VBX and so and it also allowed me to create my own components with the very same language/compiler….. good times.

By the way, I recently discovered that there is an open source project with deliver al almost exact copy of Delphi on Mac OS (and other platforms) called Lazarus and it is part of the FreePascal project. It is very good.

I like your separation of RIA development from Flash. I believe people will store more and more things “in the cloud” including applications that we currently run from our hard drives. New HTML standards will always be necessary, but it will be impossible for such a standard to be “cutting edge”. Things like Flash and Silverlight (or whatever we may be using in 10 years) will always be necessary to push technology forward, so that the standards can follow.