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Find of the week

My cube at work has a new friend..

Have you ever seen anything so strange and demented?
I found it at this architectural salvage / junk store in downtown Lancaster today.. and it was only a buck!

Android is looking good.

From the Android website:

All applications are equal
Android does not differentiate between the phone’s basic and third-party applications — even the dialer or home screen can be replaced.

I downloaded the developer’s kit (which includes an emulator and eclipse plugin) and the platform looks awesome. I am really excited about what this means.

The HTC we’ve been seeing is not nearly as sexy as the iPhone, but if it’s at all affordable then I will drop my iPhone in a second for the ability to install any application without having to go through iTunes and develop in Java using a free, open source sdk.

MOO!

At 360|Flex I gave out quite a few business cards. My Nxtbook Media business cards are pretty cool in my opinion.. I mean, they list my job title as ‘Conjurer of Code / Diviner of Logic‘ .. it doesn’t get much cooler than that, right? But I realized after handing out a few of these that they don’t really convey the information that I need to build relationships within the community. If I were at a sales event, or talking to a prospective customer then these are the cards to give out, but developer-to-developer relationships are based on much more personal information. I want people to be able to visit my blog, IM me or follow me on twitter even if they never need to email or call me at work.

Before MAX rolls around I think I should have something a little more personal to give people I strike it off with that won’t be so intimidating to use. So I dropped by MOO.com and tinkered around with their design tools to come up with something a little more personal to give out in addition to my Nxtbook card.

MOO.com sells their miniCards in packs of 100 and will let you use a separate image for the front of each if you’re feeling especially ambitious. Unfortunately, they make up for this by limiting the back design, with three fonts to choose from, six lines of text to fill out and a handful of pretty useless predefined graphics. After playing with some image ideas, I decided to use their text card editor to create a very simple, to the point card:

Simple and to the point. They’re only $20 for 100, so if these come and I don’t like them then it’s not too much of a hit to try again, but I think they’ll do the trick.

Ubiquity

There’s a buzz around the web about this thing from Mozilla Labs called Ubiquity…

I know that if I said “How would you like to use a command line interface for the web?” that you would most likely reply “How would you like to wind your car up every morning with a giant metal key?” Ordinarily I’d agree, but Ubiquity seems to have gotten it right.

There are plenty of blogs out there right now talking about it, so I won’t go into detail, but let me just say that in the past five minutes it has already changed how I use the Internet.

Here is my new three step path to power browsing:

1. Watch the video.

2. Install Ubiquity.

3. Read the tutorial.

Ubiquity needs firefox 3, so if you haven’t upgraded yet then do that too.

Enjoy!

360|Flex - Day 1

Terrific day at 360|Flex today. I attended some good sessions, had a few fun conversations about flex and development in general, and then had some really good beers. Seriously, the organizers have impressive taste in beer.

The keynote was pretty cool, though no earth shattering new news. Justin Everett-Church was showing off Flash player 10, and even though I’ve played with the beta I didn’t realize just how great the hardware accelerated graphics are going to be. I had originally heard that only the 3d and video would be accelerated, but apparently I was misinformed as according to Justin all display objects will be created on the graphics card, which is very good.

Shining through for me though was a reaffirmation of how incredible Flex 4 (Gumbo) is going to be. There’s a whole new paradigm for working with states, which have always been great in concept but, for me at least, incredibly frustrating to use in practice. The new mxml shape and drawing tools are looking really good, and the true separation of component and skin is incredible. We’ve all been talking about skinning as a way to separate functionality from design for some time now, but seeing what can be done in flex 4 is the first time I’ve felt like it’s truly been achieved, which brings me to Thermo. Being billed as a designer tool, Thermo is going to make everyone’s life easier, whether you hand it over to a designer or not.

So, while the keynote didn’t have too much new stuff for us, I got to see some demos I hadn’t before and definitely got re-jazzed about where Flex is headed.

The sessions I attended were pretty good:

Flex and Accessibility
I did not realize how much control you have over this. If you truly want to make your app accessible, then the tools are there.. even if they’re not fully documented.

Encrypting Flex
Some good techniques were covered here for encrypting and decrypting modules or external swfs on the fly.

Introduction to Swiz
I had been curious about this after listening to an interview with Chris Scott on the Flex Show. It looks great. If we weren’t already so invested in PureMVC on the project I’m working on I think I’d switch us over.

Advanced Actionscript APIs
This was a fun one, Jacob Wright is a good presenter and the material was interesting. He covered Metadata tags, The Proxy class and Namespaces, all of which I’ve used in the past, but I picked up a few new tricks in his session today.

One thing I’ve noticed here at the conference is a general feel of prosperity and optimism surrounding Flex. I suppose this is to be expected at a Flex conference, but I talked to a lot of people today and I think it’s really cool that many, when asked what they like best about flex development, replied somewhere in their answer that they couldn’t think of when they’d had this much fun as a developer.. I couldn’t agree more.

Hello, Nxtbook Media!

Just a quick post to say how excited I am about joining Nxtbook Media! Nxtbook Media is a great company, with intelligent people and a really fun work environment. They are doing some exciting work over there and I’m very pleased to now be a part of it.

Nxtbook Media™ optimizes print publications for use on the Web. Nxtbook™ Media’s digital publishing application helps clients market and broadcast print materials in easy-to-read electronic editions over the Internet using only a standard Web browser. Customers including Advanstar Communications, Hewlett-Packard, Reed Business Information, Prism Business Media, Cisco, Valpak, CMP, Thomas Publishing, VNU Media, Hanley-Wood, Kia, Vance Publishing and Ziff Davis choose Nxtbook Media™ to expand the reach and effectiveness of their print materials. Named as one of the “100 Companies that Matter Most in the Digital Content Industry” for two consecutive years by EContent Magazine, Nxtbook Media is privately held and headquartered in Lancaster, PA.

So, hello Nxtbook Media! I am looking forward to a long and fruitful relationship.

Converted, I am.

My old laptop finally kicked the bucket about a month ago. I’ve been getting by browsing the web on my iPhone until I finally got around to ordering my new machine.

I’d been on the fence for a while, but using a mac at work as my main machine after my laptop died convinced me that there was no other way to go. I can not proclaim loudly enough how much more impressed I am with OS X Leopard than I am with Vista. It’s like night and day. I could spout the many things that made the decision a no brainer for me, but it’s probably best to just go to Apple’s Leopard page to see how amazing it is.

So my new 17″ Macbook Pro arrived today and I’m loving it. It’s powerful - 2.4Ghz 64 bit dual core processor, 256 meg video card, 160 gig hard drive. The screen is sharp, bright, and beautiful. The overall quality of its physical construction is worlds better than my previous laptop.

Of course, because it’s an Intel based machine and Leopard comes with Bootcamp I can also install Vista. I wasn’t event going to bother since my current work only requires Eclipse and the Adobe suite, but then Microsoft had to go and announce their amazing plans for XNA self publishing on the 360.. now I have to get windows installed just for XNA Game Studio so I can begin work on my as of yet completely unplanned opus, but that’s another post all together.

Alan keeping warm

Our heater was out all day today and while we waited for the repair guy we had to keep our little guy warm.

posted from iPhoneSlide.com

iPhones are neat.

I’m posting this from my brand new iPhone.. Very cool.

This thing really knocked my socks off, they managed to pack a lot of power into a very solidly built little package.

Also, the edge connection is not as bad as people on the Internet make it sound.. bunch of whiners if you ask me. Its not blazingly fast, but it’s still better than dialup. The fact that i can use the internet at all on a device this small with full javascript and Ajax support is just amazing to me.

It’s almost enough to make me not feel guilty about paying into AT&T’s mass surveillance research. Oh well, as soon as the sdk comes out in February I’ll get over it, I’m sure.