Peter Elst

I don’t think I’m alone in seeing Twitter’s service deteriorate to the point where euthanasia seems like the only humane option.

Without any obvious intimate knowledge of how the service is architected, these are my three easy steps to hunt and kill the fail whale.
 
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I’m really happy to finally be able to announce a project I’ve been working on for a little while now — www.riajobs.org.

A job board targeted at Rich Internet Application developers from various backgrounds be it Flash, Flex, AJAX or Silverlight.

Of course there are already great community resources available for those looking for Flash, Flex, AJAX developers but what I believe is often missing is the idea that Rich Internet Applications and Web 2.0 are about more than any single technology.

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“In case it wasn’t clear already, you’re now watching Kevin Lynch live in concert. This isn’t just one track. No, this is a video of the entire live Kevin Lynch concert at Paradiso – Main Hall.”
  
http://www.fabchannel.com/kevin_lynch_concert/

 
That made me laugh, remember being at Spark Europe in October 2005, the last Macromedia conference I attended before Adobe took over. Web 2.0 was still a new buzzword, ah those were the days ;)

Of course Kevin Lynch, now Chief Technology Officer, is still the rock star of the company!

 

Now that the old MXNA is back up and has been revamped as Adobe Feeds I had a good excuse to create a Firefox search plugin for it.

If you’re a Firefox user you can install the plugin by clicking on the button below. Enjoy!

In case you didn’t know Adobe is running a great program where they offer you a free one year certificate with Thawte for signing your Adobe AIR applications (worth 300 USD) — the only thing you need to do is submit your unsigned AIR application to the AIR Marketplace and be among one of the first 135 to do so.

I did just that and submitted the VideoSnapshot application I built a while back — low and behold I got an email letting me know how I could redeem the certificate.

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… or a look at ColdFusion from a Flash/Flex developers perspective.

I just got back from four days in beautiful Edinburgh for an event I would likely not have attended were it not that I was invited to speak there.

Scotch on the Rocks is one of barely a handful of what I’d call real “community driven events” out there, while not as polished as other more commercial counterparts I had a sense that this is the place to be if you want to get a real feel of what is happening in the ColdFusion community and want to network with fellow European developers.

As mentioned in an earlier blog post, I’ve only had very limited exposure to ColdFusion and even that was year ago which made it all the more interesting to see what its current state of affairs is.

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I just finished my last talk here at Scotch on the Rocks and thought I’d go ahead and blog my presentation slides and code.

First session I did was “RIA meets Desktop“, a look at some of the common API’s in Adobe AIR (network detection, windowing, drag ‘n drop, clipboard etc.)

Download “RIA meets Desktop” slides
Download “RIA meets Desktop” code (zip file – 128 Kb)

 
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Just got back from London for the first teach date of my Core ActionScript 3.0 course at Skills Matter and in a matter of days I’ll be heading out to Edinburgh along with Nico Lierman for Scotch on the Rocks.

This is going to be an interesting conference for sure, for one thing I haven’t touched ColdFusion in quite a few years and creating a CFC is about the extent of my hands on experience with the technology. The up side is that pretty much every session is going to be an eye opener for me.

Don’t worry, I won’t be talking about ColdFusion but rather doing my “RIA meets Desktop” talk covering a whole bunch of AIR API’s as well as one on “Object-Oriented ActionScript 3.0″.

Have been looking over the schedule and these are some of the sessions I’m hoping to catch:

Neil Web – Cairngorm for Beginners
Sean Corfield – Getting Dynamic With ColdFusion
Neil Middleton – jQuery in a Nutshell
Andrew Shorten – Flex 3 Designer/Developer workflow
Sean Corfield – Event-Driven Programming in ColdFusion
Luca Mezzalira – Manage Flash Lite Data with Flex and Air
Børre Wessel – Flex Client Architecture & Best Practices

 
Now, I’d better get ColdFusion installed on my laptop so I can start experimenting with the stuff I’ll be learning.

Thomas Joos has an interesting blog post highlighting some of the opportunities and hurdles of the mobile ecosystem and opens it up for discussion.

I have to agree that one of the most pressing issues here in Belgium is affordable data rates, hope the introduction of the iPhone will make providers look at offering better packages. If with initiatives like the open screen project we’re going to see a unified player across web, desktop and mobile these are some underlying problems that we need to see addressed.

http://www.thomasjoos.be/2008/05/28/the-future-of-mobile-experience/