Rob Gonda's Blog - Software

Multitouch Screen Using Flash +1 Adobe -1 Microsoft

Fri, 09 Jan 2009 15:57:00 -0400

Adobe Flash is getting more and more popular as the platform to develop multi-touch applications on.

Check out a post at http://www.multitouch.nl/?p=216 regarding a Summit that will be organized between Natural User Interface and Adobe in 2009 with the main focus on development of multi-touch solutions on Adobe’s Flash platform.

In case you haven’t seen my post on our NUI Group community website regarding that event, please have a look here: http://nuigroup.com/forums/viewthread/3582/

This video was made as a proof of concept of Flash applications running on the tracker of NUI Suite Snowflake.

Enterprise Architect now supports Flex

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:32:00 -0400

The new eclipse integration in Enterprise Architect now supports Flex through their Model Driven Generation feature according to Mike Rankin. I love EA so this is exciting news.

Google protocol buffers: Open-source Data Exchange Language

Tue, 15 Jul 2008 00:27:00 -0400

Google has open-sourced its protocol buffers, the company's lingua franca for encoding various types of data, in order to set the stage for a wave of new releases.

"Practically everyone inside Google" uses protocol buffers, states a FAQ page. "We have many other projects we would like to release as open source that use protocol buffers, so to do this, we needed to release protocol buffers first."

Protocol buffers are three to 10 times smaller and 20 to 100 times faster than XML, according to Google.

Google has prepared a download page that contains protocol buffer compilers for Java, C++ and Python.

Adobe Reader 9 Released

Thu, 03 Jul 2008 19:43:00 -0400

Adobe completed its Acrobat 9 transition with the release of Adobe Reader 9. The free PDF viewer application can now view Flash content embedded in PDF documents, and offers substantial performance improvements compared to previous versions of Adobe Reader.

Version 9 also added new collaboration support, added PDF Portfolios support, improved PDF form support, updated the user interface, and more.

Adobe Reader 9 is available as a free download at the Adobe Web site.

Firefox 3 launch a success: 8 million downloads in 24 hours

Thu, 19 Jun 2008 10:01:00 -0400

The first 24 hours are over, but the downloads continue to pour in. At press time, the official counter shows that the current rate is approximately 5,500 downloads per minute, and the total number of downloads is roughly 8.8 million. [ars technica]

Firefox 3 now available

Wed, 18 Jun 2008 07:19:00 -0400

After more than 18 months of development and a slew of releases (including five alphas, five betas and three Release Candidates), the wait for Mozilla's Firefox 3 is over.

The Firefox 3 release aims to improve the Web experience for the browser's 170 million users while expanding market share even further, coming as it does months ahead of the next major release from Microsoft, Internet Explorer 8 (IE). Tons of tabbing, bookmarking, memory, security, and well, 15,000 improvements...

Mozilla conducted an application-specific test that compared relative performance on Google's Gmail service. Beltzner said Firefox 3 proved to be four times faster than Firefox 2 and seven times quicker than IE 7.

Memory usage also improved substantially in Firefox 3. Many users had complained about Firefox 2's memory-hogging tendencies, especially when multiple tabs remained open throughout the course of a day.

With today's release, Mozilla isn't just aiming to change its browser. It's also aiming to enter the Guinness Book of Records. Mozzilla is aiming for 5 million downloads, though there is some controversy here as the Adobe Flash Player has exceeded 10 million daily downloads in many occasions.

Compulsion: clickable hotspots in any video

Tue, 27 May 2008 23:17:00 -0400

Check out Compulsion... It allows to create and map hotspots in any Video and make it clickable to anywhere ... Imagine watching a video and clicking on a shirt, chair, location, or anything ... Looks really interesting, I'd love to see the rollout and market penetration ...

Compulsion is a simple, easy to use tool that makes video clickable. The clicks become links that turn the video into an entire interactive universe of your design. You can offer or sell those links for click and shop, gossip, trivia, news, music, more video, or anything you can imagine. Compulsion does not alter the original movie file, and can be used before or after your video is published.
Anyone using this yet?

IIS + Apache, side by side happy together

Tue, 27 May 2008 22:52:00 -0400

IIS and Apache running side by side ... why? Well, for me, because I run SVN through Apache in a Windows box. I still like IIS for web sites, especially because I like to keep it similar to my production sites... however, I blogged before about getting multiple SVN repositories working with Apache. I usually switched Apache to listen to an alternate port because IIS binds itself to all port 80 on all IPs, regardless if they are actually being used or not. Good news! I found this Microsoft support document explaining how to unbind IIS from all IPs and include only the ones you want. I know, I actually never even looked for this before, but I have IIS serving my sites and Apache server SVN in the same server, both on port 80. Of course, you can also use this for hosting Trac (easier in Apache than IIS), or even just testing ... By the way, if you don't have the Windows Server CD handy, you can download the Support Tools here.
So, after installing the Support Tools, follow these instructions from the M$ site:

To add an IP address to the IP inclusion list
1.    Click Start, and then click Run.
2.    Type cmd, and then click OK to open a command prompt.
3.    Type the following, where xxx.xxx.x.x is the IP address you want to add:
httpcfg set iplisten -i xxx.xxx.x.x
When this succeeds, Httpcfg returns the following:
HttpSetServiceConfiguration completed with 0

To view additional status codes, see the Httpcfg help.
4.    After the IP address is added, use the following command to list it:
httpcfg query iplisten
Httpcfg returns the following:
IP :xxx.xxx.x.x
5.    From the command prompt, stop the HTTP service and its dependent services. To do this, type the following string at the command prompt:
net stop http /y
6.    From the command prompt, restart the HTTP service and it dependent services. To do this, type the following string at the command prompt:
net start w3svc
Note When you start w3svc, all services that were stopped when HTTP was stopped will start.

AMP: Adobe Media Player launched

Mon, 21 Apr 2008 00:48:00 -0400

The Adobe Media Player (AMP) finally launched with exciting content from CBS, MTV, PBS, Scripps, Universal Music and many more networks... Adobe demo'd this at Adobe Max 2007 and I've been using the betas for months...

"Adobe® Media Player software provides control and flexibility to view what you want, when you want — whether online or offline. You can queue up and download your favorite Internet TV content, track and download new episodes automatically, and manage your personal video library for viewing at your convenience."

Download Adobe Media Player.

Flash Media Encoder 2.5 Released with H.264 Encoding

Fri, 18 Apr 2008 17:12:00 -0400

Adobe released Flash Media Encoder version 2.5, defined as a software designed to enable you to capture live audio and video while streaming it in real time to Flash Media Server software or Flash Video Streaming Service (FVSS).

It now supports H.264 video codec and the Advanced Audio Coding (AAC) audio codec. The AAC support is via a plug-in which can be purchased from MainConcept.

Aptana Jaxer: server-side Ajax

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 23:08:00 -0400

Aptana released Jaxer: the first ever Ajax server... you got that right, server-side Ajax ... the concept is pretty interesting, a server-side API that wraps for client-side Ajax app to better optimize it and allows you to interface with the file system and database.... Oh, wait a minute, isn't this really similar to AIR? AIR also extends for your JavaScript libraries to allow file system and database access, except that AIR is a client desktop runtime and Jaxer is a server runtime... nevertheless, they solve the same problem... They allow you to leverage existing JavaScript skills to integrate seamlessly with components that will allow you to deploy full apps without the need of any traditional server-side programming language.

I always thought Aptana was just a nice Eclipse plugin, but this is pretty innovative. It integrates for your Apache web server as a simple extension (no IIS for now), it deploys as a war file for your Apache Tomcat Java server, or even runs in Amazon EC2 ...

I personally haven't tried it, and I have no complaints about ColdFusion, .NET, PHP, or Ruby processing my server requests, in fact, I believe they would be much more robust and reliable than server-side JavaScript, however, this looks great for small and light applications. I'm sure that's their first niche since the only two supported databases are sqlite and mysql, it's a good indicative ...

Anyone see a good immediate use for this new technology?

ColdFusion 8.0.1 Ajax Improvements

Mon, 14 Apr 2008 22:29:00 -0400

Adobe ColdFusion 8 Update 1 (8.0.1) was released April 3rd (most of you knew already). The good and safe news is that it seems to work fine... nothing broke with the update.

What was updated? You can get the full list here, but I will concentrate only on the Ajax part.

The docs say "We have improved functionality in several areas including AJAX functions, CFPDF, and CFIMAGE. And we have updated several software libraries including Yahoo YUI, EXT JS, Spry, and the FCKEditor."

The FCKEditor component used in the cftextarea tag’s rich text editor has been updated to version 2.5. As a result, the rich text editor now supports Safari 3 and Opera 9.50 browsers. This is great news, but 2.5 was released 11/30/2007... 2.6 was just released, so they went with the latest stable, though it was pretty safe to try the 2.6 RC, which was released a while back.

Next, the Spry framework has been updated to version 1.6.... not too much to say there, I don't care much about it.

Now the important part, the Yahoo YUI Library used for some AJAX-based controls has been updated to version 2.3 and the Ext JS framework used for some AJAX-based controls has been updated to version 1.1.1... I assume they did this because Ext JS 2.0 (released in October 2007 btw) was a major update and it would have taken too much to adapt it? Adobe, trust me, I understand SDLC, but in today's world CF helps us keep up with rapid changing technology and it would be totally worth it ... you will have to upgrade it at some point .... hopefully 8.0.2 will incorporate the a much newer version of Ext.

Adobe AIR: ShifD

Wed, 05 Mar 2008 20:13:00 -0400

Following the release of Adobe AIR, ichameleon/group/, has been working with Adobe and the New York Times on a small AIR demonstration app called ShifD: an awesome little app that helps you organize your notes and see them online, your mobile phone, iphone app, or the AIR based desktop app. The Adobe Air app was written entirely in AJAX using jQuery and a custom made MVC framework, wrapped around the Adobe AIR shell. You can signup for an account at http://www.shifd.com and/or download free tools at http://www.shifd.com/tools/.

Important: You must use jquery 1.2.3+ with AIR 1.0. Previous versions have application sandbox issues.

This launched along with Adobe AIR, which will allow us to take our html/flash/flex applications to the desktop. In fact, Adobe announced that Adobe AIR, Flex Builder 3, and the Flex 3 SDK are now live on their website.

Related links:

Flex/AIR on the Adobe.com home page:
http://www.adobe.com/

Flex Builder 3
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

Adobe AIR
http://www.adobe.com/products/air/

Flex 3 SDK
http://www.adobe.com/cfusion/entitlement/index.cfm?e=flex3email

New Rich Internet Applications site
http://www.adobe.com/resources/business/rich_internet_apps/

Re-launched Adobe Open Source Website
http://opensource.adobe.com/

Adobe Max: Day 2: Thermo

Tue, 02 Oct 2007 15:49:00 -0400

Thermo is amazing! It will bridge the gap between designers and developers, allowing developers to get in the game at an earlier stage; allow customers to feel the application and not just see it in planning phase... Prototyping just upgraded to a whole new meaning. The customer doesn't know what he wants until he sees it; now this applies to RIAs as well, how nice is that?! I really can't wait to start using it.
You read about it on the blogs, but there's nothing like seeing it in action ... even on early stages, I can already visualize us being an early adopted and using it on every RIA project.

Without getting too deep into the demo, Thermo allows to create a new RIA project, spits out Flex code... allow designers to use familiar tools such as layers ... or you can import a PSD, separate all assets, convert graphics into controls, group data into arrays for dummy data.... it's amazing ...

Apple Office: iWork 2008 got the numbers

Wed, 08 Aug 2007 07:46:00 -0400

I forgot to mention yesterday that iWork 2008 also comes with a spreadsheet application.
Apple has ramped up its competitive stance against Microsoft’s Office software by adding an Excel alternative to its range of $99 iWork 2008 applications. Its Numbers spreadsheet application now joins Apple’s Pages and Keynote software in taking on Microsoft’s flagship Word, Excel and Powerpoint packages.