Presenting Rails for Flash at LFPUG

As usual, the London Flash Platform User Group event will be held on the last Thursday of the month; that’s this Thursday, October the 30th.

First up this month are the guys at Unit9, they’ll be taking you through their processes and how they keep everyone in the company communicating effectively for maximum result.

I will be following up with a presentation on Ruby on Rails and Flash; taking you through the steps needed to create a REST-ful Rails application that is read and writeable through a Flash Front end. This will give you an introduction to Ruby on Rails and how this powerful web application framework can make it ridiculously easy for you to kick-start your next, or first, database powered Flash application.

The LFPUG will be held at it’s usual location, Cosmobar on Clerkenwell Road (54-56) and the presentations start at 19:00. For more information on the sessions, and indeed on how to get there, see the official LFPUG site.

See you there!

Insoshi: kickstart your social app

Insoshi is an open source social site with everything you would expect; messaging, blogging, connections and much more. If you download the source (writen in Rails), you’ll already have a fully operational social software platform to kick start your idea. To top it off, things can only get better; Insoshi is under active development.

If you’ve used Ruby on Rails before, you should feel very comfortable browsing the source, it is written in a concise and professional manner. For the novice Rails developer, Insoshi provides a great opportunity to understand the architecture of a fully functional Rails site. You’ll learn a lot from browsing the source of a complete application, something I found difficult to find when first embarking on my own Rails adventures.

Head on over to the Insoshi site to get started on your own adventure.

Loving the profile editor at the ADC introNetwork

Today was the day I wanted to log my first Flex bug on the Flex Bug and Issue Management System (crikey, that’s a mouthful). However, I got beaten to it by Ryan Gardner who posted it yesterday. (ahh, the power of open source!) Anyhoo, I started browsing the new devnet trying to find the ADC desktop so I could see how handy it would be in watching the progression of the bug (Mike Potter mentioned the new ADC desktop app during his recent talk at the London Flex User Group)

While trying to find the app I stumbled on the ADC introNetwork, a social network for members of the Adobe Developer Connection. I decided to check it out. This is when I discovered the profile editor while setting up my account. It’s a great use of Flex and Im sure we’ll be seeing this type of thing start to appear in other more “traditional” social networks. It lets you drag certain keywords to an area at the top of the screen and order them according to how important they are to you. It’s a great way of creating a custom profile that matches you with people who have the same type of skills or interests. Here’s a screenshot for your viewing pleasure:

The ADC profile editor (click for large version)

Apollo lifts off

The Apollo SDK is now available for download on Adobe labs.
I’ve had a quick look at some of the example Apollo applications (they’re tucked away a bit) and amazingly, I’ve already been able to use one at work this morning: the Pixel Perfect example.

I’ve also been on the lookout for a nice RSS reader as I haven’t been able to find a suitable Windows alternative for Vienna, my RSS reader of choice on Mac. I’ll be giving the Fresh RSS reader a go over the next couple of days.

New VirtueDesktop Beta available

A new beta of Virtue Desktop, the multi workspace app for OS X, is now available for download, fixing a number of issues.

If you are using a Mac and want to improve your productivity when using multiple programs, make sure you check it out. VirtueDesktop is without doubt one of the most groundbreaking applications I have ever used. Sure it’s a little buggy here and there, so if thats not your deal you may want to wait till OS X Leopard; which has similar functionality built straight into the operating system.

You can find out more about the beta over at VirtueDesktops site.

Red 5, bappy 1st hirthday!

The Red 5 project is one year old today!

Congratulations to all the team members and good luck for the future…
For those of you who don’t know, Red 5 is an open source Flash Media Server project hosted at osflash.org

Flash/JS Integration Kit gets a big thumbs up

Over the last couple of weeks I have been working on a major project whereby our team needed to pass values to HTML.

Initially we used a plain old getURL ActionScript function when we needed to pass values to JavaScript. This worked fine untill we tested its cross-platform compatibility. Not soon thereafter, our hopes and dreams were dashed when we ran into trouble with Safari; even though the documentation claimed that Safari supports this method.
This method also meant it would be difficult to get values back from JavaScript, should the need arise in the future, and knowing how things usually go, it probably will.

So we did what any smart developer would do, we turned to the Flash/Javascript Integration Kit, developed by Christian Cantrell and Mike Chambers; back when Macromedia was still Macromedia, and Adobe was, well, Adobe.
It works a treat and we were able to swiftly wipe any cross-browser concerns aside and move on to more important things.
I can heartily recommend its usage to anyone integrating Flash with JavaScript. The documentation was concise and easy to follow.

You can find the project’s homepage at osflash.org/flashjs,where you will also find a link to the kit itself.