Friday, October 26, 2007

Singapore Flex User Group meeting

After a couple of months of silence, the Singapore Flex User Group is back again. Its got its own home now - and we have a forum set up as well for discussions.

The first meetup of singapore FUG is gonna happen on the 14th of November. Check out the details here. If you are in singapore, and are excited about Flash platform development and Flex in particular, do join us for the meet!

Adobe will be sponsoring some food and drinks, and Shunjie has promised to give away some free eclipse as well ;o)

Google's experimental site - searchmash - has a Flash UI

Searchmash has been around for more than a year now, and their current UI has been written in Flex!

A few things that I noted:

Their data transfer with the search server is in JSON.
Google maps is being loaded on an iFrame over the SWF.

pretty cool. The only problem I see with this approach is, If a user right clicks on the SWF and selects the 'settings' option, he's pretty much stuck. Only way to get over it would be to refresh the page. This is because the Flash app pops up the settings modal window, and since the iframe sits above the flash app, the user can never interact with the settings window.

I like how they've integrated a video search tab - which searches for the video in google videos ( and hence, youtube) and loads the video player swf from the corresponding site. Simple, and neat.

Techcrunch isn't very thrilled about the app being Flash. They question 'why flash'; and I ask, 'why not?' I mean- searchmash is a site for experiments, isn't it?
The author of the techcrunch article wonders if Flash is as fast as AJAX, and quickly decides to assume its not! He should probably take a look at the benchmarks here

Searchmash also shows snapshots of the results , using snap.com's technology. Apparently, guys at snap.com are very thrilled about this: http://blog.snap.com/2007/10/25/breaking-major-news/

Tuesday, October 16, 2007

simplespark - a download.com for webapplications

Check it out: http://simplespark.com/

I was amazed at the catalogue for video apps they had. It ran into 28 pages! How many people out there can name something other than youtube?

Monday, October 01, 2007

Flex 3 Beta 2, AIR Beta 2, Adobe Media Player, Adobe Share, Buzzword, FlashLite 3.0....

Spry, Flash player9 update, AIR update for Flash CS3, AIR update for dreamweaver ...
Phew!

All those are available today. And probably more!. Check out Adobe Labs homepage, and its almost full of brand new builds!

FlashLite announcement press release is available here. ( Btw, I heard from some highly reliable sources, that FlashLite 4.0 - planned for 2008 is gonna have AS3 support!!! )

Share is another product (Also built using Flex!) from adobe that goes public today. I see it as an online storage + flash paper thing. It lets you import . Nice to see that adobe also offers a 'widget' to include documents from share to your own webpage. I guess its the first widget from the company that helped all ( or almost all?) companies to create their webpage embed-able widgets? Ironic, hmm?

I also got an invite for Buzzword, if you don't have an invite yet, go ahead and check register yourself at http://preview.getbuzzword.com/. You might get lucky as well!

Like Ryan posted earlier today -"Big Day for Adobe" indeed!

Adobe buys virtub - buzzword

A few weeks back I saw an article on wired.com suggesting that adobe might move into Office tools market. My immediate guess was that they would buy virtub's Buzzword. I was so sure about it, I went ahead and posted about it.

And today Robert Scoble and Ryan Stewart posted the news about Adobe's acquisition of Virtub!

I also another prediction about sliderocket in the same post. Go ahead adobe, make me proud! ;o)