Futurescale has been tooling along for just over 5 years now, and so far it has been a terrific ride!

When we started back in 2004, it was a most fortunate time when Macromedia Flex was still a shiny new USD$15k per server geegaw that was clearly sent to us from the future by an advanced race in an attempt to save mankind, yet oddly unobtainable by any but the largest businesses with the hardest problems and deepest pockets.

From our earliest days, we began working with Universal Mind and Adobe to serve these clients. We spent our first two years flying all over the country to architect, build and train Macromedia (now Adobe) Flex for the likes of State Street Bank, WeightWatchers International, Lockheed Martin, Dorado Systems, Cisco, and Verizon Wireless. We worked on some great apps with some fantastic teams, did a lot of certified training, and headed out to MAX every year. Brett, Todd and Tom of Universal Mind are an unbelievable powerhouse of a company that from the very start were doing everything right. We had a fantastic time learning the industry ropes with them.

Then about 3 years ago, things took an interesting turn when our PureMVC Framework for AS3 started to draw interest from various corners of the globe. We really just wanted a code base that we could push to stability quickly and not have to change much thereafter. It would allow us to start building some products and not worry about having to upgrade to the latest version of the framework much. That meant keeping the scope tight and having a plan for adding functionality without affecting the core code.  We built it, it worked.

And somehow the interest in it grew without us ever doing anything that could really be construed as 'marketing'.  I did wear my PureMVC business card instead of my Futurescale card in my MAX badge one year when I gave a short talk about it at the opening night Ignite session. Todd of Universal Mind  caught this and asked if I'd changed the company name to PureMVC.

And for the next few years Todd's jest seemed almost prophetic around here. As the framework matured and people began submitting  demos and utilities, we struggled to get a website up to support everything. We found a fortunate ally in CVSDude, a leading provider of Subversion and Trac hosting. They agreed to support our open source project with unlimited repository space. And that availability allowed us to put in an infrastructure to support the PureMVC Manifold. People began submitting ports of PureMVC to other languages and platforms from the iPhone to Silverlight. Wow. But management of it all became an unbelievable task consuming about 20 hours per week minimum. All for an open source project. But what else are you going to do if people like something you've built and it lets you make a living building apps based on that code? You support it.

So over the last few years, in addition to doing a lot of PureMVC community work (from countless hours tending forums to a European speaking tour taking in London, Hamburg and Copenhagen), we've also launched off into several lines of development on various products and projects. Many of those projects have sat on a side track long enough for the weeds to overtake them. But the promise of a framework that doesn't change much has proven itself, as we've pulled those projects off their circa 2007 side tracks, brushed them off and found them working like new. We tend to build things for ourselves first, so if we still haven't got a suitable replacement for the thing we started to write 2 or 3 years later, we still have a reason to work on it.

And that's a big driving force behind our new web site; to give a home to some of these poorly tended projects, look at them in the light and see that their merits remain. To drive some stakes in the ground in terms of when we would like to deliver working versions of these projects and/or products. And to administer beta programs for the code as it becomes ready for others to work with. Have a look around the new site and see what we're working on.

Another reason for the new website is that we just had to do something to showcase the awesome new logo that was created for us by the folks over at GoMedia. Their crack design team took our vaguely described notions for what what we thought we'd like our logo to look like and turned it into a really great design that we're extremely proud of. We were floored by how great they were to work with and how dedicated they were to doing this right for us. We needed a website that matched that quality of their design and it's been quite a challenge, but today, we're proud to launch Futurescale V3!

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