T3B

In support of my series on cloud computing here is a brief post and a chart showing the dramatic increase in cloud computing jobs. As the post points out, increases in jobs often precede shifts in the technology.

Cloud Computing Jobs a Leading Indicator

I've been mulling over the idea for a while now and finally decided to take the plunge. I've moved my blog over to my own hosted site and changed over to WordPress. So far so good. I'm hoping this will give me some more flexibility that I didn't have with Blogger. Stay tuned...

Okay, this shouldn't be so difficult but I'm having a helluva time with it. I have two canvases. All I want to have happen is when I add a child to canvas A I want it to also be added to canvas B at the same time. Sounds easy right, but for some reason it's only showing up in the second canvas, not the first. It's driving me crazy. Any ideas out there?

var imageContainer:WallItem = new WallItem();
...
WallModel.getInstance().dropArea.addChild(imageContainer);
WallModel.getInstance().navCanvas.addChild(imageContainer);

When I do this the item only shows up in the "navCanvas" but if I take out the second addChild it shows up fine in "dropArea." What am I missing?

Looks like there is some very cool stuff coming in Flex 4 with regards to skinning components.

Ryan Stewart kindly sent me a Brightkite invite a few weeks ago. Admittedly, at first I wasn't very impressed. It seemed like a more complicated Twitter without any new added value. I don't really care where people are posting their tweets from. I decided to give it another chance though and the more I looked around the more I liked it. I like that you can post photos of where you're at and what you're doing at that moment. I however, do not have a camera on my phone (pathetic, I know) so this feature isn't particularly useful to me but it is fun to see what people are doing "around me."

There was one thing that really sold me on the service though. This past week the musical Spamalot was in town for several performances. A couple of the cast members had Brightkite accounts and were posting notes and photos of their adventures around town. It was very cool to see what they did while they were here. It provided an interesting view into how a visitor sees your hometown. The things they enjoyed doing, what they felt was interesting enough to take a picture of and post for everyone else to see. I can see where this could be useful if you were going to be traveling to a new place also. You could check out what's going on around that location and get some ideas on what (or what not) to do while you're there.

So, I think I'm sold on Brightkite. I have a few invites to give out if anyone is interested. By the way, Spamalot is a great show. If it comes to your town I'd definitely recommend it.

I decided I wanted to try creating an AIR app with Flash instead of Flex just to see what it was like. To date, I've never created the obligatory Flickr app that it seems like all developers make at some point so I thought what the hell. The result is this relatively useless but kind of fun little app that pulls the first 50 images from a randomly selected page (up to page 10) of "interesting" photos from Flickr.

I kind of liked the experience of creating an AIR app with Flash. Managing the settings seems to be a little easier since Flash offers a form based approach to creating your app.xml file. In Flex you have to manually edit the XML which really isn't too difficult but just entering a few values into a form is nice.

If you're interested you can download the app here.

Congratulations to Twhirl on their recent acquisition by Seesmic. It's great to see an AIR app getting this kind of exposure.

Seesmic Acquires Popular Twitter AIR Client Twhirl

A friend and I are considering starting a local Adobe user group. Anyone out there have advice on how to make it successful or things to watch out for?

A few of the guys here at Knoware have been working on an iPhone web app. Today it was added as a featured app on the Apple site. Design by Finch.

The old adage "You get what you pay for" reared it's ugly head today. I've spent the better part of two days working with the WordPress API and various XMLRPC Actionscript libraries. Having never worked with XMLRPC before I expected it to take a bit to get the hang of things. I was having a helluva time however and could not figure out why I couldn't even get a call to a simple "hello" method to work. It kept coming back with a "malformed XML" error. WordPress comes with and xmlrpc.php file when you install the software so I couldn't believe there was something wrong with their code, after all, other people were able to make it work. Then, this morning when I was looking at the data being returned it hit me. GoDaddy's free hosting accounts have banner ads across the top of the page. The HTML for those adds was being returned with my request data and causing the XML to go all wonky. I tried a WordPress account on a paid hosting plan and everything was fine...ugh.