I Was A Registered Alien!

AIR prototype: Gmail Notifier

I spoke at the Sydney Adobe AIR Camp on Tuesday and for my session built an AIR app that I now think I'll turn into a complete application.  It's currently for Mac only and runs on the Dock, it's icon only and when it launches you see a question mark overlayed on the envelope icon that I'm using. The app connects to your Gmail account and pulls back the quantity of unread mail, setting a new icon with an overlay of the quantity of unread messages. 

Control or right clicking on the icon will show a menu listing the 10 most recent unread messages, all menu items will click through to their respective messages.  I'd like to develop this further and add support for the system tray on Windows, but hey the original was only built over a weekend.

I've added an animated GIF below for you to see it in action, the red circle is only there to draw your attention to the icon, let me know what you think.  I'll be releasing the source code for this some time next week.

Adobe.com: now with improved usability, Macromedia style

So it's goodbye to Macromedia.com, hello to the Macromediaisation of the Adobe web site with a look and feel that's familiar and now actually usable.  I always found the Adobe site unintuitive - could never find anything in a hurry and the pages were always bogged down, now you can look up Photoshop and actually find out something about it without having to think in Adobese.

Leopards Changing Their Spots?

Are Apple having a laugh at us? Like a lot of other folk I'm excited about the introduction of BootCamp and it's ability to add dual booting to Intel Macs.

BootCamp will somehow be a part of Leopard, the next version of Mac OS, rumour has it that there might even be virtualisation in there too.

Apple for some time have used the names of large cats for the various version of OS X: Tiger, Panther etc.

As I've already stated the next version will be Leopard, and if it could also run Windows applications, or allow a Mac computer to dual boot into a Windows OS.... Well don't we have a Leopard that can change it's spots!!

Surely I'm not the only person to see this?

If the Riya RIA had a Flash UI, you wouldn't need this

A video piece on Cnet got my interest - a search engine that could recognise faces and text in images.  When I decided to check it out I discovered that because the developers had chosen Ajax for their UI there were issues with cross browser/OS compatibility - Safari users need not apply right now.

Browser detection locked me out of a front page that on face value doesn't contain anything tricky - it's funny really.

If your application is using a lot of graphical trickery, doing nice UI stuff, and you're trying to reach the maximum number of users - why use a technology that'll lock people out?

The Riya Safari welcome message is below:



Associated links:
Riya - Photo Search
Searching for the right face - CNET Video (Flash video)

The Initial Offering Of Flex Builder 2 Will Not Be For Everyone

Hmmm, from the Flex 2 FAQ:

"The initial release of Flex Builder 2 will be available on Windows only. We plan to make a version for OS X available shortly thereafter."

I know this is an Eclipse plugin, wonder what's so Window's specific.

Links:
Flex 2 FAQ (Macromedia)

Flash Player 8 Public Beta

I just found this now on VersionTracker via an RSS feed, Flash Player 8 Public Beta now appears to be available, so I guess for those of you who like to be bleeding edge, in the words of the Rolling Stones - "let it bleed".

Links below.

Versiontracker: Mac OS X download, check site for your platform
Macromedia: Macromedia Flash Player Public Beta

Tiger, Tiger, Burning Bright

My copy of Tiger has just arrived by courier and the dilema is whether to install or carry on with the code that I'm debugging.

The delights of Spotlight & Dashboard will have to wait until tonight as I want to do a backup of the current drive image before boldly installing.

I'm not got at waiting...

OT: Useful Free OS X Apps for Managing PVR Files

I've recently purchased a digital set top box with multiple tuners and a hard drive with the ability to transfer the recordings to computer via USB and have been hunting around for applications for my PowerBook that would help me to edit, compress and store MPEG2 files.

I thought that I'd share my findings for those interested in what's around for OS X, particularly since there's some good free apps available.

Another Reason Why I've Never Installed RealPlayer

In the process of deciding what software "essentials" to install on the PowerBook that I had bought when joining RocketBoots there were conscience choices of what not to install. Top of that no go list was RealPlayer.

Apart from concerns about the quality of the product itself, never worked well on Windows for me, and the quality of their media format, I've never liked the fact that they chose to spy on users of their software in the past (documented in the links below for those of you interested in finding out more).

Screen Recording Directly to a Flash Movie

It's possible, using Vnc2swf, to record screen activity directly to Flash movies (SWF format) on either X-Window (X11), Windows or OS X. There's not really a whole lot of information on the software maker's site, Japanese with English translation, there's some nice demo files to check out results for yourself.

There is a tutorial on using Vnc2swf at Mac OS X Hints that's worth checking out, I haven't had a chance to try it out yet myself but this looks very interesting.

Associated links:
vnc2swf
Record OS X screen activity to a Flash movie (Mac OS X Hints)