I’m working with a new site design, so please be patient while I work the bugs out.
I’m switching because I want the design to be a bit cleaner, but also because I registered http://www.ryanstewart.net today and I’m thinking about using that as the main site address and have digitalbackcountry.com just be a pointer.
I’ll experiment with things and see what I feel like. Hopefully most of you are using RSS feeds anyway, so you won’t even see the changes.
TweetJesse Warden has some fantastic examples of panel management in Flex over at his blog. I think this kind of thing shows exactly what Flex should be about: creating rich internet applications that behave like desktop applications. Rich internet apps should not have different rules from desktop apps.
With Flex we finally have the ability to create rich user interfaces for our Learning Lab simulations. However because there is a difference in the behavior of the UI we can build in Flex, and the UI that has been second nature to desktop applications for so long, there is always a bigger learning curve for our applications.
With that said, the great thing is that the community has started to take advantage of Flex’s customization and people like Jesse can extend Flex and show us all how it should be done.
If you want another cool example from Jesse, check out his captivate movie showing Flex running as a desktop app. Blog post here.
TweetWe spent Saturday at home but then on Sunday went up to Blue Mountain, PA (near Allentown) and hiked a section of the Appalachian Trail. It was 5.6 miles one way, so a total of 11.2 miles round trip. The views were pretty good, but the trail was VERY crowded and very rocky. It made us realize that we would hate to thru-hike the Appalachian Trail. We had great weather though and it was a good workout.
I think we did the trail in about 4 hours, so we were going at about 2 3/4 miles an hour which is better than we usually do.
We took a couple of photos: http://www.flickr.com/photos/digitalbackcountry/tags/bluemountain/
TweetI’m either a work-a-holic or a huge nerd, but I spent part of today working with svg graphics for my project at work and I found a couple of resources that might be useful to anyone who is working with svg graphics and Flash. One of them is a paper comparing the .swf format to the .svg format – http://www.carto.net/papers/svg/comparison_flash_svg/. It seems to be a very in depth comparison. Another is a very old article about vector graphics at O’Reilly – http://www.oreillynet.com/pub/a/javascript/2002/05/24/swf_not_flash.html.
I really like the SVG format, I think the idea of being able to code vector based graphics using an xml-type language is really cool, but as far as how the various vector based formats fit into Flex, there really isn’t any comparison to swf. It’s smaller, the plug-in penetration is higher, and within Flex I can dynamically load swf files (no such luck with .svg). I think svg is great for open source projects, but if you have access to Flash, swf is great.
One thing I’m very curious about is how the merger between Adobe and Macromedia will affect svg development. As far as I can tell, the main svg viewer plug-in is by Adobe (although Mozilla is working on native svg support for Mozilla). Adobe even has an SVG page set up for developers. I think there is room for both, so hopefully the merger won’t do anything to affect Adobe’s support for SVG.
Edit: Here’s another neat page with examples of different vector graphic formats http://www.square1.nl/TGC-SITE/vector/vector-gallery.htm
TweetScotch and country music is a bad combination.
That’s it.
The songs I?m used to hearin?; Ain?t the kind the jukebox play
TweetScoble posted a video about Sparkle and the Sparkle team. It’s worth a look, but I didn’t watch the whole hour of the video. Sparkle looks very cool, but I don’t think it’s any better than Flash. It does show that Microsoft is following Macromedia into the Designer/Developer space. It appears to be a very powerful, professional tool that a lot of developers will probably like.
It’s not the “Flash Killer” that people have called it, but it does target the same people that Flash targets. It is going to give designers the ability to build Windows Vista applications very easily and work with developers to make applications that are easy to use and look good.
All of the Avalon stuff coming out of the PDC is clearly a shot across the bow of Macrodobe. As a Flex developer, I think the competition is great and I can’t wait to see Macromedia present some of its own cool stuff at MAX. It’s a great time to be a rich internet application developer.
TweetAfter taking in a cigar bar with Dan and Terry, I decided I wanted to buy a bottle of Scotch to have around the house. I ended up buying Dalmore 12 year, which is what I had at the cigar bar, and it’s pretty good. After pouring myself a glass and sitting down at the computer, I wanted to know a little bit more about it. As it turns out, there is a ridiculous amount of information about Scotch out there. There’s the wikipedia entry, which is a good place to start. Then something that I think I could get used to, investing in Scotch Whisky. I suppose I should have guessed, but I had no idea Scotch was so complex.
TweetBased on the session list over at the PDC page, it looks like tomorrow is the big day for Avalon. Tonight, however, there are a couple of intro classes and a BoF called Avalon Extreme that might be interesting.
Of course if you’re like me, you aren’t actually attending PDC, so won’t be able to go to any of those sessions. But if you’re still interested, PDC Bloggers seems to be a good source of information on the sessions as they happen. Their presentation category is here.
TweetEither I wasn’t checking yesterday or this flew under the radar, but there is a new build of ASDT up over at their SourceForge site. The list of changes are here, and they include some new syntax highlighting, improved logging functionality and cold folding (among other things). It’s great to see that this project is still chugging along. It doesn’t have all the features that FDT does, but you can’t beat the price and I think it’s a great tool.
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