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!

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.

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!

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!]

Developing crossplatform AIR applications

Though Adobe AIR is a runtime for creating cross platform applications, it is very much possible to create an AIR application, that runs fine on - say, Windows and screws up on Mac OS X and Linux. Its up to the developer of individual applications to make sure that his/her application remains truly crossplatform.

Charles Ward from Adobe documentation team has put up an article on devnet highlighting areas that developers need to be careful about when they develop AIR applications. Go take a look.(http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/developing_crossplatform.html)

easter egg in Flash CS4 Professional

Keeping up with the easter egg 'tradition', Flash CS4 Professional includes the usual easter egg - a slideshow of all engineers who worked on the Flash authoring and player teams.

You can invoke it by clicking on a really small ( may be, a 1 * 1 px ) button on the About Flash splash screen. I'm not gonna spoil the party by exposing where the button is, its fun clicking all over the dialog, for sometime :)

When Flash CS3 Professional was released last year, I did a similar post. When I installed CS4 today, first thing that came to mind was to go find the easter egg. And I got lucky in a few clicks. Lets see how many releases I can keep doing this ;)

M Williams passed away a lil while ago. This picture will carry his memories as long as Flash CS4 lives!



And Robert Penner. the easing hero :)


I decided to stop at 2 screenshots, but this pic of Sean is too funny to let go!



Ok, I can't contain any longer, time to go try out the new features!

flash player 10 released parallelly for Windows, Mac and Linux platforms!

For the first time ever, flash player release for Linux has been released along with the other two major platforms, windows and mac.

Am using a Ubuntu install on my macbookpro these days, so am thrilled to have the latest player on my machine on the same day as my windows and mac colleagues :P

Official press release is here.
You can get the latest flashplayer installed here

I hear that, Adobe AIR release with the latest Flash player capabilities, is coming very soon as well :)

Flash player 10 adds a lot of new expressiveness features - You'll start seeing apps built with those features once Flash CS4 goes out in the wild (looks like buyers can already download it. Trial versions must be coming, very very soon). The demos here will give you a good idea of some of the new features, so check it out after your installation is complete.

Silverlight2.0
Oh, and on a side note, Silverlight2.0 was released a couple of days ago as well, but I can't install. There is no linux version, much like their previous version. I checked the system requirements page, and was confused at the silverlight plugin listed being not available for Safari on windows. Why?!
And when the page shows "unsupported platform" it also shows a "click to install" button below that. Which keeps refreshing the page. -_-

upgrade and unlock the 1st Gen Apple iphone ( firmware 2.1 )

Its been a while since I last upgraded and unlocked my iphone. I had 1.1.3 all this while, and got sick of seeing itunes popup up everytime saying "upgrade! upgrade!" so decided to spend some time today and get the software updated. ( and unlocked, of course)

The web is so full of 'tutorials' that help u unlock iphones, and its so confusing. There doesnt seem to be one 'official' location to look at. So I decided to write my own version of the step-by-step easy ublock procedure.

This is what I did:

1. Go to http://blog.iphone-dev.org/post/49988701/pwnagetool-and-quickpwn-for-2-1-firmware and download quickpwn torrent file.
2. Download the torrent using ur fav torrent application.
3. Connect iphone to ur mac. let itunes startup and ask u "do u wanna upgrade?". Surprise itunes this time saying "download and install"
4. Once the 238 MB download is complete and installation is over, ur phone will return to the factory settings state. All fresh and locked!
5. Now go back to the quickpwn.dmg file that you downloaded in step 2. mount it by double clicking it, and then drag the quickpwn application inside the drive, onto somewhere else ( ur desktop?)
6. run the quickpwn app, and follow the wizard. If itsnt able to find the firmware software, let it download again ( I dint bother to figure out where it was looking for the firmware etc)
7.Once QuickPwn finishes its job, you should be able to launch the iphone, and get to the home screen. If your phone doesnt detect any network, go to step 8
8. You'd have to launch 'Cydia' on ur home screen, and go to the 'search' screen. Search for 'BootNeuter'. Install it.
9. Before you launch BootNeuter, go to Settings > general > auto-lock - and set it to 'never'. BootNeuter doesnt like autolock.
10. launch bootneuter, and set Version to 3.9, Neuter to 'on' and unlock to 'on'. Once the settings are made, Click on 'flash' on top right. Let the phone be for a while, and do its stuff. Once its all done, and restarted, You should see the logo of ur carrier on the left top.

Thats it. Happy unlocking!

PHP's str_replace in Actionscript 3.0

PHP has a robust method for doing a string search and replace. The str_replace method can take in an array of elements to be searched and replaced and do the replace in one shot. Check out PHP's str_replace function's manual for details.

I just put together a TextUtils class with my Actionscript implementation of str_replace.

TextUtils.as

You can use it like below:

var content:String = "hello world";
trace(TextUtils.str_replace(["h","w"],["H","W"], content))
//outputs 'Hello World'

It gets interesting, when you gotta do something like this:

var content:String = "h.e.l.l.o; w,o,r,l,d";
trace(TextUtils.str_replace([",", ".", ";"], "", content))
//outputs 'hello world'

If you find it useful, go ahead and use it.

Of course, Actionscript 3.0 does have its own implementation of 'replace' function in the String class, which is pretty sleek as well. It also includes support for Regular Expression based search and replace. Check out the documentation AS3.0 String.replace here.

New Virus in town - Under the name of 'Flash Player Installer'

A friend today got infected with a spam email.
The email's content goes

From: MSNBC Breaking News
Date: Wed, Aug 13, 2008 at 2:06 PM
Subject: msnbc.com - BREAKING NEWS: NASDAQ index gains 720 points overnight upon war announcement
To: **********@*****.com


msnbc.com: BREAKING NEWS: NASDAQ index gains 720 points overnight upon war announcement

Find out more at http://breakingnews.msnbc.com
======================================================
See the top news of the day at MSNBC.com, and the latest from Today Show and NBC Nightly News.

=========================================
This e-mail is never sent unsolicited. You have received this MSNBC Breaking News Newsletter
newsletter because you subscribed to it or, someone forwarded it to you.
To remove yourself from the list (or to add yourself to the list if this
message was forwarded to you) simply go to
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26427935, select unsubscribe, enter the
email address receiving this message, and click the Go button.

Microsoft Corporation - One Microsoft Way - Redmond, WA 98052
MSN PRIVACY STATEMENT
http://privacy.msn.com (http://privacy.msn.com/>)

Naturally, he clicked on the link which read "http://breakingnews.msnbc.com" but was linking to a infected site. And was prompted to 'Install Flash player' . Now who doesn't want to install Flash player!!
So he "installed" clicking on the the link. At the time of me writing this, he is still figuring out how to clean up the mess!

There is only one way to make sure u won't fall for this trap. Always have the latest Flash player installed in your machine. ;)

If you haven't updated your flash player for long, go get it here.