Without much fanfare, Adobe launched a web-based Photoshop yesterday. However, it’s far from the Photoshop we all know and love… in fact, it’s reminds me more of Vuvox than Photoshop. As we would say in California, it’s lacking hella features…but hey, it’s still forward progress. Anyway, just wanted to make sure everyone got word.

http://www.photoshop.com/express/

Peace in the Middle East.

The FlashForward Conference and Film Festival has officially been acquired by none other than Beau Ambur (Founder of Metaliq). This is especially welcome news to me, because I have been a friend of Beau’s for years, and have been working for him as a Senior Engineer for Metaliq for the past year. I am also a former FlashForward speaker, in fact I met the Metaliq posse, along with Luke & Ali, and many other of my favorite Flash peers at FlashForward.

If any of you have ever worked, conversed (…or partied) with Beau before, you know the conference is in good hands. I don’t think I’ve been this excited about an acquisition since the Lakers got Shaq.

Last but not least, let me send an official thank you and virtual hug to Lynda, who has been an excellent host for FlashForward and an inspiration to us all. She has given people like myself the opportunity to grow from conference attendee to conference speaker, but that’s not the only reason why appreciate her so much. Lynda managed to breach the sometimes cold, technological world of interactive technology with old-fashioned, sincere charm and an undying love for sharing and teaching. I know we can only expect great more wonderful things from her and the rest of the folks at Lynda.com for years to come.

Here is the official pres release: http://flashforwardconference.com/press_release/23

Congratulations Beau! This is going to be a knockout production.

Well, it’s official; I am now faculty at the Academy of Art University. More specifically, I’m teaching a group directed study in the Academy of Art San Francisco’s School of Digital Arts + Communications MFA program.

Last Friday, I taught my first ActionScript class to graduate students working their way towards a Master’s degree at the Academy of Art. I must say, I’m very excited about the class of students that I have and the class of projects they are bringing along with them.

The class is diverse, offering a rich variety of projects and cultural perspectives. Yet since it is a group directed study, it is also small and intimate (8 students), a nice quality for any academic environment. All of my students want to learn ActionScript and programming in Flash, and for the most part they are all daunted, or at least put off in some sense, by the prospect of learning ActionScript 3. I look forward to helping them learn to love the joys and rewards of adhering to best practices (most of all, keeping it simple) on the way to developing fun, interactive applications in Flash.

If any Flash superstars or evangelists are planning to be in the Bay Area anytime within the next 14 weeks, and have an interest in stopping by the class to inspire the next generation of Flash developers, by all means drop me a line so that we can plan accordingly.

If you’re a Flash/Flex or WPF/Silverlight engineer with some availability and are looking for interesting projects to work on, please get in touch with me. Metaliq, the place of my employment, is searching for talented engineers with experience creating rich, engaging user experiences. I am also personally interested in talking to prospective Flash/Flex/Silverlight contractors who are interested in working with me directly on smaller side projects.

The opportunities are various, and span the gamut of cool things happening in the Bay Area’s technology space, but don’t let geography be a barrier… we can and will either relocate you or work with you remotely if need be.

Following is an excerpt describing the Interactive Software Engineer position(s) we have available, extracted fromthe original posting on the Metaliq web site:

Metaliq is looking for a highly creative, flexible, and skilled Interactive Engineer to be part of a dynamic team of industry leaders.

Applicant must have 5+ combined years of engineering for interactive applications. Ideal candidate will have strong skills in one or more of the following technologies: ActionScript 3 (AS3), .NET C#, Java, or comparable OOP language. Applicant should also have a base knowledge and understanding of Internet based applications (including XML and SQL/relational databases) and some hands-on experience with Silverlight, WPF, XAML and/or Flash.

As an Interactive Engineer you will be part of the Metaliq engineering team, primarily focused on Microsoft and Adobe related technologies as they specifically relate to Rich Interactive Application Development. This role will also incorporate the integration of high levels of data specifically as it relates to connecting to backend data services.

… for more info, please see the original posting.

The industry is really bubbling right now. By that I mean that it is hot, moving, lively, etc. I hope that it’s not the prerequisite for some inevitable burst as some “experts” seem to be convinced of. Again, please get in touch with me if you have any interest in the above job posting, or in working with me on smaller side projects which are nevertheless interesting and lucrative.

Interested parties may contact me at caleb.org or caleb at metaliq.com

Today CafePress Meter™, a quick project I have been working on that kicked off just weeks ago has gone live. You can check it out for yourself at: http://www.cafepress.com/cp/buy/elections08_meter.

It’s a tool built in Flex that allows you to view a “real-time look at what’s selling at CafePress, the colorful marketplace brimming with millions of user-created products that express your passions and points of view.”

This project, which is conceptually very simple, is testament to the rapid development one can achieve with relative ease using Flex and the Flash Platform. There’s not much eye candy, but nevertheless it’s launch is a feat that shows how quickly a large company can get cutting edge projects out the door using Adobe® technologies. The tool is totally customizable due to it’s content model which is largely XML based and thus can be customized by non-technical people w/ ease. Also, I think it’s cool that this project will continue to take shape over the next year as the elections progress.

A big thanks to all the folks at CafePress who helped make this happen

My New Year’s resolution is simply to once again become an active blogger.

So in 2008, you can expect to hear the following from me:

• Of course, whatever Flash/Flex/Silverlight trickery I find worthy of public mention
• The latest and greatest news from my adventures working at Metaliq, and getting my RIA consulting business “Fire, Inc” off of the ground (2007 was a great year)
• Job/project offers to aspiring RIA engineers and/or designers (full-time or contract)
• Updates as to my speaking engagements
• Random Bullshit

I’m looking forward to it, and I hope you are too…

Peace

If you haven’t yet experienced the online phenomenon known as Twitter, then by all means check it out at Twitter.com.

On the other hand, if you’re an avid Twitterer, check out my profile and add me!

Cheers

I have been messing around with Apollo and Flex quite a bit lately (actually, I fell in love with it … but that’s another article). Unfortunately, the solutions for viewing trace output that I have found were less than satisfying. They were either too cumbersome to implement, or caused my system to slow to a crawl.

The solution that I’ve found is simple, elegant, and totally familiar with anyone who has ever had to view a typical server log output.

Basically, I used “tail -f” and pointed to the local flash log. Unfortunately, this has the same problems as viewing any server log output using tail; it’s not very pretty, and it can be hard to read at times. However, it hauls ass and is easy to implement, and that is all that I really want.

It was easy to take it a step further in order to make it an easy to access command. Basically I just edited the “.bashrc” file found in my home directory, and input the following line:

alias flashTrace='tail -f /Users/USERNAME/Library/Preferences/Macromedia/Flash\ Player/Logs/flashlog.txt'Obviously, you’ll want to replace “USERNAME” above with your local machine username (If you don’t know how to get this, just open Terminal and type “cd; pwd”. The part right after “/Users/”is your local machine username).

After that, you can open a terminal from anywhere and type “flashTrace” to see the output (hit ctrl-c to return to the command line).

If you are a Windows User and don’t already have a shell solution, do yourself a favor download cygwin to access a unix-like shell and then you can also implement the above.

Simple, easy, and effective… at least it works for me

Cheers

Yahoo! Mail now has a publicly accessible API! Check it out at: http://developer.yahoo.net/blog/archives/2007/03/mail.html

Not only that, Yahoo! is actually offering a monetary incentive for developers who manage to sell their premium accounts.

The following is taken from the official announcement on Yahoo Developer Network:

Yahoo! Mail Web Service developers can earn referral commissions by building compelling applications targeted at our premium email users. For a trial period, Yahoo! Mail is offering an incentive for developers to build applications using the full functionality available for premium Yahoo! Mail accounts. Specifically, Yahoo! Mail is currently providing a commission of $10.00 for every new Yahoo! Mail Plus account referred by approved developers

Recently, I was fortunate enough to speak at WebDU (Web Down Under), “A rock concert for geeks”. WebDU is an Australian based web conference which boasts the highest speaker to attendee ratio of any major RIA/Web 2.0 conference. The conference itself was exceptional. I had the pleasure of speaking alongside some of the most recognized and inspirational personalities in the industry, including Jesse Warden, Mike Chambers, Mike Downey, and Ted Patrick, to name a few of my American counterparts who attended. Of course, I also had an opportunity to meet some awesome Aussie developers. I was most impressed by Scott Barnes, Lachlan Hardy, Collis Ta’eed, the guys from Nectarine, and the entire team from Daemon (whom also happen to be the conference organizers). It was also nice to see and meet Brandy Fortune, the first woman that I’ve ever seen speak at a conference (I’m excluding Lynda Weinman, the woman behind FlashForward because she is in a class of her own ). Brandy gave a great presentation on usability for designers and developers, you can read a great review of it here at flashmagazine.com.

I spoke on using Yahoo! APIs in Flash. I ran through the latest and greatest offerings from the Yahoo! Developer Network, including the recently revamped search SDK , the awesome AS3 additions by Alaric Cole (Alaric, if you have a blog please let me know, I couldn’t find it), and the latest book to make it to press by Yahoo’s Charles Freedman. I also covered security, best practices, and some real-world implementations of using web services. I also made mention of VUVOX, an awesome startup I have been working with for the past few months alongside a slew of other media & web rock stars. I’ll be blogging in greater detail about VUVOX later.

The conference was freakin’ amazing. The food was spectacular, the accommodations were immaculate, and the general vibe of the community was electric. It was fun (re)connecting with familiar (and some not so familiar) faces from Adobe. The guys from Nectarine sort of took me in and we hung out like we’ve known each other for years. Lachlan and I also spent quite a long time just conversing and sharing ideas… what a blast. After the show I hung out with an engineer from Yahoo! AU, which was cool. We conversed on ways to help Yahoo! embrace and harness the power of Flash and related platforms, which hopefully he can succeed in achieving or at least influencing. My flights to and from Sydney also stopped over in Honolulu, so I had to spend a few nights in Waikiki (hey, it’s a tough job … but somebody’s got to do it )

I’ll be posting my WebDU presentation materials and code shortly, and writing the blog posts that my audience demanded soon … so stay tuned. Sorry for dropping off of the blog thing for a while, I was just too busy to have time to think. However, I’m back and better than ever, and look forward to sharing my ideas and humble perspective with the community for a long time to come.

Peace.