This will be my last blog post of 2007. Tomorrow morning Ciara and I are heading off to Costa Rica for some rest, relaxation, and recharging. I just wanted to say thank you to everyone who has commented, emailed, and gotten excited about rich Internet applications with me. You guys create such inspirational things and have such insightful thoughts that it makes writing and talking with you a pleasure. Without you I never would have had the enthusiasm to keep up the blog and make it such an important part of what I do.

It’s been a great personal year for me and I owe the bulk of it to all of you for the support and constant interaction. I hope I’ve at least provided you some good information and things to think about this year and I hope we’ll get to do it all over again next year.

Best wishes to all of your families, happy holidays and have a great new year. I’ll have my phone down in Costa Rica so I’ll hopefully be Twittering and keeping tabs a bit. But for the first time in a VERY long time I’m not bringing my laptop, so wish me luck

(Thanks to William Shakespeare for the quote)

[tags]thank, personal, blogging[/tags]

The nominees for the Crunchie awards are up and there are a few Flash-friendly companies on the list. Congrats to the following:

• Ribbit (Flex telephony platform) – Best enterprise start-up
• Geni (Flash-based Genealogy site) – Best user-generatd content site
• Aniboom (Animation site) – Best video site
• Hulu – (HD video, requiring the new version of Flash Player 9) – Best video site
• Justin.tv (Life-casting with Flash) – Best video site
• Tokbox (Flash-based video chat) – Best video site
• RockYou (Bling out MySpace with Flash) – Best use of viral marketing
• Slide (Flash-based embed-able slide shows) – Most likley to succeed

We also had a decent showing in the Best new startup category and the Best overall category with Ribbit and Hulu in the former and GrandCentral with it’s Flex-based app in the latter category.

Did I miss anyone?

Update: How could I forget Pandora and Duels in the Best time sink category?
[tags]Crunchies, Ribbit, Geni, Aniboom, Hulu, Justin.tv, Tokbox, RockYou, Slide, Flash[/tags]

Apologies in advance for the political stuff, but as I read the news that TechCrunch was planning on holding a primary and picking one candidate from each party based on technology issues my first thought was “I really like Mike, but he may be drinking his own kool-aid a bit too much here” Then thought about it more and at this point, politics have gotten so bad that I have no clue who I want to vote for so why not vote for one of the people that the tech community decides on?

I generally vote Republican (don’t hurt me) but I tend to be more conservative on economic issues and fairly liberal on social issues. Unfortunately that’s the exact opposite of the current Republican party so I’m a heavily disenfranchised Republican. I don’t really like any of the candidates (of both sides) and I don’t really have time or energy to figure out what peoples real opinions are because it seems like it doesn’t even matter once they get into office.

So you know what, screw it. There’s a 75% chance I’ll just vote for the best tech candidate and even though I feel pathetic saying it, TechCrunch is as good a source as any to help me figure it out. I can’t be the only one so maybe Mike is on to something here. I just feel a little dirty.

[tags]TechCrunch, Politics[/tags]

Okay, I ran into this issue and I’m hoping someone smarter than me (that’s a lot of you) has either run into this before or knows what the deal is. I think it’s probably something simple but in Googling it I turned up no results so I wanted to post here in case anyone else has issues in the future. Here’s the deal.

I’m using the sweet, out of the box, getters and setters and I’ve got one for date/time:

[as]public function set time (value:Date) : void

{

this._time = value;

}

public function get time () : Date

{

return this._time;

}

[/as]

With strings or any other variable type, that works fine. But when I try to create a date my time variable is always null. I’ve done it a couple of different ways to no avail. Try 1 (time is a property of the Waypoint class:

[as]

waypoint.time = new Date();
waypoint.time.setUTCFullYear(year, month, day);
waypoint.time.setUTCHours(hours, minutes, seconds);

[/as]

Try 2:

[as]

var tempDate : Date = new Date();
tempDate.setUTCFullYear(year, month, day);
tempDate.setUTCHours(hours, minutes, seconds);
waypoint.time = tempDate;

[/as]
I thought that might fire the setter correctly but time is still null after going through the function. Finally I had to set time to a public property and I could use method 1 from above just fine.

Anyone know what I’m doing wrong and how to fix it?

[tags]ActionScript3, getters and setters[/tags]

Jason Kringen pinged me about an AS3 Library for Facebook that’s in the works and is up on Google Code. The API lets you make REST calls between Facebook and Flash/Flex applications. The current version is 0.7 and it looks like quite a bit of work has gone into it. The main person behind it right now is Jason Crist from Cynergy Systems.

I love me some Facebook, and there are a ton of users there, so if you’re interested in building some apps that take advantage of the Facebook APIs, this is a good project to check out.

[tags]Facebook, Flash, Flex, ActionScript3[/tags]

With deep linking I’ve always thought you would be fine creating a regular Google sitemap for your Flex/Flash application but I haven’t actually tried it or been able to test the SEOness of it. But today Google announced an extension of their sitemap protocol that will extend to videos and let web site owners specify where the videos on their site are and then associate metadata with them.

In looking at the spec, it seems like it would be fairly easy to extend to any Flash content. They have a video:content_loc tag which specifies an flv (flash video file) but then also have a video:player_loc that specifies a SWF file. If you can use that video:player_loc to specify a SWF and then use the title and description to get the Google-juice, that might be helpful for web developers using Flash.

SEO in rich Internet applications is still a big deal. I continue to get a lot of comments and thoughts on it. Brian Ussery, who sent me this tip, has been one of my favorite people to talk to about the subject. It’s something we think a lot about at Adobe and I always love to get feedback from web developers who are running into issues.

[tags]Flash, SEO, Google, Sitemaps, Video[/tags]

Twitter is down for maintenance. It’s actually kind of pathetic how much I’m missing it tonight, but I’m okay with that. I find that when I’m doing work I usually use Twitter to complain/brag/inquire about the stuff I’m doing. Tonight I’m working on an application that will help me manage my hiking trips and GPX files. I’m using AIR and script bridging between Flex and Ajax so I can use Yahoo/Google maps as the display and Flex for the rest of the UI. So here’s what I would have been Twittering:

Whoo hoo! Finally got Flex and Ajax talking in AIR. Once you figure out the pattern of the sandbox it’s not bad.

Ugh. Just spent 30 minutes on a bug that ended up being caused by Safari.

After using AS3 going back to JavaScript just seems so hacky. I don’t get the joy.

Okay, now I can’t figure out the security sandbox again. It displays Yahoo Maps but not Google Maps.

[tags]Twitter, Personal[/tags]