JAN 31
2010
As you may know, Adobe has public betas for ColdFusion Builder, and AIR 2.0. Both of these toolsets will really advance the development of Rich Internet Applications: for Flex, for Flash, or for standards compliant HTML and Javascript. One thing that it looks like neither will ship with, however, is support for jQuery 1.4, released on January 14, 2010. jQuery is arguably one of the the biggest players, if not THE biggest, in the burgeoning JavaScript framework renaissance of the last 3 years.
JAN 26
2010
A month or two ago I noticed a twitter friend of mine, and respected designer, Dee Sadler talking about a new conference she was planning. She's based in Kansas City, and having found out how active their development and design user groups are, I was intrigued. This Designer/Developer workflow conference sounded awesome. It wasn't just for developers, they wanted to target designers as well. Having started my career as a designer I decided to submit a topic. I just found out that I was accepted to speak! I'll be presenting a workflow topic covering how to build AIR applications with jQuery and ColdFusion. If you're in the midwest and you're looking to learn a wide range of topics, come check it out.
JAN 21
2010
On January 20th I gave a presentation to the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) on Building AIR Applications with ColdFusion and jQuery. It went well, with about 30 or 40 people in attendance, both live and via Acrobat Connect. I just wanted to take a moment to post my code samples, as well as a link to watch the recorded presentation. Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to check out some of my other AIR posts.
JAN 21
2010
at: 7:03 PM | Filed under:
jQuery
On January 20th I gave a presentation to the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group (BACFUG) on jQuery 101, an intro to jQuery. It went well, with about 30 or 40 people in attendance, both live and via Acrobat Connect. I just wanted to take a moment to post my code samples, as well as a link to watch the recorded presentation. Hope you enjoy, and don't forget to check out some of my other jQuery posts.
JAN 6
2010
I just found out that I'll be speaking again this year at cf.Objective(), the premier Enterprise level ColdFusion developers conference, the week of April 22-24 . I'll be presenting on "What's New in Adobe AIR 2.0" and reviewing many of the new features Adobe will be putting out with AIR 2.0, code-named Athena. Functionality like support for the detection of mass storage devices, advanced networking capabilities like secure sockets, UDP support, and the ability to listen on sockets, support for native code integration, new APIs for access to raw microphone data, and global error handling. Its gonna be great!
JAN 5
2010
Way back in May, at cf.Objective(), I met a great guy named Sid. He shared with me that he was involved in the Bay Area ColdFusion User Group way out in the country of California. Sid told me that he was impressed with my jQuery presentation and asked if I would be interested in speaking to BACFUG. Fast forward 7 months and it seems that they've finally been forced to make good on their offer and let me speak. I'm sure it's because Sean Corfield can't be bothered to make the drive into the Adobe offices, but who am I to complain. (yes, I'm just kidding).
DEC 9
2009
So I've finally taken the plunge and started working on an honest to God iPhone application. Up until now it's just been reading about the process, dabbling with XCode, or talking to other like-minded individuals who were also in the same boat. The application I'm building will be a mobile version of Whiskerino, the bi-annual beard contest I've been a part of since 2001. It's not meant to be a replacement for the website, but more of a complement. It'll feature many of the same features, reading (and posting to) the chat window, and browsing photos, as well as being able to post your own photo. None of that is all that revolutionary. The big news is that I've decided to take the low(er) road and skip learning Objetive-C for now and use the PhoneGap framework.
NOV 9
2009
Dealerskins, Inc. in Nashville TN has immediate openings for 3 skilled web developers. In-house positions are preferred, but remote candidates will be considered . To get the full scoop on the job posting, head over to the Dealerskins website. If you have questions first, you can contact me directly, using the contact form above, or on Twitter. You can also submit your resume directly through devjob AT dealerskins DOT com. Good luck everyone.
NOV 5
2009
When it comes to AIR application development, those of us using JavaScript are second class citizens. It's unfortunate, but true. Functionality easily available in Flash or Flex is either missing, or difficult to find (and use) in our apps. One such piece of functionality is the ability to capture screen shots, or bitmap data, for use in other parts of your app. In this post, I'll show you how you too can capture bitmap data using JavaScript, and a sprinkling of AS3.
NOV 2
2009
It's been a week since BFlex and I'm just now getting the chance to post all of my materials from my Drag and Drop Image Manager session. If you came to my session and didn't have a chance to grab the zip file containing all of the collateral, or if you weren't able to come to BFlex this year, then here's your chance. Download the zip file here.
NOV 1
2009
at: 9:12 PM | Filed under:
AIR,
Flex
If you're a JavaScript developer building apps against the AIR platform then you're a rare breed. Those of us who want to leverage our existing skillsets are definitely in the minority, and in some cases so is our code. While the AIR runtime includes lots of handy classes for building robust rich internet applications, it's also missing quite a few. The thing is that while the AIR runtime might not include those classes by default, we can still use them if they exist in our project. This quick tutorial is going to show you just how you'd go about compiling class files down into a SWF that can then be referenced in your project. I'll be using Flex Builder to do the compiling, but you can also do it via command line using the Flex SDK.
OCT 30
2009
at: 10:44 AM | Filed under:
Whiskerino
Ah...November (on every odd year)...when a young man's thoughts turn to the brilliant fall colors, the crisp fall weather, and facial hair, or rather the lack of it. Wait...what? Those of you who have known me for a while are probably familiar with the phenomenon known as Whiskerino. Those of you who have only recently met me are about to hear a LOT about it over the next 4 months. So what IS Whiskerino? In a nutsehll, Whiskerino is a celebration of masculinity; it's showing pride in your hirsuteness; it's being happy about not shaving for 4 long months.
OCT 22
2009
I've noticed over the past few months quite a few developers with little to no knowledge of regular expressions (regex from here on out). For whatever reason they haven't taken the time, or had the chance, to learn what I consider to be one of the most powerful, and useful tools available in programming. Even knowing a few basics can really streamline your workflow, and improve your code. Not only are they useful IN code, but they can even help you write code. In this post I'm going to cover some regex basics, then show you some real examples of how they can solve problems for you.
OCT 17
2009
at: 3:49 PM | Filed under:
AIR,
CFinNC,
jQuery
Thanks to everyone at CFinNC who came out to my sessions on Saturday morning. There were some technical snafus, but overall I was very pleased with the results. I hope you enjoyed yourselves, and maybe picked up a thing or two. Without further ado, here are the files from this morning's presentations.
OCT 12
2009
The next 2 weekends are going to be super busy here in Nashville. Or maybe I should say busy for me in general as I'll be going out of town for both of them.
OCT 9
2009
Adobe announced that it would be putting all of the content presented at this year's MAX conference online, for free. Yep, that means that you can learn from the same presenters as the people who paid thousands of dollars to attend MAX. Speakers like Christian Cantrell, Raymond Camden, Russell Brown, Grant Skinner, and much more.
OCT 5
2009
at: 1:11 PM | Filed under:
Flash,
iPhone
This is absolutely huge. Adobe's big marketing conference MAX is going on this week. In today's opening keynote Adobe dropped a bombshell and announced that developers will be able to write Actionscript 3 based applications in Flash Professional CS5 (coming to beta at the end of the year), and compile those apps for the iPhone. They even showed a handful of apps built using this process that are already available in the app store RIGHT NOW.
SEP 24
2009
at: 10:49 AM | Filed under:
Flex
While working on a project at work, I needed to highlight a UI element when the user performed an action. The problem was that the action had no direct relation to the element. When the user saved a piece of data, I wanted to update a ComboBox, then add a glow effect to said ComboBox to let the user know that it had changed. Adding the effect was easy enoough but it took me several hours to figure out how to trigger te effect without directly interacting with the ComboBox. Here's a quick set of sample code in case you ever need something like this. Feel free to download the Flex Builder project files.
SEP 20
2009
Wow...I'm humbled...I just found out this week that I've been accepted to speak at BFlex this year October 24th and 25th. If you haven't heard of this conference, then shame on you. It's an intense two day weekend in America's heartland, Indiana University. The first day, a Saturday, features multiple tracks of tasty ColdFusion goodness covering beginning through advanced topics. The second day is much the same approach, but for Flex instead.
SEP 20
2009
at: 8:19 PM | Filed under:
Flex
Recently I was working on a new interface component to an app I was building at work. It was a series of thumbnails, each of which triggered a modal window containing a video. I decided that the TileList component made the most sense. So I coded it up and got it working in no time at all. The problem that I was having was that when I assigned the click event to the TileList, I could click anywhere in the control and it would fire the event, even on empty space. After trying to manage the click event in code, I asked on Twitter about it. Not too long after, T. Scot Clausing replied to let me know about itemClick. This blog post is a quick way to illustrate the difference between click and itemClick, and why you might use one over the other. Let's tale a look at the project first
