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).
I just found out about this project on the Mozilla labs site.
What is this project all about? Well it can create a desktop application from basically any web application. I just moved my Gmail onto my desktop. That’s quite something.
Their next step will be to integrate Prism with Firefox (3.0?)and then the user will be able to just go into the menu and choose “Convert into application”.
Right now this is just a demo, a project, a showcase of the XUL platform, but interesting things are foreseeable in the future.
Some good thoughts about this project can be found on Mike Chambers blog.
Last night we organized the first major event at Adobe Romania: FlexCamp Romania. There were a lot of attendees and all of them were curios about how this event will go as, from my knowledge, there was no such event organized in Bucharest until now.
We had a lot of swag for this event and the whole team switched to an old factory process: the production line.
First one to present was Matt Chotin, Product Manager for Flex. The room was full and the people interested in his presentation. He talked about Flex, AIR and also Thermo. Some of the audience knew about Thermo as videos from MAX 2007 where it was first presented were posted on youtube.
He was followed by Andrei Dragomir, our Ajax and Flex specialist that presented an overview of Flex. His session was long and intensive as there are so many things you can say about Flex.
However there were also breaks 
. During those brakes, we ate pizza, drink beer and most importantly socialize. All the people got to know others that share the same interest and we were also very busy (and that’s a good thing) answering different questions about Flex, AIR and about Adobe user groups, as many of them were interested in joining or creating one.
Oh, I forgot to tell you, we broadcast FlexCamp live using Adobe Acrobat Connect and also recorded all the event and everything is available on myadobe.ro site.
Dragos Georgita took his turn and presented AIR along with a lot of cool samples.
After some small technical difficulties (his computer closed just before his session), Mihai Corlan held the first hands-on session about how you can create a cool Flicker gallery.
The second hands-on was about web services and Flex and Cristi Ivascu presented the new wizard available in Flex Builder 3 that inspects a WSDL file and generates the ActionScript client that knows how to use that service. One of the main advantages is the creation of all the complex types used by that service so the developer can have access to a strong type framework in using it (code completion and everything).
Mihai Pricope’s hands-on was about data synchronization in Flex and even if it was a late hour he managed to get all the audience excited about the subject through his unique presentation style. He proposed a poll application and all the audience was able to vote and see the results changing in real time on the screen behind him.
In the end the whole Flex team stepped in front of the audience and we were bombarded with a lot of questions and hopefully we managed to answer satisfactory for most of them.
Overall we think this event was a success and we are already planning for another one at the beginning of 2008. That one maybe will be bigger and we’ll try to involve more the Flex community giving them the chance to present their work and ideas.
Statement:
This is the blog of Yahoo’s Flash Platform team. We will use these pages to report on all things Flash at Yahoo! From articles to tutorials, new components and libraries, notes and discussions, experiments and hacks – all of that will be here.
This is an interesting entry on the market especially because the libraries they will develop will be open sourced. And having Flex SDK also open source good times will come to Flex/Flash developers.
I have a teeshirt from MAX 2004 that says that.
We are using more and more paper per person every day but also we are using less and less paper every day. How comes that? Well we are using more and more paper and more and more trees are cut to produce that paper. We are reading more newspapers and magazines, everything we buy is packaged in paper, we even take our groceries back home in paper bags.
On the other hand more and more information is available in electronic format. I read less and less things on paper, most of the information I acquire is coming from the web or emails or different documents.
How big was the impact of web on our forests? I guess nobody ever calculated that. Nobody calculated how many trees were saved because we are using PDF documents to pass around information this days. If I print all the documents stored on my computer I will consume maybe 100kg of paper (and I was shy with this estimate). So in that respect the Internet might be one of the most environment friendly structure/entity on the planet.
P.S. to bad Internet needs electricity to run
