Entries from February 2008 ↓

Amit / Digital Inspiration Technology Blog:
Wow!  All Gmail Users Are Given Two Separate Email Addresses  —  You probably know how to create multiple email aliases in Gmail by adding the plus symbol and dots to your Gmail username but there's something more interesting.  —  When you create a Gmail account, you actually get two email addresses …

To coincide with the release of Adobe’s AIR v1.0, the Ext team released v2.0.2 of the Ext framework with enhanced support for the new AIR runtime. The Ext and Adobe teams collaborated during the AIR beta process to ensure that support for the updated AIR API and security sandbox would be available to Ext users from day one.

To demonstrate Ext’s AIR capabilities, founder Jack Slocum went about updating the Simple Tasks application he initially created during the early AIR beta process.

Making extensive use of the newly updated AIR API, the Ext team enhanced the Ext.air package to handle such functionality as:

• Managing native windows, event listeners and automatic state management for the windows.
• Use of the new synchronous database access introduced in AIR beta 3.
• Native drag and drop and clipboard access.
• Playing sounds.
• Minimizing AIR applications to the system tray.

Adding an icon to the system tray is now a trivial task as can be seen in this code sample:

In addition to demonstrating AIR apis, Simple Tasks v2 also includes several advanced samples to demonstrate creating custom Ext components. These samples include:

ListTree – Allows for a hierarchical list of options, similar to a treeview, but within a drop-down listbox

Custom Grid Columns – Allows for grid columns to be represented as buttons or menus

Switch – Provides a collection of buttons, one of which can be “pressed” at a time. This is used as an alternative for radio buttons.

Ext v2.0.2 is immediately available for download as is Adobe AIR v1.0

Continuing their march into the RIA space, Adobe announced today the official release of AIR v1.0 and Flex 3.0.

Adobe has taken the beta off of the wrapper as their have released both AIR 1.0 and Flex 3.0.

As Ajax developers, Adobe is trying hard to get us developing applications, not just Flash folks. They have a place for us to start with AIR:

The new Adobe AIR runtime enables Ajax developers to build rich Internet applications (RIAs) that deploy on the desktop. AIR applications run across operating systems on the WebKit HTML engine and are easily delivered using a single installer file. With Adobe AIR, Ajax developers can use their existing skills and code to build responsive, highly engaging applications that combine the power of local resources and data with the reach of the web.

Adobe AIR

The AIR runtime and SDK has gone through an especially long beta cycle (since June 2007) to ensure that both security and compatibility with existing frameworks was achieved. Some key new and/or updated features include:

• Enhanced Desktop Fucntionality: Drag and drop to the operating system, copy and paste between applications, launching of AIR applications from the desktop or the browser, and run in the background with notifications.
• Data Access: Adobe AIR now provides both synchronous and asynchronous access to the local file system, as well as structured data within a local database. This database is implemented using the open source SQLite database.
• JS Library Support: Most major Ajax frameworks can be used to build AIR applications. Supported frameworks include jQuery, Ext JS, Dojo, and Spry. Adobe AIR integrates JavaScript and ActionScript to allow cross-scripting between the two languages, and integrated rendering of Flash and HTML content.
• Security: Applications built on Adobe AIR can only be installed through a trustworthy install process that verifies that the application is signed via industry standard certificates, providing users with information about the source and capabilities of the application.

Flex 3.0

Adobe’s Flash-based RIA development platform, Flex, continues to mature and has been picking up steam in both the corporate space as well as sites such as blist and Scrapblog who have embraced Flex whole-heartedly. Some of the new features in Flex 3.0 include:

• Intelligent coding, interactive step-through debugging, and visual design of user interface layout
• New capabilities for creating RIAs and building applications on Adobe AIR
• Integrates with Adobe Creative Suite® 3 making it easy for designers and developers to work together more efficiently.
• New testing tools, including memory and performance profilers and integrated support for automated functional testing, speed up development and lead to higher performing RIAs.

One of the most compelling parts of the Flex announcement is the fact that Adobe has released the Flex SDK under the open source Mozilla Public License.

Adobe Open Source Site Launch

Finally, Adobe announced the launch of their new Adobe Open Source site which aims to “presents the definitive view into open source activities at Adobe, including details regarding projects that Adobe participates in and hosts.”

The new…website is designed to keep you up to date on Adobe open source activities, within Adobe as well as with the larger world. It will also be the point of entry to our source code contributions, including Flex, BlazeDS and others. We’ll post news items, tell you where to see us, and keep you in touch with some of our favorite bloggers.

Currently, the site houses the Flex SDK, BlazeDS and Tamarin projects, all of which have been open-sourced by Adobe.

Aptana has coordinated the release of their AIR plugin that includes support for Jaxer which allows you to write AIR apps that run on the desktop that include server-side code, written in JS, that can run on your backend server.

Adobe also put together a list of featured applications that you can check out.

Hitting a “1.0″ release is a big deal (as is a 1.0.1 ;), so congratulations to the entire Air team. Adobe is working hard to raise the bar in the RIA space by giving developers more tools with great functionality. 2008 is panning out to be an interesting year in web development.

Ben and I are at Adobe Engage today, and hope to find out more about Adobes plans in the coming year. We are live twittering using the #engage hash tag.

To end with something a little fun, and since it was the Oscars tonight:

NOTE: Rey and I both wrote a post on this big release. This post is a conjoining of both posts into one

A great way to spend this lazy Sunday afternoon is looking up Yamelo and be ready for a music trip down memory lane. This site has collected almost every hit from the sixties and beyond. Just click on a year or search for an artist. Remember your first kiss, school party, rock concert or that first vacation without your parents? All the songs you listened back then, are there.

Yamelo presents the songs as videos, ripped from YouTube. That basically makes it a music video search engine annex directory, with a great interface. Try to look up a song on this page and then compare it with Yamelo, you’ll know what I mean.

I hope the makers of Yamelo will put even more effort in developing the site, and filter out the videos of bad quality. Also, the service lets you relive your greatest memories but wouldn’t it be great if you could also share them? Yamelo would become a beautiful archive of not just music, but also the funny, touching, great and sad stories connected to the melodies.

An open source identity platform called the Higgins Project launched the 1.0 version of their service this week and it’s a nice look into what could be the future of user-centric identity online. Higgins offers a variety of features and services, but the basic premise is that it serves as a portable container you can use to carry multiple identities with you around the web.

Why would users want that? Because you don’t want to sign in to a social network with the same identity card you use to sign in to financial websites. Higgins aims to replace the assorted user names and passwords we all use today with a set of simple, standards-based identifiers that you can take from site to site.

Think of it like a wallet with different credit cards and forms of ID inside. Unfortunately, that’s only a metaphor and there’s nothing about Higgins that’s so easy to do today. Additionally, without a meaningful selection of sites that support the various protocols Higgins lets users leverage – then it’s pretty much a nonstarter. Let’s assume though that identity landscape is going to open up and that OpenID isn’t the only way it will do so. In that case, Higgins is a great idea and interested developers will likely find the project worth a look.

In addition to a browser plug-in for users, there’s libraries that site developers can make use of and an API that will let developers make use of the Higgins Global Graph (HGG) and a quite a few other things with even less hospitable acronyms. OpenID is at least intelligible and end users will not run away when they hear it said out loud.

RSS has changed the world because it is simple. OPML is fun to take to parties because anyone can learn the rules in minutes. I understand that security is by necessity more complex, but any party where as many acronyms show up as is the case with Identity (see below, for example) is not a party I look forward to attending.

The Real Value of Identity Diversification

That said, there is some comprehensible stuff here that’s clearly worth checking out. You may have stopped by someplace like SpreadOpenID.org and noticed that many OpenID vendors let users expose any of multiple “personas” when logging into a new site. Is that sufficient for security, though? Now that I see the Higgins vision explained, I do think that using one service for everything and trusting that single service to keep personas separated from each other is more trust than I care to put in anyone. To some degree, Higgins is asking you to put your trust in them instead, but the assertion is that you the user are in the driver’s seat.

I’m cheering for a clear, simple interface. Hopefully it will arrive sooner than it took the OpenID community to start to move in that direction. That said, I think there’s a lot of potential here in addition to the straightforward and compelling value proposition.

Below: The Higgins Interoperability Framework – don’t be scared, it’s ok.

The Popcorn Hour is a surprisingly robust little network media streamer that does pretty much everything you could want a set-top box to do. In addition to streaming from your home network, attached USB storage or the internet, you can set it up to download torrents directly to an attached hard drive.

It looks like it can handle pretty much everything you throw at it, handling nearly every major codec and network protocol. It’s got a bevy of connections, including HDMI out, component out and S/PDIF coax digital audio out (although no gigabit Ethernet and no built-in WiFi is a definite drawback). For a mere $180, it looks like it could be a great AppleTV alternative for people who don’t mind their products coming a little cheap and with a few quirks. [Product Page via Boing Boing Gadgets]

This Touchpad app for the iPhone/iPod Touch is similar to a regular VNC app, but instead of mapping screen taps like a touchscreen, it maps screen taps like the touchpad on your laptop. You'll get what we mean if you watch the video. Connect your iPhone to your computer via Wi-Fi and start gesturing around the screen—it'll be just like you were fiddling with a touchpad. People who hook up their Mac or PC to their TVs to act as a HTPC should definitely pick this up. [Touchpad iPhone]

by Brian Fichtner

Bluelounge just announced their latest antidote to desktop clutter. Dubbed the SpaceStation, it’s a clever fix for those of use with mobile offices. Essentially, they’ve distilled the best elements of their earlier products into a single system.

An extended USB hub contains internal coils for wire management. This floats slightly above the desk surface, allowing cords to poke out where required. The hub also functions as a prop for your portable computer, providing a more ergonomic angle and better airflow. To top it off, they’ve put a slot in the back of the hub to support any documents you might be working from. Not that anyone uses paper these days.

The SpaceStation is available in black or white directly from Bluelounge for $80.

Also on Cool Hunting: Cableyoyo Pop

Version 2.5 of the Yahoo User Interface Library (YUI) was released today. You can get all the details on the official blog post, but here’s the “change log”:

• The new Layout Manager allows you to create multi-pane user interfaces that are collapsible and resizable.
• The Flash-enhanced File Uploader control might be known to you from Flickr and and allows you to easily batch-upload files and images with progress bars.
• The JavaScript Profiler now has a graphical front-end to make the information more easily understandable
• The YUI Data Table performs faster and got new features, including horizontal and vertical scrolling, a paginator class, drag and drop columns and an API to access, add and remove columns.
• The Image Cropper control allows you to pick a part of an image to be cropped server-side
• The Cookie Controller provides a wrapper for all things to do with cookies
• The Slider Control got updated to support multiple handles to define a range rather than just a state.

In addition to that, some of the components left beta status. These are the Get Utility to retrieve scripts and style sheets on the fly, the ColorPicker Control, the JSON Utility to validate JSON, the ImageLoader Utility to load images on-demand to increase page performance and the YUI Test Utility.

The really detailed report on all the changes is available on the YUI list/forum.

If you want to have a quick glimpse of what the Layout Control allows you to create, check out the demo application interface simulating simulating Yahoo Mail.

As Caroline McCarthy reports, Viacom’s social networking platform Flux will officially support Google’s OpenSocial. The Flux platform now has a more complete developer center with documentation, sample code and support forums. We’ve added a new Flux API Profile to our listings with more details. The screenshot below shows a sample application and code snippet of Flux code for displaying videos.

The Flux service was launched in September of last year to provide a free mechanism for partners of entertainment giant Viacom to add social networking features: “content sharing, member profiles, customized page layouts, photo and video uploads, easy technical integration” to their own sites. A user who signs up for one of the Flux sites then can use that name and password on any other Flux site. In that sense it operates like Ning – it’s not a destination network, but a “network of networks,” albeit one that anticipates that sites will proliferate around musical artists, record labels, media companies, DJ’s, and other cultural influencers.

In November Michael Arrington reported on the feature differences between Flux and Ning from a site owner’s perspective, and earlier this month he analyzed their respective traffic patterns.

Much like Facebook’s FBML, Flux has its own markup language called FML, the Flux Markup Language, to simplify site management, templating of pages, and to access the social graph. In comparison with FBML, the examples offered in the developer network seem geared more towards easy page templating for collections of videos and photos, and integration with discussion forums, profiles, and blogs.

With the Flux read-only REST-based API, a developer can access the members of a community, and that member’s friends, images, posts, and videos. From the site: “The Flux Data Access API (DAAPI) provides the mechanism for retrieving publicly available community data. FML uses DAAPI queries to make requests for data. The output is offered in multiple formats (XML, Atom, JSON) for convenience. The DAAPI can be used both inside the community and externally (for integration of outbound widgets and promotions).”

Flux can be used at three different levels: fShare for external widget distribution of content from a Flux community, Flux Lite for simple member profiles, and Flux Custom for the full suite of tools.

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