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May 31, 2006

Adobe Killing Freehand & GoLive?

Nope. :-)

(a lot of speculation and rumors going around about this. I thought I’d help transmit the message above)

Read more here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:12 PM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

May 30, 2006

Flex Data Services overview preso

Have you seen any Flex Data Services examples? If not, you need to. They are THOROUGHLY sweet! Christophe Coenraets has a lot on his blog. To see/hear what FDS is you can watch a Breez’o.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 8:02 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ColdFusion MX Un-Documentation

Sarge showed me this a few weeks ago. It is pretty coo. It seems the CF team left a lot of documentation that could be very useful for people to pick up on CF by seeing familiar tags.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:55 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

Software Anti-Piracy Information

If you are a software developer/company it would benefit you to visit the BSA site. You can learn about piracy prevention, etc as well as potential ways to prevent piracy and handle product activation. Here is a blurb form the product activation section.

“BSA estimates that software publishers lose roughly $13 billion to software piracy every year. Many people are surprised to learn that the lion’s share of those losses come from the problem of over-installation - that is, loading a program onto more computers than authorized by the license agreement. Globally, that type of copying hurts software publishers more than retail piracy and counterfeiting.”

Check out the product activation best practices here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:50 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

RemoteObjectAMF0 Update

I used this class in a recent project and it definitely sped up my dev time since Flex 2 + AMF0 isn’t as quick and easy as AMF3. Take a look at Renaun’s post here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:27 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Teknision V2

They have been around for years and seem to be rockin’ as good as ever. Their site was HUGE back in the day (2002’sh) and was used a many-a-day to showcase (to clients) the Flash chat app (which seems to be gone) and the tweening of the panels. This is more-so a respect entry. Teknision gets mad respect from me by being a bar of tight Flash web sites regardless of the year.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:22 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Reflection.js

Jim Jeffers sent this to me a few weeks ago. It is pretty nice. Sometimes reflection on images looks great. Now you can achieve it without being a graphics master. :-)

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:13 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Visual Studio Actionscript Editor

If you are a Flash developer (Actionscript 2.0+ specifically) and have ever used Visual Studio you would probably agree. VS is so nice. In working with the rewrite of Kode 2 Go, which is done in C# (for many reasons), it was just so nice working with the code. The Intellisense is superb.

FlexBuilder 2.0 (FB2) is super nice as well but I STILL think it pales in comparison to VS. I love working with FB2 but sometimes it can be a bit slow/sluggish, noted it is still in beta. This I would credit to Eclipse rather than FB2 but either way…it isn’t as slick as VS. Plugins like ReSharper make the coding experience so nice.

I think one of the biggest things might just be C#. It is, in my opinion, much more robust than AS 3 and a great pleasure to work with. Things like overloaded methods are highly useful and missed, by me at least, in AS 3.

Anyway, this is nothing but a wish with no “solid” substance, which is why it is file under the “I Wish” category not the “Arguments” category. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 5:00 AM | | Comments (4) | TrackBacks (0)

May 26, 2006

Kode 2 Go Beta 2 in dev

We’re starting beta 2 of K2G today. It is pretty exciting and going to be a rather useful tool. If you don’t know, Kode 2 Go is a CRUD code generator (create/read/update/delete). It isn’t meant to be anything high level. The idea is to remove the redundant work of creating CRUD for database driven apps. This way the CRUD is created by K2G and you can concentrate on more important things like…ummm…the actual application/site you are building. :-)

K2G has received some great feedback from a number of people. We want to continue this success by ramping up the abilities of K2G. Doug, you will be able to do single table generation this time. :-) As we continue I will post more information regarding the new feature set, etc.

There is no set date for the end of Beta 2. Look for that information on here as well.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:33 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 24, 2006

American Idol: Taylor Hicks Won!

Yep, he’s the new American Idol. Shed a tear…crack a smile…get excited for Taylor! He seems very deserving of the title. He can’t dance, too well, but his soul and style overshadows all of that. Starting out with Ray Charles manerisms and ending up as the Idol who, in my opinion, transformed (or just showed the world) to a versatile performer.

Taylor, congrats and stay true to yourself and eat some fried chicken! ;-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 9:36 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 23, 2006

Vista Beta 2 & Office 2007 Beta 2

Get’em while their hot!!

Vista Beta 2

Office 2007 Beta 2

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:34 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 22, 2006

Adobe Developer Week

This is pretty coo by Adobe. Ed Sullivan, “overseer” of the Adobe user groups, sent an email and he stated a few years back they had a “Community Week”, or something similar in name, and this is that event revived, in a sense. Here is an excerpt from Adobe’s site.

“Join us to learn about the Adobe engagement platform, including Flex, and other Adobe technologies by attending Adobe Developer Week. This free, week-long event features live, online sessions presented by Adobe technology experts. See live demos and get your questions answered by the experts during interactive Q & A sessions.”

So when is it and who should attend?

“June 12-16, 2006 | ColdFusion App Developer, Community, Flash App Developer, Internet Application Architect, IS/IT Manager, Java App Developer, .NET/ASP App Developer, Web Application Developer”

You can read more and register here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:11 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Connecting Flex to Flash Media Server 2

I couldn’t resist. In an attempt to just see what FMS has been up to I ended up installing the server on KM’s dedicated box and on my laptop, opened up the ports, and got Christophe’s app running. Could I stop there? Nope, hence the time I’m posting this entry.

Continue reading "Connecting Flex to Flash Media Server 2" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:23 AM | | Comments (2) | TrackBacks (0)

May 21, 2006

Bit by the spam bug...

Ok, I didn’t blog for like a week or so and ended up with 30 or so spam comments. :-( That’s not coo. I’m going to beef up the security a bit if this happens again. I have to force comments to be approved but it may come to that since I definitely don’t have time to implement one of those nice squiggly line image authenticaters (I think that’s the technical name, really…I think it is; j/k). :-)

Just an FYI here…

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:33 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 20, 2006

LLBLGEN: Sweet Code Generation

At Desert Code Camp, Paul Schroeder did a preso on LLBLGEN and the demo of the app it generates and abilities seems to be the best code generator I’ve seen. The best part is the relational support. It will read your entire database, grab the relations, and create all of your DAL code (data access layer) and package it up nice and pretty. :-) This removes a ton of the repetitive grunt work involved in creating database driven apps.

The preso description can be found here.

LLBLGEN can be found here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:17 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Intro to CF 7 Preso

Here is the video url to my preso from Desert Code Camp on May 5th. There are a couple audio problems but for the most part it is a good recording. If you do get an audio lag, etc just go back a couple seconds and it should fix itself.

Sorry for the rushed speaking. I was running short on time due to video problems.

Source code is here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:11 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

ColdFusion Flex Application Wizard

Ok. This is super sweet and decreases the amount of time it would take to build an app. I just heard about this from DBake earlier this morning and the video is pretty mind blowing, for the nerd in me at least. :-)

I won’t go into great detail here because Damon Cooper already took care of that. He has a great deal of information (including the video) on his blog which you can see here.

To jump right into the video go here.

BRAVO Adobe! :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 2:29 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 18, 2006

So Adobe likes Ajax?

Adobe released the Spry framework for Ajax a week or so ago. It was a bit surprising but goes to show Adobe isn’t set on Flex controlling the market. The Spry framework provides some pretty solid functionality and the examples look really nice (to the point I want to use the Photo Gallery one on our family site).

It seems to be a competitor to Atlas from Microsoft. I don’t know how robust Spry is but it seems to be pretty easy to use.

What do you think?

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:46 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Flex 2 Beta 3 Release (some time ago)

I know I’m late so the buzz has worn off here but for those that didn’t know Beta 3 is here. Yesterday I noticed the expiration date for Flex Builder 2 Beta 3 is 70+ days. Unless Beta 4 is coming out we should have a final launch around 70 days (July’sh).

There are lots of changes in Beta 3 vs Beta 2. The one that urked me was backgroundColor. You have to set the backgroundImage to an empty string or use fill colors in order to get the backgroundColor attribute to work properly.

For more information on changes from Beta 2 to Beta 3 go here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:41 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Jermaine Herron: Always loved...

In my junior high to high school years there was one friend I could count on. He was someone I trusted, worked with, and laughed with. Our days, little did we know, were numbered. Eventually we went our own ways but it wasn’t a choice. Jermaine chose the street life and I stayed on the same narrow path I traveled before. We were still good friends but by our sophomore year in high school our lives were different.

Continue reading "Jermaine Herron: Always loved..." »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:05 PM | | Comments (9) | TrackBacks (0)

May 13, 2006

What a week

I had a crazy week which kept me from blogging about Desert Code Camp, new Adobe Labs releases, etc. I’ll play catch up on Monday or so.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 7:50 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 5, 2006

cl1p.net: The Internet Clipboard

I file this under Nice Sites because it is just that. The idea is super sweet and no doubt helpful to me since I have a laptop sitting in front of my desktop that I use for certain tasks.

Basically, create any url after cl1p.net, type whatever you want (or upload a file), hit save, go to the same url on another computer and pull up the same URL. You can set passwords, time limits on saves, and save whatever whenever.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 10:32 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 4, 2006

SQL to XML

Cody B. posted about how to query a database and return XML. It is super simple yet so powerful. All of the examples, etc are on his post.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:31 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Oh how I wish...

…I could trade Flash projects for Flex projects! Tonight I ran into tons of bugs and issues Flex could’ve either handled flat out (layout issues, etc) or FlexBuilder could have caught with its (almost) excellent error checking. Flash dev (now that I’ve been really working with Flex dev) is becoming almost painful at times. LOL. I guess I am thoroughly sucked into the Flex world.

Nothing relevant here…just a wish. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:27 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 3, 2006

Where my Flex skills met my Flash skills

Coming froma Flash background I’m so used to setting dynamic x/y coordinates by hand I took the same approach in Flex. I was doing things like this.

<mx:Canvas id="mycanvas" />
<mx:Canvas id="yourcanvas" y="{mycanvas.y+mycanvas.height+10}) />

+10 simply gave me a little extra cushion. I basically took the y position and height of mycanvas to figure out where the bottom of the clip was positioned. Here’s how simple it is using what’s readily available to you in Flex.

<mx:VBox>
     <mx:Canvas id="mycanvas" />
     <mx:Canvas id="yourcanvas" />
</mx:VBox>

I know. I said “wow” too. LOL. This is just 1 example of me leaning on Flash based layouts instead of utilizing Flex’s natural ability. I have more but this is enough for now. :-)

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:26 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Restarter.exe 1.0

There was a need to restart an app from another app. So App 1 needs to be restarted by App 2. App 2 was initially built with Zinc but there is reason to believe it isn’t working (hence the fact 12+ App 1’s have been seen open at 1 time). The client suggested a C++/C# version of the restarter so I took off to write one real quick.

Restarter takes 2 params. 1st is app to close and 2nd is app to start. 2nd can be a filename of any sort really. 1st param is the process name and all instances of that name will be closed. It is super simple but very effective.

Continue reading "Restarter.exe 1.0" »

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:01 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 2, 2006

Why Do We Have So Many Screwdrivers?

Cody passed me this article a few minutes ago and it is a pretty interesting read.

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 1:35 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

May 1, 2006

Mike Chambers Podcast on Flash Platform

Mike Chambers has released a podcast where he speaks on Flash as a Platform. He talks about Flash moving forward; including Flex, Apollo, Flash 9 (player and IDE), etc. It is worth the listen. The good thing about a podcast is you don’t have to watch anything. Just let it go and listen. :-)

Check it out here.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 4:09 PM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

Amazon Flex RIA

There has been word for quite some time (before merger) that Flex department folks were working with Amazon to rebuild their site using Flex. It was purely for showcasing Flex’s ability. This dates back to Max but no one has said anything about it since then. I guess someone decided to go ahead and make the RIA.

Click here to see app. It is nicely done in several manners. There are a few tweaks it needs but all-in-all it is a good showcase of the abilities Flex possesses.

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:33 AM | | Comments (3) | TrackBacks (0)

The New Adobe.com

Adobe.com has been upgraded and now includes Macromedia.com (which is a redirect now). Oh…wait…does Adobe.com include Macromedia.com or vice versa? Well, the design is Macromedia’s but you can definitely feel Adobe’s changes (no gradient, dropdown menu [nice enhancement], color changes, etc).

All-in-all…good stuff Adobe. Glad to see it is up!

Posted by John C. Bland II at 3:29 AM | | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)