I like colors, I hate colors. That’s why I love colors. A RIA without creative skinning job is not a complete RIA. A RIA with ugly color scheme is worse than a plain old HTML page. One tool I frequently come back to test (taste) the color scheme is the Color Scheme Designer.

It gives you six schemes of color schemes, mono, complement, triad, tetrad, analogic and accented analogic.  These won’t make much of sense without seeing them with this nice little tool.

This best part of this tool is the Light page example and Dark page example tabs. They bring out a simulate page with the color scheme you selected. If you have something in mind for creating or re-skin a site, you could play this for hours.

I was asked to find a web hosting company that can help a stay-home friend quickly and cheaply setting up a web site. Since I don’t have much of time to help her constructing the web pages, I need a hosting that can go a bit further for just raw site. I found Pickaweb, which is no doubt the perfect fit I was looking for.

I was drawn to its price first, and then the Website Builder caught my eyes. From the examples I can see those are very professional quality site templates. It’s the right tool for people just want to get on the web without much of programming and web skills. Beside, the price can be any better, it’s free.

the next surprise I enjoyed is the help. I had a few questions regarding the tools for setting up shopping cart. I clicked the “click to chat” button and right away, there is a person start chatting with me. My questions were answered very clearly. Obviously they know what they are doing.

There are so many web hosting companies out there. I think sometimes it only takes a little more effort to help customer (or potential one) to be in the front. Wish all the web business can keep that in mind and practice it.

(Sponsored Post)

Back from MAX. Realized Adobe is a new company now. It was a desktop software company with a niche market in the graphic design and creativity tools area. Through organic growth and acquisitions (mainly Macromedia in 05)
Adobe is evolving into a developer focused IT platform company and gaining acceptance and great respect among development communities. From the messages of the Adobe MAX 09, it’s obvious Adobe is moving aggressively into a more competitive and lucrative
pace, enterprise and online. This move is annotated with all the buzzwords through out the conference sessions, cloud computing, p2p collaboration, analytical web, augmented reality, real time web, to name a few. Its product line-up/pipeline does support
the direction they are going. The significant investment made prior to the MAX, the purchase of Omniture (a web analytic company) with $1.2bn, demonstrates its determination for this transition as well.

Keynotes

Two major tr
nsitions were introduced by Adobe CEO, Content to Content + Applications, Creation to Creation + Optimization. The first one particularly resonated with me very well because I believe that’s the path from web 2.0 to web square. To be relevant, pumping in
content is not enough (anymore) because there is not lack of contents these days. Rather, the future is about the innovative ways of turning content into intelligence and actions, via web applications. This transition can be applied to many initiatives w
’ve been seeing today, gov 2.0, cloud computing, etc.

The Cloud and Social

Even though the uses of “cloud” and “social” were a bit farfetched in a few sessions, the intention and direction were load and clear. Adobe is moving more and more software capabilities to be hosted ser
ices, in the cloud so to speak. They even kicks start a sharing platforms to allow developers easily sharing their works via large amount of social media outlets, without engaging too much of coding. They are/will be having Adobe Collaborating Service, D
stribution Service, Sharing Services, plus the existing Adobe Connect, Photoshop.com etc. Adobe not only adapts the utility type of pricing for its cloud service offering, but also starts App Store approach to allow its developers distribute and monetize
their works.
 
The observation is that Adobe’s cloud strategy is not content focused; rather, it is platform focused that intends for creating its ecosystem in the cloud via crowd-generated applications, not via the good-old-crowd-generated content. It’s a good way to
o.

The Mobile

Adobe announced that it has agreements from all major device or mobile platform companies (inc. Google) to put Flash 10.1 on mobile phones, except Apple. However, the iPhone was overwhelmingly and amazingly domi
ating any mobile discussion, either on keynote stage or in conference sessions. The coming Flash Pro CSS will be able to compile Flash apps into iPhone native applications. Adobe already has had 8 applications submitted and approved in the Apple AppStore
(I tried and addicting to one).

It’s clear that a mobile strategy nowadays has to have iPhone in it as a big part. It may not a sound business or technological approach, but certainly a major marketing and PR must-have, to be relevant in the mobile space.

The Enterprise

To be in the enterprise space, a tech company needs to have something relevant and be able to touch the foundation that supports enterprise computing. That makes the difference between in-enterprise and be-enterprise. Adobe’s approach is the Livecycle DS that supports workflow management and execution. Combined with its client side RIA technologies (aka Adobe Flash Platform) it starts telling a sound story that plays well in the enterprise area.

The Innovations

The most amazing and exciting part is the demonstration of innovation. There is a plenary general session named Sneaks to show off some innovative works done by Adobe employees that may never become released product. That spirit evidently exists in Adobe’s developer communities as well. There is a session where people showed long list of very cutting edge and push-envelope ways of using Adobe technologies. Those show-offs may not have price tags hanging; but the perception generated from them could very well be translated into marketing value and innovation force behind it. It seems to me it’s a good approach that be prudent and calculating on what to be released; and be open on what can be built or tried as a way to leave the door of innovation wide open.

It’s kind of interesting how Adobe sneaked out the iPhone announcement. First, a iPhone quick demo was shown in the general session that gave a clue on the iPhone + Flash thing but not whole lot of details. Then, luckily if you went to a right session like I did, the original session titled with “mobile” something was changed to have “iPhone” in it. Very exciting actually.

Anway, the way it works is that you create the Flash application with Flash Pro CSS and generated the native iPhone code bits for deployment to the Apple AppStore. Apparently so far Apple has no problem with it because Adobe has put 8 apps to it already. Here are some more details:

• It’ll be part of Flash 10.1 and AIR 2.0 APIs. Flash 10.1 is the Flash for mobile devices that everybody has signed up (including Goole, RMI and Plam) except Apple.
• It support stand Flash and AIR API: Audio, NetConnect and File system. So, you can do low level socket connection from the generated iPhone native application.
• New APIs for iPhone: Media library for writing to the camera roll.  You can’t read the camera roll though. Odd. You can connect to the camera to receive the photo taken either.
• New APIs: Multi-touch.
• New APIs: Scokets network. You can connect to server side such as LiveccycleDS or BlazeDS. The remote object connection works too.
• support sqllite

Things are not supported:

• PixelBlender
• Loading SWFs
• HTML Loader
• ActionScript 1 or ActionSCript 2

The reason they above are not supported because Apple’s term does allow anything script-able available in iPhone app. Pixel Belnder is actually scripting. A SWF has actionscript will be in the same scripting situation. But seems it’s OK to load SWF that is just media.

Anyway, it’s a half happy and half sad story. Every other mobile device platform will have native Flash 10.1 so that the same Flash 10.1 code based will work on all of them. It’s great Flash gets indirectly on iPhone but it’s by-pass type of approach. I don’t think it actually will work just like developing a native iPhone app. The application will be bigger and the performance will be not that good. You will do a lot of optimization to make it a viable iPhone app. After all, there will be a while for Flex or Flex Builder can do the same thing.

.: Flex RIA @2008

Flas flex (as3) can be compiled into native iPhone.

Needs Flash Pro CSS.

Heading to Adobe MAX 2009 in LA. Started downloading BYOL (bring your own laptop) sessions’ assets. Adobe is certainly creative company so that I won’t be surprised the Adobe MAX Companion created for MAX goers, a AIR application where you can twit, check your session and find locations in the convention center.

Only one problem though, so far I’m not able to connect to my MAX account. Guess I’ll keep trying. just thought, it’ll be cool(er) is such app can be run on iPhone (or other mobile devices). Someday, guess someday Flash will be on them.

Run into this creative site, flappr, which is a totally re-skin of Flickr using Flash. It also simplifies the the way of searching photos from it.

I tried it and it performs very well. When ever you have some time to kill, this a easier way to browse through photos without pay too much of attention on navigation or busy web page elements.

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Here are three ActionScript 3.0 Cheat Sheets from a similar named blog.

Top Level Class Cheatsheet

download from here.

flash.display Package Cheatsheet

download from here

Packages Cheatsheet

download from here.

It always have something handy around for a handyman.

I wrote about ActionScript Spell Checker and 10 more others you can use in your Flash based RIA. Here is one more from Adobe: Squiggly.

Squiggly is a spell checking engine for Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR. The Squiggly library allows you to easily add spell checking functionality in any Flex 3 based text control. The distribution package consists of a utility for building your own spelling dictionaries, a sample English dictionary, an Action Script package that checks individual words for spelling accuracy, and sample code that demonstrates “check as you type” functionality — see the online demo. While the included UI class requires the Flex SDK, the core spell checking engine can be used in pure Flash applications without any dependency on Flex packages.

You can download it from here.

Twitter is nearing a deal to close as much as $100 million of new funding, about twice as much as the messaging Web site was expected to collect in its latest round of fund-raising, from as many as seven investors. The investor group includes mutual fund giant T. Rowe Price and private-equity firm Insight Venture Partners, which are new investors to Twitter. The investors are valuing Twitter, which has yet to generate revenue or finalize its plans for making money, at about $1 billion.

Twitter is a very interesting startup study case. I’ve got a feeling it will be in MBA text book someday. The reason being, twitter is too important (even as geopolitical tools), twitter can’t make any money, twitter deadly simple, most people using twitter don’t come to twitter’s site and investors love it.

I’m sure it’s lots of fun working there (heard they all use Mac:-)