You want to get your feeds closer? Check out this new application build using Adobe AIR and Flex 3: Snackr.
Snackr is a RSS ticker that pulls random items from your feeds and scrolls them across your desktop. Thank you NJ.
The official guide to Adobe AIR, written by members of the AIR team, is out. One of the authors, Dragos Georgita is my colleague. He is the engineering manager for the Adobe AIR team here in Romania. He and his team are doing a lot of great things, especially related to AIR and JavaScript.
We are all here at the office very proud of him and we wish him many books to come. (I am still waiting for my signed copy 
)
You can buy the book from amazon: Adobe AIR for JavaScript Developers Pocket Guide.
Yup, I took the Scrum Master training. And I was also fortunate to go to a training help by Ken Schwaber.
The training was intense. Two days of learning and doing exercises. Slowly, Ken pointed to us different aspects of the Scrum process and why it works. Anyway, Scrum is a great leap of fate. No more predictability. At least in the beginning. As the team is getting more an more used to Scrum and you can actually compute the team’s velocity (which by the way increases in the same time) you can predict better how much work the team can do.
What I really like is that some of the concepts from scrum are common sense and can be put in practice in any other development process. Like transparency and quality. In Scrum is just far more easy “enforce” them.
I hope that somewhere in the future I will be able to work in a project fully developed in fully adopted Scrum.
Of course there are some issues about Scrum that remained unresolved for me. Like what can you do when the “self managed” team does not manage itself. Like what are the main factors that can make a project developed in Scrum fail or make the Scrum process being abandoned. I do not believe in the “silver bullet” concept. Or let’s put it this way: during the course I liked something that Ken said to us. There is no magic in software development, as in if you strongly and passionately believe that something can be done it will indeed be done. And managers often believe in such magic. But the same thing I guess can be applied also to Scrum. If you strongly and passionately believe that Scrum can work it will indeed really work?
Ted Patrick writes on his blog that Flex Builder 3 Pro is free for Education.
So if you are a student of a professor just go to FlexRegistration.com claim your copy.
Adobe released Flex 3, the free open source framework for building rich internet applications. It’s time now to build real cross platform web applications that work the same no matter in which browser the application was opened or which operating system the user has.
Flex 3 is open source and is free. The new site opensource.adobe.com is hosting the source code and the community resources for Flex SDK and BlazeDS. And talking about BlazeDS.. for whom is familiar with LCDS, this is the free version of server based Java remoting and web messaging technology. It enables (among other things) server push to Flex and AIR clients.
The Adobe® AIR™ runtime lets developers use proven web technologies to build rich Internet applications that deploy to the desktop and run across operating system.What is great about this framework is the ability to develop desktop applications using Flex, Flash and Ajax. So if you are a skillful Ajax developer and you have a powerful web application that you think will benefit from running on desktop, you are definitely interested in AIR.
I went today on the Microsoft’s web site to get the IE7. After I have selected the download section in the site, a popup caught my attention, something like: Do you want to try the new Silverlight enable download center?
A line from a cartoon show comes to my mind: “Isn’t that nice?…”
A new initiative was started and I wish it good luck. A Flex developer from Craiova is trying to create the first Flex User Group in Romania and right now he is on the mission to deliver his message to as many Flex developers he can.
You can found out more here:
http://www.craiovaforum.ro/scripting-client-side/adobe-flex-user-group-pentru-romania-164146.html. (article in Romanian)
… for Leopard users at least.
After Mozilla found a new use for their technology, the XUL platform, in the form of Prism, somebody has found this technology inspiring and developed Fluid.
That somebody is not Apple as one first thought might be, but a web enthusiast, Todd Ditchendorf.
I have noticed lately that good training in Flex seems to be in high demand. That can only mean that Flex is becoming more and more popular.
There is a shift in the way people and especially companies lately are looking at the way they are learning things. Previously someone trying to learn or become more proficient in a particular technology was just looking for different articles over the internet or search on forums for some help. The companies, of course, were expecting to see this behavior in their employees. There is no doubt that all this are still good practices, however they are not always offering the best solution to the learning problem. There is always something that you can not learn from the internet, some tips and tricks, some best practices and if the company does not have a senior developer, a good tech lead to teach all this to the others, these skills will be acquired the hard way (by braking things) and that is not the best solution.
Here comes training.
For a company, sending people to training is like renting all that important good tech lead. Usually this is a very good thing and if this effort is backed up by a good corporate environment that is encouraging people to also learn on their own, you end up with high quality developers (axiom: the company hired good people with great potential for development).
