Flash Apps for iPhone Video

Lee Brimelow did a video cast of how you can use Flash Pro CS5 to build an app for the iPhone. Lee goes through setting up your project and builds a quick application that uses the new accelerometer APIs. Take a look at the video and the process that’s used to go build the app. Since it’s beta software, the UIs may/will change but the video gives you a good idea of how to get started building an app for the iPhone using ActionScript 3.0.

Chrome OS Screenshots

I downloaded the VMWare image of Chrome OS (actually of Chromium OS) and gave it a whirl. It’s still super bare bones and the video drivers seem to be unaccelerated (framerates are really choppy). It’s exactly what it’s billed to be: a web browser. I’ll hold off on passing any judgment on Google’s endeavor at this point given that the whole thing feels like it’s about a week after it started working.

Screenshot of Chrome OS

AIR 2 and Flash Player 10.1 Betas

Today we made available the betas for Flash Player 10.1 (on the desktop) and AIR 2. While there’s a ton of features in both runtimes, one of the things that’s coolest to me is the shared work that’s gone in to the core of the “Flash runtime”. Across both runtimes, apps will use less memory and consume fewer CPU cycles just by the nature of the work that’s gone in to the runtime.

Since the cores are the same between Flash Player and AIR both runtimes benefit from the shared work. All this matters even more as we bring the Flash Platform to mobile devices (esp memory and CPU). Plus, features like the global exception handler (something the community has wanted for years, as I understand it) get exposed in the browser and in the desktop.

On the features side, I’m most excited about the support in Flash Player for hardware decoding of H.264 videos on Windows. The demo that our CTO showed at MAX had Hulu HD running on a netbook sipping CPU. On the AIR side it’s a tossup between the new networking features and the new native process APIs. My coworker, Rob, has a full write up at Logged In in the Adobe Developer Connection, so head there to learn more.

Needless to say, congrats to the teams and send us your feedback!

Moving to WordPress

I moved my blog and my website today over to WordPress. I have it running on my Win2k3 server, running in IIS with PHP and MySQL installed. I had written my own blog software in 2002, named TalkOut, that ran www.redyawning.com. From RedYawning, the RSS2 feed was syndicated over to www.adityabansod.net. I had started RedYawning to learn ASP.NET & C#. The site ran but I haven’t had any time to put in to it in the last two or three years. There were definitely bugs plus a set of newer blogging standards (like spam protection) that I would never have the time to keep up with, thus I decided to move over to WordPress.

So far, WordPress has been an awesome experience. I exported my entire old blog as an RSS feed, then imported it in to WordPress. Like that, my entire blogging history from January 2001 to today (719 posts) from my old blog were now in my WordPress instance. I installed a few plug ins and picked a theme, and it ready to go. Overall, a very good OOBE.

Hopefully now with a new blogging platform, one that’s more scalable and more integrated in to the rest of my online experience (e.g. Twitter, Facebook, etc), I’ll post a bit more. Looking through my blogging history, I was most active in early 2005. These days, I find myself using Twitter much more often.

TweetDeck and VmWare Fusion

I recently ran in to this problem using TweetDeck and VmWare Fusion. Whenever TweetDeck wanted to update, it would launch the Adobe AIR update manager. If I said “yes, update”, my Windows XP VM would take over and try to open the update in the VM. This happened only after I’d also installed AIR in the virtual machine (after I’d installed in the OS X host). The workaround is pretty simple:

Find your .vmwarevm file for your guest operating system
Right (or control) click and show package contents
Open up the Application folder within the package
Delete Firefox and Adobe AIR Installer (these are the “Applications” that Fusion creates to allow you to open a file in OS X and have it open directly in the guest. They are not the actual applications)

Preso chango, all is back to good.

My First Computer

A few months ago back home, my dad was trying to resurrect our old Sperry that he’d brought home when I as a kid. We still had it in the basement but sadly it wouldn’t boot up any more. Here are some pictures I took.

Most of the machine was built by Mitsubishi, so there a ton of Mitsubishi parts in. You can clearly see Intel 8087 math coprocessor with its gold top. The power supply, in the top right, is the only part of this machinery whose connectors are still the same in a modern PC. All other connectors and interfaces have been replaced or modernized. The two long cards on the left are memory cards, and then there’s a hard drive controller card, a floppy controller card and I think a modem in there too.

Here’s a view of the Intel 8088 and the 8087 up close.

Another look at the expansion cards. From far to near, I think it’s video (with a DB9 connector!), memory, memory, serial, modem, hard drive controller, and then floppy controller.

View from the back and the ports:

Mobile World Congress 2009

Mobile World Congress starts today, it’s my first time here. This place is pretty impressive. The Fira, the conference center in Barcelona, is built to match the architecture style of the city and blends right in to the fabric of the area. It’s impressively large and as you walk in you’re accosted by all the biggest names in the industry, mobile and general technology both. It feels a lot like the first Comdex I went to in the 90s. It also feels like Burning Man for tech geeks. In the entrance pavilion (which is outdoors) are huge 20 foot TV screens showing interviews, etc and race cars and booth babes. And that’s just outside.

Our hospitality suite — which is basically an office building that was shipped and built here — is amazing. There’s a full kitchen, stocked with food and drinks for the employees. And that’s completely hidden from the meeting rooms that our awesome admin and show staff run with full coffee and food service. As one of the companies I met with in the morning said, “this temporary office is better than our regular offices on the peninsula!” Needless to say, it’s quite cool.

Adobe’s booth is in Hall 1, and I’ll be manning it for various hours of the day from today until Thursday. I’ll also be doing two presentations at the theater at our booth, “Delivering the Most Complete Web Experiences Across Devices” and “Deliver Seamless Experiences With Flash”. Come check them out if you’re here.

FriendFeed

Echoing Omar’s post, I started using FriendFeed to aggregate my activity across various sites on the intertubes. I’m at hyperionab on their services. It’s quite cool. I have this blog, delicious, Facebook, Google Reader, last.fm, LinkedIn, Netflix, twitter, and Yelp plugged in to it. It’s really useful that I can flag something as shared on Google Reader and it shows up in my FriendFeed feed. They’ve done a great job of creating that Facebook style news feed that works to aggregate many services, not all of which are social networks.

Blackberry OS 4.5

Last week I upgraded my Blackberry Curve from OS 4.3 to 4.5. The upgrade process ran only in Windows took about an hour. I ran it in Fusion, but was generally painless and worked without issue. I’m sure there a ton of new features and bug fixes but here’s my hit list of what I like.

HTML email! Tables work, replies don’t break formatting. Colors, bold, underline, and all that goodness renders on the phone.
You can see Exchange availability in the calendar. When you type in somebody’s name, it shows you the free/busy for that person.
Multiple and colored calendars. If you have more than one service that supports a calendar, the Blackberry will overlay them with colored views now. It works a lot like Windows Live Calendar does.
The address book now uses two lines per contact. The first line is the name and the second is the company. Not a huge fan since now I can see half the contacts at one shot. I wish they had an option to disable that.
The new default font, BBAlpha Sans, is really pretty. It’s easy on the eyes, has really nice font hinting. The problem is that it slows the phone down. I have a feeling rendering that font on the Curve is a bit much and adding a touch of sluggishness to the device. Switching the font to any of the old ones picks the speed back to the 4.3 OS.
In call audio enhancement is supported, so you can add bass or treble boost in the middle of a call if somebody is hard to hear. It’s moderately useful.
The media player app is pretty much the same, except there are now voice notes. It’s a bit hokey and I’m not a huge fan of it. More on that in a later post.

Overall, it’s a really good upgrade. Makes the phone feel like it’s a new device and the HTML support is awesome.

Linksys WRT100 and the Macbook Pro

My parents have a new Linksys WRT100 RangePlus router at home that replaced an old D-Link. The old router had no problem on my MacBook Pro. This new one would always connect but using any service on the web or even IM would be spotty. Oddly, traceroute and the like showed find transmit times but I think it wasn’t able to push more than one kbps or something paltry like that. It was so painfully slow that I coudn’t even access the router’s configuration page via wireless

After fiddling around hardwired, I disabled the “mixed mode” which is basically B/G/N support and set it to B/G support since my laptop in any case is the only device in the network that supports N. Bingo — back and functional. So, word to the wise: Linksys WRT100 does not love the factory settings on the WRT 100.