Old Doug, New Tricks!

C U @ PV3D Vancouver this weekend!

2008-04-28T19:20:00.000-07:00

I'm excited to get some Papervision3D training this weekend from John Grden. We might decide to make him an honourary Canadian and buy him an extra vowel or two for his last name.

Obviously, the appropriate Canadian letter would be a 'U', since we have so many of them lying around these days. "Color?" Never heard of it. "Colour?" Yeah, baby. That's more like it!

Anyway, if you're from out-of-town and want to blend in, the correct pronounciation is "Vang-couver". Yup, us locals add a nearly silent "g" into the city's name.

I hope to see you there.

Boo-hoo! I have to miss 360|Flex Milan

2008-03-15T20:34:00.000-07:00

Unfortunately (for me, at least), I've had to pull out of my Cowbell Hero session @ 360|Flex Milan. I can't make the conference any longer, and I'm feeling very, very sheepish (as opposed my usual "moose-ish") for canceling so close the conference.

Tom and John have been great about it. They really have the coolest conference going these days.

But just because I can't go, it doesn't mean you shouldn't (my absence might even be *more* of a reason to go!). You simply will not find a better value for your 360 Euros than in Milan, April 7-9.

Cheers,
Doug

PS: Cowbell Hero is still a go, and I'll be posting details on this blog as development progresses.

Come see Cowbell Hero @ 360|Flex Europe!

2008-03-04T12:25:00.000-08:00

I'm excited to be presenting at 360|Flex Europe in Milan, Apr 7-9.

When I first talked with Tom & John about the Milan gig last August, I said that I had wanted to present something that integrates hardware and physical interaction with the Flash platform.

So over the past year I've been working on a number of home projects centered around the Arduino, a low-cost open source hardware platform, which fittingly was designed in Italy.

The Arduino is a 16 Mhz Atmel microcontroller with a USB interface and a number of digital I/Os and analog inputs. You can purchase a fully assembled Arduino controller for less than $40. And open source IDE is available for Mac/Windows/Linux.

So $40 plus a few spare LEDs and simple components can yield some interesting stuff.

Cowbell Hero with an Arduino

This Christmas my son got an Xbox 360, and I got Guitar Hero. Now my son (15) and daughter (11) routinely kick my butt at this game (but at least they unlocked Trogdor! for me).

When I was planning for 360 Milan, I was trying to think of a fun way to engage the audience, and I thought it would be fun to create game in AIR. Natuarally, this game had to be Cowbell Hero.

We'll be hooking up my Mac to the projector, the Arduino, and the sound system, and rocking out like Bruce Dickinson would want.

So sign up now for 360 Flex Europe, and I'll see you in Milan!

Pixton revealed at Vancouver Flex/AIR tour

2008-01-31T20:13:00.001-08:00

The fine folks at Business Objects hosted the the recent Vancouver stop of the Flex3/AIR Prerelease Tour. Local Adobe Evangelist Duane Nickull was bravely demoing a 4-hour-old build of Flex Builder, showing off the new features to a crowd of of about 60+ developers / designers. About half were new to the Flash platform (welcome to the party!).

Duane's quote of the night came at the Yaletown Brew Pub afterwards: After telling him that I think that Flex is the crack-cocaine of programming languages, Duane quipped "Adobe considers Flex to be the gateway-drug to AIR". Brilliant.

Star of the evening - Pixton

Local developer Clive Goodinson demoed a new online comic site called Pixton. This super awesome site was created by Clive in just two months, and includes a Flash CS3 front end married to a PHP back end. Pixton is incredibly visually appealing, plus it has very immerisive and intuitive editing capabilities. Drag a character's arm to reposition it, and the joints all move correspondingly, in a very natural manner.

You can also remix the content of other Pixton comics, if the original author permits. Duane has already used Pixton to mock co-worker Ted Patrick. Most excellent.

My new mashups book is out!

2008-01-31T08:10:00.001-08:00

Please help support this blog and buy this book. It was seconds in the making!

Labels everywhere often means that the design sucks

2008-01-12T11:34:00.000-08:00

This blurry picture is a camera-phone snap (scratched lens! grrr!) of the elevator control panel at my previous gig, before I joined EffectiveUI. The pic is blurry, but you can still make out the details.

There is just no affordance or discoverability in this button layout. I was working onsite for a couple of months, and I saw everybody continue to struggle to figure this thing out. I'm not talking just visitors (who also struggled), but people who had been working there for years! I was also tricked by the strange layout a couple of times a week.

Now, to be fair, the building was a little oddly shaped. It was built into a steep hill, and was terraced. An elevation perspective looked like this:

    +---+
    | 2 |
    +---+--+
Gnd | 1    |
----+------+
    |      |     Patio
    +------------------+  Ground level
    | Parking P3       |-------\
    +------------------+        \
    | Parking P2       |
    +------------------+
    | Parking P1       |
    +------------------+

Things I found bad about this design:

"Main" (1)  (2)
       (P3) (M) "Roof Garden"
       (P1) (P2)

This panel is ordered right-to-left, instead of left-to-right. The standard layout (at least in North America) is for two-column panels to start with the top floor on the upper-left, and then decrement floor-by-floor in a left-to-right, top-to-bottom sequence.
Floor 1 (street level entry) is also labeled "Main", but there is an "M" button!
The mezzanine floor has the confusing "M" button, which everyone thought was the main level. "M" should only be for main.
To fix the above, the mezzanine floor is labeled "Roof Garden". Roof? In the middle of the building? Call it a patio and avoid the confusion already!
The parking levels are not ordered according to the standard. Underground parking levels should start with P1 being the level just below the main floor. So P3 should be floor furthest down, not at the top.

It's a tough design problem, for sure, but I think that the person responsible for this just gave up and said "This will do", thereby condeming all future occupants to confusion.

How would you solve the layout problem?

(PS: Can you tell I love ASCII art?)

No, I haven't died in a blogging accident

2008-01-12T09:47:00.000-08:00

Just in case any of you were wondering. Man, you gotta love XKCD. Too many fluff posts like this are skewing the results.

DryerFox - Updated for Flex 3 Beta 3

2008-01-02T10:19:00.001-08:00

I made a few minor tweaks to DryerFox a few weeks ago, but I thought I should post them.

Updated the code to resolve breaking changes.

The WebKit control was reworked a fair bit for Beta 3. mx.controls.HTML no longer delegates the heavy lifting to flash.html.HTMLControl. So this meant a code sweep to change snippets like:
- html.htmlControl.historyBack() becomes html.historyBack().
- html.htmlControl.window.document.title becomes html.domWindow.window.document.title.
- HTMLUncaughtJavascriptExceptionEvent becomes HTMLUncaughtScriptExceptionEvent.
Updated the -app.xml

Another beta, another -app.xml schema.

All the same values are set, but the precise location and names within the XML have changed again. I can see in the SDK that there is a template for these in sdk/templates/air/descriptor-template.xml. I just wish that Flex Builder provided a config panel interface to set this stuff, just like it does for the HTML wrappers.
Updated the badge installer

This beta included another update to the badge installer, so I have included this in the source update.
Added the new EverythingFlexAIR.SWC library

DryerFox was already using Rich Tretola's UpdateManager class, and Rich has now packaged this (and other useful goodies) in a SWC, available here.
Updated SWFObject to v2 RC1

SWFObject has moved to a release candidate, so I updated my copy. No other changes required.

Source for the latest DryerFox can be found here. App can be installed via the "Install Now" button at the top of the sidebar.

I am older than the *nix epoch

2007-12-22T20:49:00.000-08:00

This fact dawned on me this week, during a discussion of UTC time handling in particular, and time/date handling in Flex in general.

I don't know why I fixated on it. OK, I do know why. I'm terribly vain, *and* I'm the oldest guy in the company. At least I'm not the most mature!

Random Fun Facts

The UNIX epoch is defined as midnight, UTC, Jan 1, 1970.
I'm 42 years old, born just after the Earth finished cooling in July 1965, so that makes me about -4.5 years from the epoch.
UTC is not technically an acronym, since the letters don't stand for anything. Instead, the letters represent an interesting compromise between the French TUC (temps universel coordonné) and the English CUT (coordinated universal time).
I think the year 2038 problem is much more likely to be a big issue than the non-event that was Y2K.
Man, this date/time stuff is a difficult problem to solve precisely.
Did you know that the Unix epoch of Jan 1, 1970 is not the same as the UTC epoch of Jan 1, 1972?
Did you know that the official UTC spec includes leap seconds, but Unix time doesn't?
All of this makes me think of this Chicago song. Which is also older than the Unix epoch.

DryerFox - Moxie Beta 2 Upgrade Completed

2007-10-03T11:44:00.000-07:00

This post updates a couple of earlier posts about DryerFox in particular and how to deploy AIR apps with a seamless install from your web page.

Click on the "Install Now" button in the sidebar to get the latest DryerFox executable, or click here for the source.

Updating from AIR Beta 1 to AIR Beta 2

This step was pretty straight forward. The foo-app.xml schema has changed (again!) in FB3B2, so the simplest thing to do (and the sequence recommended in the release notes) was:

Create a new AIR project
Cut-n-paste the few project descriptors and icon paths from the old project to the new project. The same information exists in both projects, but the location of each XML node has changed.

So far, each public beta of AIR has changed the app.xml schema, so this seems to be an area of churn. Not a biggie though. It took about 3 minutes to do this.

Once DryerFox was compiling in FB3B2, I found that the stage.window property was renamed to stage.nativeWindow, so I have to update the startMove(), minimize(), and close() handlers. That took another 5 minutes, and then DryerFox was up and running again.

Adding UpdateManager

This was quite straightfoward. Kudos to Rich at the EverythingFlex blog for posting this useful class.

I copied the com.everythingflex.air.managers.UpdateManager.as class to my project.
I created a version.xml that matched the new version in -app.xml
Added the following two lines to the onAppInit() method:


import com.everythingflex.air.managers.UpdateManager;
var um:UpdateManager = new UpdateManager("http://www.dryerfox.com/blog/DryerFox/version.xml");

Seamless Installation update (imageurl is gone!)

I followed the instructions in the AIR release notes, and updated my install badge to the latest version bundled in the SDK. This folder can be found at "installRoot/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.0.0/samples/badge".
In doing so I found that the new badge.fla no longer attempts to frame a supplied image with the button. I quite liked the embedded, so I just updated my older badge flash project from here, simply replacing older install.as with the newer, more robust version included in FB3B2.

Feel free to steal my backwards-compatible badge.swf if you want something you can just drop in as a replacement. Also note that Adobe now recommends setting Flash 8 as the minimum flash version. Since Flash 9 has well over 90% market penetration, that's a pretty reasonable setting.

SWFObject 2.0

Geoff Stearns and Bobby van der Sluis have been busy improving their individual SWF-hosting efforts into a combined project, just released on Google code. I've updated my "Install Now" button to use the SWFObject 2.0 script, and it seems to be working well. There is a syntax change from the previous use case, but it is still pretty simple to use.

Here's the new syntax:


<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"/>

<div id="dryerfox_flashcontent">
Whoa. You need to install <a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayer">Adobe Flash Player</a>.
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
var flashvars = {
 appname:  "DryerFox",
 appurl:  "DryerFox.air",
 imageurl:  "dryerfox_badge.jpg",
 airversion:  "1.0.M5",
 buttoncolor: "008811",
 messagecolor: "000000"
};
swfobject.embedSWF( "badge.swf", "dryerfox_flashcontent", "217", "180", "8", "expressInstall.swf", flashvars );
</script>

The first two sections are unchanged. Include the swfobject.js script in a <script> tag, and your app's alternate content in a <div> tag. Then use a swfobject.embedSWF() method call to replace the alternate content with your SWF and viola!

DryerFox demoed at Best Buy!

Thanks for reading this far. I just thought I'd send a shout out to the techs at Best Buy (is that still Geek Squad?) for leaving their Vista demo systems wide open. On the weekend I was able to install DryerFox on a sweet HP 19" touchscreen system, and associate DryerFox with the .HTML file extension. Who sets up demo accounts with admin privileges?

Oh well, it was fun to drag the dryer around with my finger.

DryerFox - Maintenance mode

2007-10-02T22:55:00.000-07:00

The DryerFox code is getting a wee bit stale, so it's time for an update. Rather than make incremental changes, I thought I'd lump in the following tweaks:

Build it with Flex Builder 3 (Moxie) Beta 2
Add in Rich Tretola's UpdateManager class
Deploy it with the new badge installer (now called Seamless Installation)
Wrap the Install Now badge using SWFObject 2.0

Four framework upgrades at once. What could possibly go wrong? ;-)

Stay tuned ...

To Catch A Thief

2007-09-26T11:43:00.000-07:00

Or at least, to catch a buyer of hot items. :-)

Mr. Flickr-fied turned the stolen iMac into Victoria police (that's a 2hr ferry ride away from Vancouver), on the advice of his lawyer. He had "bought it from a friend who bought it from someone else". Apparently our friend is "known to police" and the investigation is ongoing.

I think we should chip in and get the iMac tattooed for easy identification next time.

It wasn't me! I didn't do it! You can't prove anything!

2007-09-24T14:08:00.000-07:00

OK, so this post is off-topic, but it is too sweet to not blog about.

Our Vancouver office space is at the lovely WorkSpace in Gastown. Last Tuesday night there was a break-in, and the thugs stole some computers, including a public-use iMac that lived near the espresso bar.

That stolen iMac had the great FlickrBooth plugin installed and today someone posted a few interesting pics of themselves to the WorkSpace Flickr account. Nice tats dude!

40 minutes ago, one of the Flickr admins called WorkSpace owner Bill MacEwen with the IP address used to upload today's photos. I sure hope the cops nail this guy.

At the time of the heist, I was in Denver, at the EffectiveUI main office. Since it was international Talk-Like-A-Pirate day, I was required by law to dress up. Today I noticed that my fake tats and bloated face make me look similar to the person of interest.

I'm thankful I have a rock solid alibi.

Now go get him, boys!

I am a Nerd King! How about you?

2007-09-08T23:17:00.001-07:00

Etch-A-Sketch Technical Support

2007-08-26T20:18:00.000-07:00

I can't really describe how I found myself there, but this Etch-A-Sketch FAQ gave me quite a laugh today.

Wanted: Eclipse IDE widget to quickly change the editor font size

2007-08-22T21:29:00.000-07:00

Does anyone know of an existing Eclipse widget / plugin that puts a quick font-size dropdown on the IDE toolbar? If so, please share and the Flex presenter / speaker community will give you a hug.

Can y’all see this in the back?

Changing the font size of the Eclipse text editor is a royal pain. It is a completely undiscoverable feature. It seemed that all the 360 Flex sessions I attended had the same scene:

Presenter: OK, let’s look at some code now. (switches to the IDE, either Flex Builder or full-blown Eclipse)

Guy At The Back Of The Room: Umm. Can you increase the font size so that we can read it back here?

Presenter: Oh, OK, no problem. (fiddles with Eclipse for a few seconds) Umm. Anyone know the secret handshake?

GATBOTR: Preferences —> General —> Appearance —> Color And Fonts —> Text Font —> Change …

Presenter: Whut?

GATBOTR: (louder and more slowly, as if talking to one's great Aunt Ethel) Preferences —> General —> Appearance —> Color And Fonts —> Text Font —> Change …

Presenter: (kinda sorta fiddles some more, and eventually stumbles onto the right path) OK, got it.

GATBOTR: Thanks.

I think the brain is wired to immediately forget such painful experiences. It almost made me long for the intuitiveness of Ctrl-Alt-Delete again. As the conference progressed, some of the presenters got wise early, and had pre-configured their IDE for “presenter mode”, but if they were like me, they still had a hard time finding it buried in the UI. I had to search the Eclipse online help the night before my presentation in order to find the setting.

Turn down the suck

Now, I’m not trying to bash Eclipse here. Really. I like Eclipse. I have all their albums.

I’m just guessing that this UI just sort of grew unwieldy over time, rather than by design. Maybe it is already scheduled to be fixed in the 4.x codebase. But the current experience sucks.

Preferences —> General —> Appearance —> Color And Fonts —> Text Font —> Change …

I'm counting seven clicks (7!!!) until I see a familiar font size selection dialog. There are at least three glaring issues at play:

The "Colors and Fonts" category is too long, and by default is clipped to "Colors an". So I can't even just use the tree control to expand and navigate the categories. I have to click each expanded item to see if its full name gives me some clue about what it controls.
Once selected, the "Colors and Fonts" panel displays the list of settings, and the "Text Font" entry is selected (it is highlighted in blue), but there are no obvious controls that suggest "click me to change the font".
So now you click the already-selected entry "Text Font" and viola! The "Change" and "Reset" buttons appear like magic.
OK, I know I said 3 issues not 4. I'll concede that this one might just be me. Grouping colors together with fonts doesn't make sense to me. I assume that each language controls its own syntax highlighting, so I just don't expect to be setting colors when I'm setting fonts.

How to help

A savvy Java developer (ie. not me) can probably create a wee widget to sit in the IDE toolbar and add a font size dropdown. No font face changes, no color changes, just make the existing font bigger for the text editor (or better yet, the text editor and any console/output/trace buffer windows).

There now. Assuming this saves 2 minutes of a 60 minute session, the widget you’ve just created has increased the productivity of the presenter by 3%. Not bad! U R AWESOME!!!!

Using SWFObject and the AIR install badge for easy deployment

2007-08-19T11:30:00.001-07:00

One of the topics I spoke on at 360|Flex was how to add an "Install Now" button to a page, using the AIR install badge from Adobe. This is very easy to do, even though this post is long-ish. Explaining what is happening takes longer than the dozen lines of JavaScript required to get this to work.

I have an example "Install Now" button for DryerFox in the blog sidebar. This button will provide a one-click install experience for your users.

Quick-n-dirty summary for adding an "Install Now" button.

Copy foo.air to your web folder. This is your app's AIR application bundle.

Create a 215 x 100 image of your app, and save it as foo_badge.jpg in your web folder.

Copy swfobject.js to your web folder. Thanks to Geoff Stearns for the fabulous SWFObject.

Copy badge.swf to your web folder.

Add the following HTML snippet to your page:

<script type="text/javascript" src="swfobject.js"></script>

<div id="foo_flashcontent">
Whoa. You need to install <a href="http://www.adobe.com/go/flashplayer">Adobe Flash Player</a>.
</div>

<script type="text/javascript">
var so = new SWFObject("badge.swf", "badge", "217", "180", "6.0.65", "#FFFFFF");
so.addVariable( "appname", "Foo" );
so.addVariable( "appurl",   "foo.air" );
so.addVariable( "imageurl", "foo_badge.jpg" );
so.addVariable( "airversion", "1.0.M4" );
so.addVariable( "buttoncolor", "008811" );
so.addVariable( "messagecolor", "000000" );
so.write("foo_flashcontent");
</script>

Details - Under the hood

The SWFObject script will replace the <div> section labeled "foo_flashcontent" with the badge SWF, and populate its required Flashvars with your apps resources. Note that it is important to include some sort of fallback text in the <div> in case no Flash player is found.

Flashvar name	Description
appname	The name of your app. This name will be displayed by the badge in various messages below the "Install Now" button. Messages like "In order to install FooApp, the AIR runtime will also be installed".
appurl	The URL of your app's AIR bundle. The URL can be relative to the same folder as the page, or can be an absolute URL pointing to some other domain.
imageurl	The URL of the 215 x 100 image (JPG/PNG) to display inside the badge. As with the app URL, this URL can be relative or absolute.
airversion	The version of the AIR runtime required by your app, as specified in Foo-app.xml. For Moxie beta 1, this is "1.0.M4".
buttoncolor	The color of the "Install Now" text in hex RRGGBB format.
messagecolor	The hex RRGGBB color of the message text displayed below the badge.

Clicking the badge will do the following:

Auto-update the Flash player. The user's current Flash player version is examined and the script will update to the latest Flash Player if required. This bootstrap works as far back as Flash player 6.0.65 (released in December 2002), so that gives pretty good coverage. Will a 2002-era computer run a useful AIR app? Hmm. Probably not.

Auto-install the AIR runtime. Verify that the AIR runtime required by your app is installed, and auto-install it when missing. Each AIR app is tied to a specific runtime release, and the install badge knows how to deal with this correctly.

Auto-install your AIR app. This is, of course, what you really wanted to do in the first place.

Security Issues

Just to be clear, all of the above installation operations take place in the context of the active operating system user account. No OS security restrictions are bypassed, so the user will need admin or install privileges to succeed. This is a good thing.

Churn, Churn, Churn

The badge.swf example was added to the Flex SDK as part of the Flex 3 (Moxie) public prerelease, but that version of badge.swf was rather buggy. Adobe quickly released a patch and you will need to use the patch and avoid the one included in the SDK. I'm sure this will be fixed in the next public code drop. For now, avoid the code in INSTALLROOT/sdks/moxie/samples/badge.

Update:
Also make sure your web server is configured to know the mime-type of .air files. (*.air=application/vnd.adobe.apollo-application-installer-package+zip) More detail on the mime type is found in Mike Chamber's post here.

Resources:

Tom Cornilliac's excellent post on the AIR install badge. (It is just missing the SWFObject example)

So here's the downside of having a dozen designers on staff

2007-08-17T19:49:00.000-07:00

So I'm in Seattle for the 360 Flex conference, speaking about DryerFox yet again, and the "Your Mom" jokes start flying fast & furious from the entire EffectiveUI team.

Saying "your mom" to an EUI-er is like saying Aloha to a Hawaiian. You can use it as a greeting, as a goodbye, or in place of whitespace or punctuation.

So I'm feeling a little punchy at the end of a day and I spam this silly self-portrait to the entire company.

Suddenly, our president Anthony spams back with "$20 to the best Photoshop of Doug's pic by Friday". Everyone knows that designers are completely shameless when a twenty is waved in front of them so now I've got the equivalent of Something Awful's PS forum descending like vultures on my boyish good looks.

I'm not the judge of this contest, but I'm pretty sure Patrick will win with this entry, which I absolutely love!

Out of respect for you Patrick, I will always say "Your Mother". :-)

var office:Office = new Office( "EffectiveUI" );

2007-08-17T14:03:00.001-07:00

I've been offline for longer than I wanted, and now I've got too many blog post ideas and not enough time.

So first things first, I'm happy to announce that I've joined the crazy folks at EffectiveUI, a rich internet app services company, with headquarters in Denver, Colorado. Some of the cooler public projects we've worked on include the San Dimas project for eBay and the Cancer Collage for Discovery Channel.

We opened up an Vancouver office a month ago (me and two other buddies) in the funky Gastown space offered by WorkSpace, home of the best barista in town (thanks Dane!)

The team down in Denver ("down" in longitude, but "up" in elevation) is a very creative and fun bunch, and I'm hoping that we can build an equally impressive team and culture here in Lotus Land.

I'm definitely gonna need to be riding my bike to work more often, since all the excellent restaurants nearby seem to be keeping me extra well fed.

DryerFox - Updated for new AIR runtime

2007-07-18T21:23:00.000-07:00

I've finally updated my DryerFox hack for the Adobe AIR runtime. The conversion from the alpha version of AIR to the public beta was pretty straightforward.

One-click Install
I've added "Install DryerFox Now" badge in the sidebar, which should provide a one-click install experience, installing the AIR runtime if required, and then installing DryerFox.

I haven't logged too many test hours on the install badge, so please let me know if you have any problems.

Geek links
The source for DryerFox is available here.
The AIR file (the DryerFox executable) is available here, in case the "Install Now" button gives you trouble. You might need need the AIR runtime too, if "Install Now" chokes.

Please come again! Props to Apu!

2007-07-02T10:32:00.001-07:00

Hah.

The 7-11 near my home is one of only 12 stores across North America to be temporarily transformed into a Kwik-E Mart as part of the upcoming Simpsons Movie promotion. I saw the 7-11 under construction the other day, but I haven't been back to see the final product.

Hopefully, it will be close to the this 7-11 in Burbank, CA, which has been profiled on Flickr.

Get on the bus, Gus! Come say hi in Vancouver July 11th

2007-06-24T09:53:00.001-07:00

Mike Chambers was kind enough to offer me a chance to speak at the Vancouver leg of the Adobe onAIR bus tour.

I'm just doing a small session on my 15-minutes-of-fame-are-now-over DryerFox hack, as an example of no-chrome (or would that be self-chromed) app development.

This is a free event, and everyone is invited, but you need to register. I'm expecting the schwag-o-meter to be pretty high, so it will be worth it. I hope to see you there. Did I mention the free-as-in-beer beer? 'Nuf said.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Air, DryerFox, Flex, WebKit

Gee, I wonder how Silverlight will work on my Mac? Oh ... never mind

2007-06-23T22:23:00.001-07:00

I was keen to check out some of the Silverlight capabilities on my MacBook Pro. I heard that our friends in Redmond were doing all their demos on a Mac first. Apparently none of them were running the latest 10.4 release.

Here is my out of the box experience ... Doh!

What, is the installer just doing a string compare on the versions?
Since when is 10.4.10 < 10.4.8?

OK, so it's a beta, and they'll probably have a patch soon, but it's a pretty nasty out-of-the-box experience.

Oh well, back to AIR-land.

[Update] There is a workaround posted on the MS-site, but it is clunky.

I'm an Airhead now!

2007-06-10T22:22:00.000-07:00

... but my wife could have told you that a long time ago. :-)

Adobe has renamed the Apollo runtime as "Air" (Adobe Integrated Runtime), and I like the new name. Apollo was a good code name, and "Air" is a nice product name. It also helps that the file format for Apollo bundles was already called a ".AIR" file.

I've been involved with enough products over the years to see my fair share of silly product names ending up with "designed by committee" feel to them. (Ironically, best described by this in-house Microsoft ad parody).

Congrats to the Air team.

New stuff on Adobe labs today:

Air beta installer: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/air.html

Flex 3 beta: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/flexbuilder3/

Enjoy.

Technorati Tags: Adobe Air, Apollo

Ah! Movies the way I remember them ...

2007-05-21T21:07:00.000-07:00

If you're as old as me, then you remember what movies were like when the first came out (right after the earth finished cooling).