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A Proud Member of the Reality-Based Community
About Me :
I'm a grownup nerd living in the Boston burbs. I write computer programs for a living and plays for fun.
I'm married to a wonderful woman, and we share a nice little house with our daughter and our cats.
I'm a humanist, a technologist, an artist, and an idealist. I believe in reason, freedom, love, equality,
and democracy. (Did I mention that I'm
an idealist? I did, OK.)
I'm also a pragmatist and an empiricist. I reject ideology and dogma, especially when they conflict with
practical facts (i.e., pretty much always). I particularly hate willful ignorance, which tends to go hand-in-hand
with ideology and dogma.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Like the alignment of the planets, this blog gets updated as I have the time, inspiration, and inclination to do so.
Sunday, January 18, 2004
Leapster Rocks!
So it was long overdue, but I finally got to play with a Leapster a couple of days ago. What a fun product! Basically a hand-held Flash player with a really nice high-res color LCD screen, Leapster is being promoted as an educational toy in the tradition of Leapfrog's venerable product line, with lots of new animated courseware.
My interest in Leapster is mostly from a professional standpoint. I'm a professional programmer who has taken a turn into Flash development at Convoq, Inc. As I've noted in the past, I like developing in Flash quite a lot, even though its limitations as a platform are irksome. However, seeing Flash spread into new platforms, such as handheld computers, cell phones, and customized hardware such as the Leapster, is very exciting. If it continues on the trend it's on now, Flash will be blazing a trail into becoming a universal client technology. That's quite surprising! Java made the promise of "write once, run everywhere"; Flash is as close as anyone has ever come to actually delivering it. I hope that the language and debugging tools evolve into something more suited to serious applications development. In fact I'm confident that they will. [ Yes, Dan, I have drunk the Kool-Aid...]
I had a great time playing with the Leapster, which is whole lot different from just reading about it. I have no idea if the courseware will be any good, or if toys like this really help anyone learn anything. My personal guess about "educational toys" is that they're probably about as effective as books, only more expensive, but what the hell, it's still better than TV.
So it was long overdue, but I finally got to play with a Leapster a couple of days ago. What a fun product! Basically a hand-held Flash player with a really nice high-res color LCD screen, Leapster is being promoted as an educational toy in the tradition of Leapfrog's venerable product line, with lots of new animated courseware.
My interest in Leapster is mostly from a professional standpoint. I'm a professional programmer who has taken a turn into Flash development at Convoq, Inc. As I've noted in the past, I like developing in Flash quite a lot, even though its limitations as a platform are irksome. However, seeing Flash spread into new platforms, such as handheld computers, cell phones, and customized hardware such as the Leapster, is very exciting. If it continues on the trend it's on now, Flash will be blazing a trail into becoming a universal client technology. That's quite surprising! Java made the promise of "write once, run everywhere"; Flash is as close as anyone has ever come to actually delivering it. I hope that the language and debugging tools evolve into something more suited to serious applications development. In fact I'm confident that they will. [ Yes, Dan, I have drunk the Kool-Aid...]
I had a great time playing with the Leapster, which is whole lot different from just reading about it. I have no idea if the courseware will be any good, or if toys like this really help anyone learn anything. My personal guess about "educational toys" is that they're probably about as effective as books, only more expensive, but what the hell, it's still better than TV.
