Mar

24

CodeAmber.org is now offering a free public service regarding Amber Alerts. You sign up to receive text messages to your phone, pager, or PDA for certain state(s). I’ve been wanting to throw something together to do this for some time. It makes perfect sense. I can foresee a lot of these types of services coming out over the next year or so. This was discussed during the Tsunami disaster earlier in the year. The phone makes a perfect platform for these instant public service announcements.

Something I am sure is out there but I haven’t see is a similiar service from AOL or MSN tied to their IM platforms. The mechanism is already there, at least on MSN. I have received system alerts before regarding system outages, etc… Would be cool to opt into something like an Amber Alert system for my state to receive and IM if I am logged in and online, otherwise send an SMS to my phone. I have AOL and MSN both set up to send IM messages to my phone when I am not online. Seems logical to let AOL and MSN be the controller of these alerts. CodeAmber is great for stepping up to the plate and implementing this, but a more seamless approach seems to be in order. AOL or MSN, are you working on this?

For now I am signed up with Code Amber.

Mar

17

I’ve been using Eclipse as my external Actionscript editor lately. The syntax highlighting in the AS for Eclipse plug-in could be a bit more extensive, but I use Eclipse for everything else, so it just works for me. Anyway, I was using a string replacement method to replace a string coming from an XML file and inserting an appropriate trademark symbol. Here is the code:

var pos = str.indexOf(”(TM)”);
if(pos != -1){
str = str.split(”(TM)”).join(”â?¢”);
}

Strange thing, it was inserting a garbled character. So I pasted the code into the Flash IDE Actionscript panel and ran it and it worked as expected. I don’t know if it is the way Eclipse encodes the .as files, or if it would happen with any editor. I’ll have to check it out. Anyway, heads up if your characters are parsing incorrectly and you are using external .as files.

Mar

16

After returning from my short trip to the Bay area, I’ve been a little slow in posting (and catching up on email) and a few people have been wondering what has been up. Long story short, I had decided to “switch” (much to the delight of my friend Calvin) and ordered a new 15″ Powerbook before I left. It was waiting for me when I got home. The first few days I was still on my PC catching up with work not even able to really setup anything on the PowerBook. I’ve had a 12″ PowerBook from my company for some time, so I wasn’t just going into this blind. The PC hard drive is displaying SMART failure notices everytime its booted, so I guess I had no choice but to do something. It was time to go back to the Mac.

A weekend came and I was finally able to install what apps I thought I needed (setting up Mail, iChat, Adium, Skype, Firefox, NetNewsWire, Colloquy, iPodderX, Transmit, Photoshop, Flash, Eclipse, etc…). Once I had everything set up it was time to do something with the PC. Reformatting had to happen first. Unfortunately that didn’t fix the SMART errors, the drive really is about to die. So I decided to use it as a server for now. Apache/PHP/mySQL, Zope, and Cold Fusion MX. All three are running on different ports. Really set up very easy. Turned on remote desktop and installed an FTP server and everything is configured.

This week I have been still discovering new things with the Mac. All good so far, except for I can’t figure out a way of preserve file paths when adding files to ZIPs. I need this for projects with Kodak. Guess the PC better hold up or I am going to have to terminal into a Win server at work just to ZIP files.

I am slowing catching up on emails, despite all the new press releases from CTIA. I’ll be there next year for sure. Sounds like such a good time. Lots of excitement. I am working on a new Flash Lite project. I have started experimenting with XFactor Studios XPath class for a desktop Flash project. So far this class is awesome, its really working well for this project.

And I am back on the bike training for this year’s cycling season. If you sent me an email in the past few weeks, I am trying to catch up. Promise.

Mar

10

Adobe and a company called Ikivo are announcing a partnership of sorts regarding a new Mobile SVG IDE. Adobe has been on the SVG bandwagon as an alternative to Flash for years. My thought would have been that Adobe would have bought this small company and really made the push, but apparently they are still a little hesitant themselves. I know SVG is a W3C spec, but I just don’t see it happening alone, maybe if there were a SVG-T parser integrated into J2ME. I haven’t played with this IDE (and for the price tag I may never) but I’m curious as to the level of logic that can be programmed into the apps that it can create.

I’m sick and feel like complete hell, so maybe I am just not in the frame of mind to see this as a promising move in the SVG-T space. Maybe the spec has promise, but right now I am not seeing it.

Mar

9

MiniMo(zilla) as it is called, is a project to port the Mozilla/Firefox browser to mobile devices. This is awesome. The team has posted pics of it running on various Windows Mobile devices.

Pocket IE isn’t so bad (at least we don’t know of any major flaws in it yet, like its desktop counterpart). But my hope is that this port can be extended to multiple platforms as well, and quickly. Opera is a good mobile device browser as well, but most people aren’t familiar with it on the desktop and I think the majority of users would be better off sticking with something they are familiar with. The Nokia Services browser needs a major UI overhaul if it wants to compete.

I’ll be watching the progress. MiniMo team, if you need someone to test, I would be happy to give it a go. And we’ll have to add it to WURFL as well.

My first question: does it accurately support the “devices” media type param specified in the stylesheet spec? At least I think its “devices”, I need to look that up again.

Mar

1

Think Secret has an article about a recent job posting by Apple on a popular gaming developers Web site looking for game developers for the iPod platform. The job description mentions Flash and graphics. Could Apple be talking with Macromedia about licensing the small footprint Flash player for inclusion into the next gen color screen iPods? Makes sense to me. Hopefully they weren’t talking about flash storage.

Apple, I could become available. I’d be happy to put this shiny new PowerBook to good mobile device use.

Mar

1

I got back late last week from my trip. My apologies to everyone that I couldn’t meet up with while I was out there. It was more of a family trip (the first for my son to California) than business. We did a bit of business the last two days down in Monterey, but nothing worth mentioning really. I will try and plan another trip out with the sole intent on meeting up with folks and showing some of the projects I have been working on lately. When that time comes I’ll let those folks who contacted me know. Now back to the tech blogging…

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