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

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