Friday Humor with Hank and Jed
I've posted a couple videos by Hank and Jed productions in the past. They are a small production company that makes some fun movies. This past weekend they launched the newest version of their site, which keeps up with their brand of humor. You can also see their movies online, in decent quality.
Check them out at HankAndJed.com. ...
Yahoo Flex Map Component Part 3 available
Part 3 in my multi part series on building a flex component out of the Yahoo! Maps API is available over at the Flexcoders group.
In part 1 of this series I talked about the reasons why you would want to make a flex component out of something you can do in actionscript. In part 2 I discussed the basics of the component architecture. From that second article you can create a component that works however you still haven't handled most of the reasons to make a component in the first place. In this article I will take care of those issues the issues of data binding, event handling and making it easier for non coders( sometimes called designers or managers :) ) to work with.
Friday Humor? Adult Freeze Tag
I'm not sure if you can call this humor, but it is worth sharing. A friend reminded me today of an Improv Everywhere mission where over 200 people froze in place for 5 minutes at grand central station. If you haven't seen it, it is beautiful. ...
YahooFlexMap part 2 is available
Part 2 in my multipart series about creating a Flex component fromt he new Yahoo! map API for actionscript 3 is now available in the my.opera Flexcoders group blog.
In part 1 of my series on making a flex component out of the new Yahoo! Maps API for actionscript 3 I talked about the reasons I was taking the time to componentize something I could easily build with pure actionscript. Today I will be talking through the basics of creating a visual component. While these basics are covered at the LiveDocs for Flex 3, I will go over them in a slightly different way, as well as talk about how they affect the Yahoo! map component in particular.
Also make sure to join the Flexcoders group as it is new and looking for new members. At the very least, feel free to ask questions in the forum.
Ralph Nader on The Daily Show
Yesterday Ralph Nader was interviewed on the Daily Show with Jon Stewart. When I posted about this before I called The Daily Show the fake news. Granted, that is a term they use themselves but the Jon Stewart actually interviewed him like other Presidential candidates. Bravo Jon, if it wasn't for the Cam-Pain Carnage piece I probably wouldn't be able to call it the fake news anymore. ...
Nader on the Fake News
This Tuesday could be a very exciting day for politics. Sure, the Democratic party could finally decide on a candidate after the next set of primaries but I've already said I won't be talking about that much any more. The real news is that the fake news, The Daily Show with Jon Stewart, will be interviewing Ralph Nader. This could be interesting. ...
Nader on the Daily Show could be interesting because they could have a good laugh about the whole "spoiler" issue. I'm sure Ralph is tired of the serious answer he always has to give. Of course, he'll probably only have about 6 minutes. And since this may be one of the most mainstream interviews he gets, at least for younger voters, he will be making his points as well. He's very well educated and a good speaker, I'm not worried. Hopefully he'll get to show off more of his humorous side than we usually get to see.
It should be much more informative than the guest on The Daily Show tonight( but I'll watch it anyway ). First SNL and now the Daily Show, she is really working for those youth votes.
Other than the forthcoming Daily Show appearance there is a lot being said about the Nader campaign. There is getting to be even more since he announced his running mate Matt Gonzales, who so far seems great to me. I especially like his response to the spoiler issue. For more of the news related to Nader/Gonzales check out the votenader.org news page.
YahooFlexMap part 1 available
I have made my first instructional post over at the new Flexcoders group. Here is the synopsis:
After the Flex 360 conference in Atlanta I decided to start creating components that use the Flex framework out of items that can only be done through actionscript. Due to my history with the Yahoo! maps component in AS2, I decided to make the new AS3 map API into my first Flex component. As this process has enough information to be worthy of a series, I thought I would first answer why I want to do this in the first place.
It is the first in a multipart series about creating a custom flex component from an existing actionscript API.Check it out.
In case you missed it
I almost missed it while I was at Flex 360 in Atlanta. There has been a lot of talk about Nader officially running for President of the United States of America but you might have missed it. So I've decided to post some video of his announcement on Meet the Press. ...
As always, Nader is very intelligent and more eloquent about his political points than many.
Something else you may have missed is that Ralph Nader announced his Vice Presidential running mate yesterday.
Honestly, I was amazed at how quickly the information was on Wikipedia, that Matt Gonzalez was Ralph Nader's running mate. I don't know much about him so its time to do some research.
Flexcoders @ my.opera
I just created a Flexcoders group for my.opera. I figure there are a lot of programmer type people in this community who may at least be interested in the technology and this could be a good place to look for answers in the community. It's my first group though so please be patient as I learn the ropes. For those of you who don't know what Flex is, you can either read some of my posts on the subject or go to Adobe's website. The group will be their to focus on anything in the Flex framework ecosystem, much of which is still in development.
Last Day of Flex 360
Yesterday was the last day of the Flex 360 conference and it was a whirlwind. Along with checking out of the hotel and making sure to get to the airport on time I still had a conference to attend, including the final keynote. I don't have all my notes about what I did yesterday, so bear with me as I describe the highlights of the day. ...
The morning started out with the final keynote of the conference that included short talks on some community projects. One cool non-project community development was Flex Authority, which is a community driven zine that will be coming out in early summer. As for projects there were short demonstrations of OpenFlux and Degrafa that were great. The highlight was the last project which was a social musical notation program complete with keyboard( QWERTY not the 88s ) entry. A very cool program that I think is still not open to the public and unfortunately, no name was given.
Of the talks I went to yesterday, 2 stand out for very different reasons. One talk was about video in Flex and the other was about architecting AIR applications.
The presentation on video in flex stands out because, I realized I actually understand this concept quite a bit. The company I work for, Provis Media Group, is all about the powerful use of video on the web and I've been dealing with video and the flash player since day one. This doesn't mean I didn't learn anything. One glaring detail I learned is about the index on H.264 files that can keep HD videos from streaming progressively. The answer to that problem can be found here. The main thing I got out of this session, that can be applied to more than just video, is the usefulness of creating components based on the flex framework. It takes a little extra work up front but it can save a ton of time in the long run.
Architecting AIR applications stood out because it made me realize how much I hadn't thought of. The talk was led by a former .NET developer who went to web applications and now, thanks to AIR, is back to making desktop applications. Because of his background, he had a perspective about architecting an occasionally connected app that was different than the standard line. It was a great talk and I've got a lot of researching to do on new approaches. The main thing that got driven home was while tools like Cairngorm and Pure MVC have their uses, especially for web apps, their are some limitations when creating a desktop app. It's important to have many more tools and good OOP knowledge and practice under your belt so that you don't fall into the 'Golden Hammer' syndrome.
To finalize, Flex 360 was awesome and I hope to go to many more of these types of events. There is a Flex 360 event in Europe happening in April, I believe and I would love to go there, even though I know I wouldn't really get to see any of Europe. So if you are in Europe, check out 360 Flex Europe coming to Milan very soon.