Peter Elst

Yesterday, I download the latest MacBreak video and what do I see —

<rant>

This is probably the worst description of any product I’ve ever seen. First of all, Bordeaux is not Thermo — secondly there’s already quite a bit of information out on Thermo since the MAX conference last October.

Two minutes of research or just checking with someone at Adobe would’ve been welcome (they’re standing right outside the stand for goodness sake).

I’m sorry to see the LA Flash user group being mentioned here, sure as hell they’re not spreading that kind of misinformation. I don’t mind the occasional speculation on a podcast but if you’re at NAB, in a position to easily confirm with an Adobe representative, and then present this dribble as ‘breaking news’ you lose my vote.

</rant>

http://www.pixelcorps.tv/macbreak148

 

[update] Turns out it isn’t quite as bad as I thought — the pay as you go is 0,26 Eurocent or 0,0026 Euro vs 0,00099 Euro buying the extra monthly blocks. Still wish Telenet had better package options and did something about those ridiculous download limits.

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Its no secret that, being in the business of developing software for creative professionals, Adobe has traditionally had a proportionately large chunk of Mac users. With Adobe acquiring Macromedia and going all out to extend its reach to web, desktop, mobile and beyond (hosted services seems to be their next big thing) it seems that the business relationship with Apple and others is not as straightforward as before.

I think its fair to say that on a number of fronts Adobe is becoming serious competition to the established companies, just look at the potential of word processing with something like Buzzword — despite its current limitations of being run in a browser (the desktop AIR version is coming soon) it is in my mind already the clear winner. Web development has always centered around user experience and bringing that skill set to the users machine is paving the way for an entirely new desktop experience.

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…or what is all the fuss about? If there’s one controversial topic in the community its speaker arrangements with regards to covering their expenses for conferences. In the last few years several people have been pretty vocal in expressing their opinion on the issue.

Just to put this into context, I’m not pointing the finger at any particular event or organizer nor am I suggesting that its in any way unethical for a conference to make a profit. I want to put some information out there for those of you that might be wondering how things are handled by various conferences.

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Just half an hour before I need to head out to the airport and what do I see? My MacBook Pro power adaptor is at it again — what the heck is wrong with these things? Last time it burned through at the magsafe connector, this time its happening at the base.

First stop in Chicago will be by the Apple store getting another piece of expensive hardware that will probably last me just a few months.

Just have to hope it doesn’t burn down the house next time round.

Just read an interesting post by JD where he talks about how little Microsoft staff have commented on Apollo compared to the rest of the blogosphere — Scott Barnes, seems to be one of the few that is open to some debate on the topic and, although his position is pretty clear, he does at least come up with some valid arguments (as opposed to Parvez Ansari’s recent post which caused a bit of a stir )

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Twitter has rapidly become my new addiction — its a really cool way to stay in touch with friends and if you turn off text message notification and use something like twitterific I’ve found it is actually quite usable.

One thing I just don’t get is the AS2 and AS3 libraries they released, instead of simply parsing your RSS feed for messages it uses a JSON parser class. Talk about overhead — that doesn’t make any sense to me. This is one of those situations where they try to shoehorn an AJAX approach onto Flash. The example FLA that comes with the library also has code embedding your twitter username and password to get hold of your friends timeline.

While I understand they want to keep the example easy to read and understand, that’s not a smart move! How easy is it to decompile a SWF, get hold of account details and start spamming away?

If you need to do anything other than what the RSS feeds can get you, I’d really recommend using a server-side script to proxy the calls rather than running the risk of exposing your account details client-side.

www.twitter.com

I’ve seen my fair share of Flex projects over the last year but lately can’t help thinking there’s a distinct lack in innovative uses for the technology. Sure there are cool things out there like the Noise Monitoring System Schiphol (note that its Flex 1.5) by MediaCatalyst or the hybrid Flex desktop sync apps like the what the guys from Nascom did for Sony Vaio.

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I’m not a difficult person but is it too much to expect support to do its job? For a few months I’ve been struggling with my old Acer Travelmate notebook (overheating and randomly shutting down when not plugged in).

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… I certainly believe so, if I didn’t see it posted on John Nack’s blog I honestly wouldn’t have believed this was for real.

I won’t profess to be the worlds greatest designer but the whole look and feel doesn’t work for me at all. Particularly the two-letter icons just look horrible. Not sure if its the typography, the uppercase/lowercase combination or something else.

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