Friday, October 02, 2009

Now everyone can be at Adobe MAX

Virtually, that is :P

Adobe Max 2009 is couple of days away. Fortunately, I happened to be here in the bay area, and my boss was kind enough to let me go attend MAX, despite the tight schedule. I've been at the MAX Asia conferences before - 2005 in Bangalore, India, and 2006 in Singapore, but lets face it - the one in US is undoubtedly the mother of all MAXes. And I'm very very excited about being there this year.

So if you are reading this and thinking, ' wish I could go' but those pesky deadlines at work didn't let you go - worry not; Not everything is lost. Last year, the MAX team posted the sessions on adobe tv, within a few weeks of the event. This time around, Adobe is also streaming the keynote talks, live! All sessions will be available online latest by October 11, 2009. So yea, go ahead and register yourself for viewing the live videos, here.

You can also keepup with tweets using the adobe max companion. Its a thin twitter client, which filters tweets about adobe max and lets you post tweets as well. You can also check out details about the sessions, and the session location etc. Sweet!


If you are going to be at LA, see you there! You can reach me on twitter at @arulprasad

Friday, July 24, 2009

The Actionscript Conference - Edition 2 is on!

Last year, the Singapore Flex User Group successfully organized a one day Actionscript conference. Due to the overwhelming response from last year, this year we decided to do a two day conference, with more speakers, sessions and added seating capacity.

And now, the dates are official. The 2nd Edition of TAC will be held on September 14th and 15th 2009. Registration for seats is open as well!

Check out http://www.tac.sg for detailed speakers list and sessions information. There is more sessions coming, so keep track of the site for updated information!

Registration of seats is open now. And we have a massive lucky draw around the registration process. One in every 10 tickets bought will win a FDT - Pure Edition. Thats 50 licenses that would be given away free. Apart from the monetary value of €99, using FDT will increase your development speed tremendously!


So yea, go ahead and reserve your seats!

Tuesday, June 23, 2009

download Facebook video - bookmarklet for browsers

A friend just asked for some help to download a video from facebook. I patched up a lil bookmarklet that does the download.

Get Facebook Video

Drag the Get Facebook Video button to your bookmarks toolbar in your browser.

Am sure there must be other bookmarklets that already that; guess I just wanted to do something else than my usual work. Anyway, usual caveats apply about usage of the bookmarklet - Use at your own discretion.

I didn't test it on anything other than Firefox 3.5. Must work other browsers as well, I guess.
I check if the current browser location is http://www.facebook.com/video/video.php. If not, this bookmarklet wont do anything. So, make sure u r in the video's homepage when u use it :)

Thursday, June 18, 2009

Creative Crew Singapore - Special meeting - "Into the code"

Creative Crew Singapore - The adobe usergroup for Creative Suite tools is doing a special usergroup meeting this weekend. This time, the sessions will concentrate on code and programming! The creative crew website has a detailed blogpost, complete with the schedule and venue details here.

I'll be doing an introductory session of the upcoming Designer-developer workflow changes - around the introduction of the Adobe Flash Catalyst (previously codenamed 'Thermo'). ArulKumaran from the Singapore FUG will be doing another Flex session titled "Thinking in Flex for Designers". There are couple of sessions from the Creative Crew core members as well. More details here.

When:

Saturday 20 June, 2009 from 2:30pm - 4:30pm

Where:
Bukit Merah Community Library
3779 Jalan Bukit Merah
Singapore 159462 - map

RVSP here

Friday, May 08, 2009

Using firebug on firefox 3.5 beta

I updated to Firefox 3.5 beta a while ago, and almost all extensions became incompatible. And today, I just couldn't avoid not using firebug (I had Firebug 1.3.3) , so decided to make it 'compatible'.

This is what I had to do:
  1. OSX, find the install.rdf file at ~/Library/Application Support/Firefox/profiles/xxxxxxx/firebug@software.joehewitt.com/install.rdf (On Windows, I guess it should be at C:/Documents & Settings/username/Local Settings/Application Data/Firefox/profiles/xxxxxxx/firebug@software.joehewitt.com/install.rdf )
  2. Find a node like 3.0.*
  3. Change the version number in the above node to to 3.5.*.
  4. Save the file, and restart Firefox. Firebug should now be active, and available for use!

Disclaimer:
Of course there might be something new in firefox3.5 that isn't compatible with Firebug1.3.3, so it might give u some unexpected errors. I've been using it for a while, and its alright at my end. But use it at your own risk :P

Friday, April 03, 2009

A bookmarklet for Digg.com's new Diggbar

Kevin Rose announced DiggBar today. Read the official blogpost here

Diggbar is a 'toolbar' for Digg - but without any traditional installation process. Unlike traditional browser toolbars, this is a html toolbar which gets appended on top of any website that you visit the webpage with "digg.com/" prefix-ed to the url. Digg also creates a short url for all those webpages that you visit using this feature.

I personally like this feature, and can see a lot of uses to this - but am too busy with work to pen down my thoughts. You all can read what those pro-bloggers have to say instead :P

Am sure there are some lazy buggers out there who find having to prefix the "digg.com/" a tiring task. So I put this lil bookmarklet together:


DiggBar



Drag the DiggBar button above to your bookmarks toolbar in your browser*. Now you just have to click on that bookmark link everytime you visit a website that you wanna Diggbar-ize. Cool stuff, huh? ;)


* - Tested on Firefox & Safari. Not sure if it works on IE, Sorry. If you tried this on IE, leave a comment. Thanks!

Happy Digging!

Tuesday, March 24, 2009

BugQuash - Don't just complain, do something about it

The line "Dont just complain, do something about it" nailed it for me.

From the pre-event kit:

All of us have run into bugs with all types of software. Every now and then we even run into some that are a part of the Flex SDK. These bugs can be aggravating due to their elusive nature - you think the bug is something that you are doing wrong while all the time it is a bug in the Flex SDK that was likely missed during various testing - this is not uncommon! Now that the Flex SDK is open source, our community has the exciting opportunity to help eliminate bugs in the SDK. Adobe has designated numerous bugs as Community Bug Fix Candidates which they believe are the best candidates for the community to tackle. However, you're not limited to fixing the Community Bug Fix Candidates. Do you have a bug that's been deferred or not yet resolved? If you're passionate (or rather irritated) by other bugs, we encourage you to quash those too! Our goal at the Flex BugQuash is to eliminate these bugs and contribute software patches to Adobe for their approval. We want to quash as many bugs as possible within the time allotted! Wouldn't you love to be part of it?



Want this for your site?


Visit http://bugquash.com/ for details. If you are in Seattle WA, you can physically attend the event, and if u are away, online option is available as well.

Tuesday, February 10, 2009

RIAction Singapore - the big 3's in RIA come together!

After a successful TAC, the Flex User Group here in Singapore presents - RIAction. Its a - first of its kind - one day Rich Internet Apps 'event' sponsored by the 3 ultimate names in RIAs - Adobe, Google and Microsoft. There will be sessions on Adobe Flash platform, Microsoft Silverlight, and AJAX based RIA development. And there will be non-technical sessions about effective RIA development methodologies as well! February 26th 2009 is the date, and Microsoft Singapore, the venue. Since the sponsors picked up all the costs, attendance to the event itself would be free!

Special thanks to Shunjie Hu, the Singapore FUG manager, for arranging this event in record time.

Learn more about the event here. If you'd like to attend the event, please register your details here.

See you at RIAction!

Monday, January 19, 2009

Fusiongarage just got techcrunched...

...but, not in the same way that startups usually get 'techcrunch'ed; We have been collaborating with TechCrunch building the software for TechCrunch's tablet pc project, pet named 'Crunchpad'. Though we've been at it for a while now, I couldn't 'publicly' discuss this - due to obvious reasons. But last week, that changed - when Mike Arrington wrote an official blogpost announcing the status of the latest prototype, and in the process, mentioning our involvement in the project. So yea, for all those people who have been asking what I do at Fusiongarage, and been hearing some seemingly disconnected replies, here you have it.

The last year had been pretty eventful. February 2008 we were just setting up fusiongarage's office space. By day, we were assembling furniture we got for FG, from IKEA and by afternoon we were busy brainstorming our product idea. Once we settled on the core product idea, we set out to build a prototype application. We ended up building some really cool stuff in the next few months.

When we eventually had a demo-able version of our idea (it had a 'grander' vision of what we are building now), it was also that time of the year, when TechCrunch had started accepting applications for the TechCrunch50 2008 conference.

We decided to send our entry and a few weeks later, we found ourselves at the demopit in the conference venue. We didn't really launch our product/startup there, the plan was to showcase the concept to the attendees and gauge their interest and gather feedback. People generally seemed to like our idea, and some interesting meetings were scheduled for the next few days.

The week following TC50, we also attended Mobilize '08 - a conference targeting the mobile web space, organized by GigaOm network. People liked our ideas there as well, we even won the audience choice award! There were a few very interesting observations made here as well.

So after a fruitful 3 weeks at SFO, we were back to singapore, only to start preparing our software for the Intel Developer Forum, at Taipei, Taiwan. What better place to present our software to Intel based hardware manufacturers, than the IDF! So off, we went. ( More of that later, as things get 'declassified' :P )

The collaboration over the Crunchpad project happened as a result of meetings we had with Mike Arrington and co, subsequent to TC50. We worked closely with Louis Monier in getting the software in shape for the hardware prototype B. We continue to work with them in getting the software in shape to make crunchpad a 'simple to use' device. This is where we stand as of prototype-B: (Details over at TechCrunch's update )



As I said, 2008 had been a very exciting year for FusionGarage. We expect, that 2009 is gonna be no less exciting!

[EDIT 30 Jan 2009: Though I started writing this post on Jan 19th, I only posted it today. sigh.. lazy me!]