journal

The little AIR app we created for the Adobe AIR release got best of show, tied with Buzzword! Check out the article… http://www.webware.com/8301-1_109-9878909-2.html

Following the release of Adobe AIR, my company, the ichameleon/group, has been working with Adobe and the New York Times on a small AIR demonstration app called SHIFD.  SHIFD is an awesome little app that saves data you see online and you can pick it up on the website, your mobile phone, iphone app or the AIR based desktop app.  The Adobe Air app was written entirely in AJAX wrapped around the Adobe AIR shell.  You can signup for an account at http://www.shifd.com or download some of the free tools at http://www.shifd.com/tools/ Here’s  a great article on SHIFD

Here’s a great little code snippet that shows off the power of AIR and flex.

  bitmapData = new BitmapData(this.width,this.height);
    bitmapData.draw(this,new Matrix());
    var bitmap : Bitmap = new Bitmap(bitmapData);
    var jpg:JPEGEncoder = new JPEGEncoder();
    var ba:ByteArray = jpg.encode(bitmapData);
    newImage = File.desktopDirectory.resolvePath("Images/" + fileName.text + ".jpg");
    fileStream = new FileStream();
    fileStream.open(newImage, FileMode.UPDATE);
    fileStream.writeBytes(ba); 

Props to EverythingFlex for this example…

Flex Builder 3 and Adobe Air have been released.  I kind of knew about it already, we developed a sample AIR app for Adobe at my company that I hope you all enjoy.  Have fun with the new AIR people!! 

Well this is an ingenious little idea.  Wrap all of your data access like xml, text and variables into one class.  Pretty slick.  Check it out for yourself.

So I’ve had this Wordpress theme for like a year now.  I’ve just been sitting on it cause I was on the fence on whether or not I really liked it.  So I showed a friend at work and he was like go for it.  And I thought… well, its better than the one I have now so I posted it.  It still needs alot of work.  The portfolio section has a really cool ajaxy interface but its still buggy so I decided not to post it yet.  And I need alot more content for alot of the sections but all in all its a good start to start developing what I need out of my blog.  Hope you like!

So Microsoft had the Silverlight Camp back in November and had released some great videos on getting started with Silverlight.  See them here.

The latest version of the PureMVC framework distribution package for ActionScript 3 Platform is 1.7. The package is in ZIP format contains the AS3 source code, API documentation, and SWC library for use with the Flex, Flash or AIR platforms.The change is transparent, that is to say, it requires no code changes and will not affect the behavior of your application, except to fix a reported bug. For information on the changes in this version, see the version.text file inside the download, as well as this forum thread.In addition to the bug fix, (for which a new unit test was created), the Facade class and IFacade interface both received a removeCommand method. It simply passes through the request to the Controller. In practice removeCommand is rarely used, but for the sake of balance in it was added so that if you want to use it you don’t need to get the Controller singleton to do so.And in the Controller’s registerCommand method, there was a potential for a Command being registered to a previously registered Notification, the new Command could be executed twice. This was taken care of, so that the Observer is only created if there is no existing Command registered for the notification. The behavior is the same as before in that the newly registered Command is executed, only once as you would expect.

Ryan Stewart has an article on RIA predictions for 2008.  Most are pretty good, I mean, this is coming from an Adobe insider and all. I’m not to sure about the whole Apple RIA deal.  Apple needs a major overhaul of their software platform in general.  The .NET platform really blows Apple clean out of the water and its starting to show in Microsoft’s overall growth.  If Apple doesn’t pull up soon, the XBOX 360/Zune space is going to shut the door on the AppleTV/iPod, and you bet that Microsoft is on their butts big time.  And one thing is exceptionally true, Adobe is underestimating Microsoft.  I personally know Microsoft is revamping their Expression suite big time, they were pretty upset about the first version and are taking the gung ho, take no prisoners approach to the next release.  Not saying that the first version isn’t impressive, but its unusable compared to Adobe’s tools.  One thing is absolutely for sure, we’re gonna hear and see some major movement in the RIA space from Adobe and Microsoft, because after all its the future of the web. 

Google is now using Adobe’s Search Engine SDK technology.  To summarize what’s going on for developers, you can run a program called swf2html and will output all of your text in the swf’s to an html doc.  From there you can see what text Google is picking up.  For more info check out the links here…

Google reads Flash text, so optimize it
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13530_1-9844989-28.html

Matt Cutts on how you can help Googlebot “see” your Flash content.
http://blogs.cnet.com/8301-13530_1-9834708-28.html

Search Engine SDK FAQ
http://www.adobe.com/licensing/developer/search/faq/