Peter Elst

A few months ago I had the pleasure to get involved tech reviewing a book by David Powers on CSS — one of the technologies I used to work with on a daily basis before switching almost exclusively to Flash Platform development.

I have to honestly say this is most probably the best book I’ve ever read on CSS, it covers just about the entire spectrum of possible topics and focuses on pragmatic solutions to common problems. David is a very skilled author and uses clear examples to guide you through the process of building out a page and solves issues that come up as you go along.

Definitely recommend buying this book to anyone wanting to start out with CSS!

 

Today one of Adobe’s community programs previously known as “Adobe Community Experts” got rebranded to “Adobe Community Professionals“. This was long needed to avoid naming conflicts with other people using the ACE acronym such as the “Adobe Certified Experts“.

I’m also glad to report I’ve been renewed for another term in this program. If you count the years at Macromedia this is now my 8th term, first as a Team Macromedia volunteer, then Adobe Community Expert and now Adobe Community Professional.

Still every year its an anxious wait to see if you’ve made the cut — thanks to Adobe and the community team in particular for their vote of confidence!

 


 

This is what Google suggested to me as search queries earlier today.

I think many will agree that 2010 is going to be the year of mobile and devices. With Android becoming a serious contender and Apple reportedly coming out with some innovative new hardware its no surprise to me that there’s a lot of buzz around the Flash Player and whether or not Adobe will be able to deliver a good experience on mobile platforms.

Enter Flash Player 10.1 – a few years in the making, the engineers are specifically targeting this release for mobile consumption and added critical features like hardware video decoding, GPU graphic acceleration and serious CPU and memory optimizations.

Its fundamentally flawed to compare this Flash Player release with previous versions which were primarily built for use on personal computers with very different constraints in terms of CPU and memory usage. We’re finally seeing the first results of the Open Screen Project — call it a marketing effort if you must — but partners like Google, HTC, Intel, Nokia, Palm, Sony Ericsson and many others have no incentive to support and invest in a sub par technology.

Will it be perfect? Probably not, but we’re getting a hell of a lot closer to a full web experience on the majority of mobile devices.

Enter Flash CS5 – with Apple not playing nice with supporting a Flash Player initiative (or any other plugins for that matter) on the iPhone browser, we’ll now get the next best thing. Exporting native applications from Flash CS5 is going to be an easy way to port Flash content (including accelerometer, geolocation and other new APIs introduced for mobile) to iPhone ARM binaries for distribution on the iTunes store.

 


 
My prediction is this will be good as a way to port typical Flash content to the iPhone, not necessarily an IDE you would want to use for developing iPhone application where you need fine grained access to the underlying code. Objective-C will still be a good choice for your iPhone development, though Flash CS5 will now open up a very approachable development environment for the iPhone to Windows users.

Moving beyond just mobile phones, the Flash Platform is reaching out and the Flash Player is being used on set top boxes, digital television, on board computers on cars and boats, even user interfaces for refrigerators and microwaves.

 
What bothers me is how all sense of pragmatism seems to be lost on some bloggers. Wanting the Flash Player to die because of the unfounded believe that its not supportive of an “open web”, not SEO friendly or claiming that its been made obsolete by HTML5 (which will incidently take at least half a decade to come even close to being supported on the percentage of web users that the Flash Player can target now). A full decade of Flash content out on the web and 90% of video is not going to go away.

I am not an Adobe employee (though I am involved in their community programs), call me biased but I’m incredibly excited about what is in store for Flash support on mobile and what it promises for user experience. But more importantly I’m not ready to dismiss new technology before getting a chance to play around with it, a view I wish more people would share.

 

I’ve been reading “Coders at Work” by Peter Seibel over the holidays and wanted to share my review.

The book is basically a series of in-depth interviews with 15 interesting programmers including people like Brendan Eich (inventor of JavaScript), Ken Thompson (inventor of UNIX), Peter Norvig (Director of Research at Google).

Other programmers interviewed are: Frances Allen, Joe Armstrong, Joshua Bloch, Bernie Cosell, Douglas Crockford, L. Peter Deutsch, Brad Fitzpatrick, Dan Ingalls, Simon Peyton Jones, Donald Knuth, Guy Steele and Jamie Zawinski.

 
I first got interested in in this book after reading an interesting tweet from Ralph Hauwert quoting Joe Armstrong in the book:

“The problem with object-oriented languages is they’ve got all this implicit environment that they carry around with them. You wanted a banana but what you got was a gorilla holding the banana and the entire jungle.” — Joe Armstrong

Its really invaluable to get the perspective of this wide range of experienced developers and get an insight in the way they work, what inspires them to code and how they see the future of programming languages.

Definitely recommended reading and a good source of inspiration to any developer!

 
www.codersatwork.com
 

As many of you will know by now — I have been in the process of setting up a business in India with colleagues for the last few months and am now back in Belgium for the holidays.

While in Pondicherry in December there were rumors of a drastic change in Indian visa regulations and we went to the immigration office to find out about this. We returned with some peace of mind after speaking with the immigration officer that things weren’t quite as bad as they were made out to be. Now preparing for my return to India it turns out the situation is much, much worse and is effectively crippling our ability to run our business in India.

Where I was originally going to apply for a 1 year business visa, I was advised to apply for 6 months and will now be (hopefully) issued with a 3 month visa. To say the new visa guidelines are unclear and inconsistent is an understatement. My French colleagues have a condition on their business visa that requires them to leave the country every 30 days which doesn’t seem to be the case in Belgium, or at least is not published as one of the business visa conditions.

On leaving India your passport is stamped and you are not allowed to re-enter the country before two months without special approval from the Indian embassy in your home country. To get this special approval you will need to demonstrate that you left India for an emergency (e.g. death of a family member). There are several reports of people getting stopped on immigration for wanting to re-enter before two months of leaving the country while others have gone through without problem.

Calling the visa office helpdesk even they are unsure if this applies only when on the same multiple-entry visa, when on a new tourist visa or regardless even when you have a new different type of visa.

This is where the core of the problem lies — as a tourist or business person you pay to apply for a particular visa (non-refundable of course) and have no idea whatsoever what you will get back or what the conditions of your visa will be.

All this is being done reportedly to help against terrorism in response to the case of David Headley in particular and his involvement in the Mumbai attacks.

Nobody will argue against strict measures on who you allow into the country and by all means screen people before issuing them a visa, ask more supporting documentation to be submitted on applying for a visa or require them to register on arrival at an immigration office. Simply giving out shorter term visas with additional conditions but little to no background check is not a solution to this problem.

I seriously doubt this new visa policy will have a deterring effect to terrorist activity and hope it will be reviewed very soon. At the very least my advice would be for the government to release an official statement on the exact new guidelines and make sure they are enforced the same everywhere.

 
Speak up against the new India visa policy

Since last month, my colleagues and I have been keeping ourselves busy working through all the paperwork required to set up a Privated Limited in India.

We ended up getting it wrapped up (with the exception of a few formalities) in record time, one month to be exact. This admittedly is largely thanks to some excellent help by our lawyer and accountant.

If you ever find yourself in a similar situation, here are the basic steps involved if you’re not an Indian national (and in our case for the Union Territory of Pondicherry):

• get a personal bank account
• apply for a DIN (Director Identification Number)
• apply for a PAN (Permanent Account Number)
• apply for a digital signature
• get your company name approved
• get a commercial lease for your company registered address
• draft and sign the memorandum and articles of association
• get your Certificate of Incorporation
• get company seals
• apply for a company bank account
• put up a company signboard at your registered address
• deposit at least 1 lakh INR initial capital as foreign equity investment
• get FC-GPR paperwork for the deposited money
• apply for a company PAN (Permanent Account Number)
• apply for a company TAN (Tax Account Number)
• apply for a municipal license
• apply for an IEC (Import Export Code)

 
Getting a bank account as a foreigner, particularly under a tourist visa, is no easy task. Be prepared to spend at least half a day at the bank filling in paperwork. Make sure you have several photocopies of your passport, visa, proof of foreign address, your local address (ideally a notarized rental agreement). Bring several passport and stamp sized photos.

When applying for approval of your company name, you have to submit three names in order of preference. The first part of your company name has to be a unique common name, followed by a description of your activity. Use of certain words (such as “India” etc.) can either be prohibited or require you to have a higher capital investment.

For getting a company bank account you will need to draft a resolution, signed by the directors and stamped with the company seals. This resolution needs to state that the board of director approves applying for a bank account at that particular bank and branch. If you want to apply for internet banking or any other services those also need to be explicitly mentioned.

Without a company signboard on your registered address, the postal service will not deliver your letters. Make sure you put it up as soon as your company gets incorporated. Any registered post sent to the company will need to be stamped with the company seal.

I can highly recommend getting a good lawyer to help draft your articles of association and a reliable accountant. Don’t expect to be able to file all the paperwork yourself, this could also end up costing you a lot more money.

 
It’s been quite an adventure getting this sorted, but looking back it was – despite being tedious and incredibly frustrating at times – a relatively straight forward process.
 

With just a few days left in 2009, I wanted to post some moments this year that stuck with me:

• Discussion about Fx prefix versus namespaces in Flex 4
• Flex Builder to get renamed to Flash Builder
• Fantastic first edition of Flash at the Lake in Zurich, Switzerland
• Carlos Ulloa speaks at TEDGlobal
• Summer of Flash podcast (now RIA Radio) gets started
• Joa Ebert’s jaw dropping presentation at Flash on the Beach
• Ralph Hauwert leaves the Papervision3D team
• Liz Frederik joins Adobe as part of the community program team
• Adobe acquires Omniture for $1.8 billion USD
• Omniture CEO boasting about getting Adobe to pay “a whole lot of money” at the MAX keynote
• AIR 2, Flash Builder 4, Flash Catalyst public beta releases
• Adobe announces native iPhone application export from Flash CS5
• Flash CS5 public beta canceled

 
The annual tradition of complaining about Adobe MAX not paying speaker expenses of non-Adobe employees can now be put to rest, flight and hotel accommodation were covered and it turned out to be a fantastic event. Looking forward to heading to Los Angeles again next year for more Adobe goodness (and no doubt another trip to Universal Studios Hollywood).

Its been a difficult year for many, another 600 layoffs at Adobe this November – we’ve sadly lost the wonderful Stacy Sison of the community programs, evangelist extraordinaire Rufus Deuchler and several others.

For me personally I spent half a year teaching first year Devine students at the Technical University College of West-Flanders, was invited to speak at 5 conferences, presented 3 Flex/ActionScript workshops, did technical review on 2 books, attended a TED conference and have set up Project Cocoon Multimedia in Pondicherry, India with two good friends and fellow freelancers.

This next year I’m planning to spend both in India and back home in Belgium. I’ll be focusing on training and consultancy and building out our activities with Project Cocoon. You’ll no doubt still see me around at various conferences but plan on cutting down on my speaking engagements.

 
Wishing you all a fantastic 2010!