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By Clint Boulton Amazon Web Services offers a Web-based editing tool for its Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing marketplace that makes it easier for non-programmers to create tasks for others to work on together. Even as Turk is fading, businesses are leveraging Amazon's EC2, S3 and other cloud computing tools to give developers platforms to launch Web-based apps. This has spawned a nation of startups, including Bungee Labs, Etelos and Coghead. Amazon Web Services, the Amazon.com unit that popularized Internet-based computing with its (Elastic Compute Cloud) and S3 (Simple Storage Service) services, is making its application development marketplace available to non-programmers. Today, business users with no coding skills can use a new Web-based editor in Mechanical Turk, the popular site that lets users create a task online and turn it over to someone else to complete.
Before today, businesses with no programmers (or at least none to spare on things like Mechanical Turk) had to manually enter and retrieve each HITs (Human Intelligence Tasks), if they even could use Mechanical Turk at all.
HITS include such chores as identifying objects in a photo, transcribing audio recordings, or just researching some data. AWS views HITS as examples of artificial, artificial intelligence, because they let humans do work that computers can't. Now users can leverage HITs and monitor them without writing a single line of code. AWS is offering sample templates to help Mechanical Turk users, also known as "requesters," who want to get work done (and get paid for doing it). The templates help determine how the HIT will look, as well as payment terms and requirements for "workers," or those who are looking to get paid by working on the HIT. Some templates include image tagging, search relevance, data collection and extraction, content filtering, and product definitions. Here's how it works: once a requester has designed his or her HIT template, he or she can enter each task manually, or leverage new bulk-uploading utilities in Mechanical Turk These tools let requesters use spreadsheets to manage the new data they are loading into and accessing from Mechanical Turk. Once HITs are published on Mechanical Turk, requesters just as before can monitor the workflow and approve or disapprove completed HITs. AWS is offering the new Web-based tools along with the APIs software developers have been using to integrate Mechanical Turk into their apps. There are currently around 12,000 HITs. AWS hopes to expand that number by making it easier for non-geeks to load HITS onto the site for others to work on. This could be a big deal, assuming Mechanical Turk hasn't nuked the fridge, jumped the shark or flat out gotten tired. Do users care about Mechanical Turk anymore? That's the real question. 12,000 chores doesn't seem like a whole lot to me in the broad context of the Internet. Regardless, give Turk its credit. Like its Web 2.0 brother and sister applications, including blogs, wikis and RSS feeds, Turk has fostered a wave of collaborative crowdsourcing apps that leverage the interminable reach of the Internet. And even as Turk is fading, businesses are leveraging AWS's EC2, S3 and other cloud computing tools to give developers platforms to launch Web-based apps. This has spawned a nation of startups, including Bungee Labs, Etelos and Coghead.
BT today announced it has acquired Ribbit Corporation, a Silicon Valley-based “Telco 2.0” platform company, for $105 million in cash, on a cash-free, debt-free basis. The acquisition will accelerate BT’s strategy to transform itself into a next- generation, platform-based, software-driven services company. Based in Mountain View, California, Ribbit – “Silicon Valley’s First Phone Company” – provides an open platform which enables developers to create new and innovative voice applications and services by combining telephony and internet technologies in new ways. JP Rangaswami, managing director of service design at BT, said: "Silicon Valley is emerging as a hotbed of telecommunications innovation. With Ribbit, not only do we extend our presence in the Valley, but we also gain a groundbreaking platform, a growing community of developers and a world-class team that share a common vision. Buying Ribbit lets us accelerate that vision.” Ted Griggs, Chief Executive of Ribbit, said: “The communications industry is entering a new phase. Closed networks are becoming open platforms and developers are now driving innovation. By adding Ribbit’s capability to the power of BT’s global 21CN platform, we will now be able to give the development community the tools they need to innovate on a global scale. We are delighted – BT is exactly the partner we were seeking.”
Using Ribbit’s platform, developers are able to add voice and automation features to virtually any web-based application or community. For example, using Ribbit, developers have integrated voice into salesforce.com and built voice applications that run directly from Facebook or iGoogle. Since its launch, Ribbit has attracted thousands of developers, launched an innovative solution for the enterprise software market, and has begun testing a consumer application scheduled for general release later this year. The acquisition of the Ribbit platform will complement BT’s existing capability in the software platform space with its award-winning Software Development Kit (SDK) initiative. BT’s SDKs enable developers to integrate new applications with BT’s services using a single line of code. Ribbit, which will maintain its management team and identity, will extend its global footprint by becoming part of BT, one of the world’s leading providers of communications solutions and services operating in 170 countries. Michael Boustridge, President, BT Americas said: “The Ribbit platform makes it simpler, cheaper and faster to build communications functionality into applications, enabling developers to introduce new revenue-generating voice services in hours, rather than weeks. By combining the Ribbit platform with BT’s existing web services, we have the potential to deliver some of the world’s finest applications for communications innovation benefiting consumers and businesses alike.” Ribbit Corporation was founded in February 2006 and funded by venture capital firms Alsop Louie Partners, Allegis Capital, KPG Ventures and Peninsula Ventures. Ribbit is being acquired from these firms and other stockholders of Ribbit’s, including founders and employees. Source: BT Media Center
by Kip Kniskern  Just getting the urge to regurgitate press releases out of our system today – but here’s just one more (hey, we read press releases so you don’t have to!). Today Microsoft has announced an API for MSN Direct, to allow websites to send location information to navigation devices either wirelessly or via a USB connection.
“MSN Direct opens up opportunities for Web sites in a variety of areas — real estate, travel, event planning and food service — to make it fast and simple for visitors to have access to turn-by-turn directions on their navigation device,” said Joe Coco, product unit manager of the MSN Direct initiative at Microsoft. “MSN Direct helps consumers get the most out of their navigation device, while also helping businesses drive more customers to their locations.” A number of MSN Direct partners, including Garmin and Alpine Electronics Inc., plan to ship or are already shipping GPS products that are compatible with the MSN Direct Send to GPS feature. “As more and more consumers are using their PC to locate their desired destinations and then needing to find those exact locations on their GPS device, MSN Direct is making that process easier for our customers,” said Roger Jollis, Garmin’s director of OEM and mobile marketing. “Garmin was the first to offer MSN Direct on an automotive GPS, and we are pleased with MSN Direct’s newest innovation because it will be very helpful to our customers.” MSN Direct, which began with a collection of (huge) SPOT watches and appliances, has now evolved into integration with GPS devices and Windows Mobile phones, making it much more useful to a larger audience (in the non-giant-geek-watch wearing set). The API is available at MSN Direct/Developer, and you can learn more about MSN Direct on the home page.
Verb Exchange announced a deal with interface design specialist, Nitobi, to develop the desktop and web interfaces for Tabrio, a new way to stay in touch with anyone, anywhere. Verb Exchange and Nitobi will work together to enhance the Tabrio user experience, making Tabrio feature-rich. Read full article...
Adobe has released a substantially enhanced BPM/RIA solution. While LiveCycle suite isn't new software, its popularity increased in June of 2007 when the entire suite started to run on the same J2EE server and the RIA components were introduced. Today, over 5,000 enterprises use LiveCycle in financial services, government, manufacturing, and other verticals. Flex developers will enjoy easier integration with this powerful BPM software. Read full article...
A little Chicago ISV called LimitNone is suing Google for nigh on to a billion dollar charging it with misappropriating its trade secrets to beat back Microsoft Office. Seems a year ago March LimitNone shared its mojo for migrating Outlook users and their calendars and contacts to Gmail with Google and according to LimitNone's story the widgetry turned up in Google Apps despite Google's assurances that it had no intention of developing a similar product. read more
 Yesterday, a new component architecture a nd feature specifications were provided to the Flex SDK open source developer community. The Flex team targets three primary teams: design in mind, developer productivity, and framework evolution.
read more
by Heather Havenstein (Computerworld) IBM's Rational Software unit today unveiled a development tool that can scan and check code as it's written to uncover errors before they make their way further into the development life cycle where fixes are far more costly. The IBM Rational Software Analyzer automatically scans the new code up to 700 times before an application is complete. Its operation is similar to the grammar check function in Microsoft Word, according to IBM. "We unfortunately see a lot of defects in code. You really want to be able to minimize those defects. The earlier you do it in the life cycle, the less expensive it becomes," said Dave Locke, director of product marketing at Rational. For example, Locke added, if a programmer is writing an application to most likely be used in North America, its code will likely reflect the needs of English-speaking users. But if that application also needs to support Hebrew-speaking users in Israel, changes will need to be made as to how the words are displayed, he noted. The code's Java underpinnings have "to deal with this difference in how you handle and parse the strings or the language in the code," Locke said. Deploying an application built for English-speaking users in Israel would require spending "hundreds of thousands of dollars to go back to the program I just wrote to fix it. With Software Analyzer, rules are in the tool so errors are flagged in the first development effort vs. having to go back." When errors are flagged, programmers can click on a box to find out what the errors are and to find suggestions and sample code for fixing the problem, Locke added. The tool can also be used to flag known security weaknesses so that when a programmer mistakenly adds such security shortcomings, they can be eliminated right away, he said. Developed by IBM Labs and built as an Eclipse plug-in, the new tool is available now. A developer edition is $3,500 per user; an enterprise edition is $50,000 per server with unlimited users.
A JavaScript module built on the Yahoo! User Interface library that allow asynchronous (Ajax) usage of Amazon's Alexa Site Thumbnail web service. The project consists of a server-side component written in PHP which makes the cross-domain request to Amazon's Alexa Site Thumbnail web service, and a JavaScript component which makes Ajax requests to configured server-side component and caches the results. Features - Uses YUI library and registers itself as a module
- 1.4kb minified version
- Caching to reduce number of server and web service requests
- Ajax request queue to prevent multiple request for the same resource
- Configurable (in JavaScript) for small/large thumbnails, and wrap with anchor (link)
- YUI Logging support for development and testing
More details on http://code.google.com/p/ajax-alexa-thumbnails/
by SDTimes A componentized non-Windows operating system is in the works at Microsoft, one that could eventually phase out Windows. The OS features asynchronous-only architecture built for task concurrency. SD Times has viewed internal Microsoft documents that outline Midori’s proposed design, which is Internet-centric and predicated on the prevalence of connected systems.
Midori is an offshoot of Microsoft Research’s Singularity operating system, the tools and libraries of which are completely managed code. Midori is designed to run directly on native hardware (x86, x64 and ARM), be hosted on the Windows Hyper-V hypervisor, or even be hosted by a Windows process. According to published reports, Eric Rudder, senior vice president for technical strategy at Microsoft and an alumnus of Bill Gates' technical staff, is heading up the effort. Rudder served as senior vice president of Microsoft’s Servers and Tools group until 2005. A Microsoft spokesperson refused comment. Read full article...
by Google System Blog  After many months of testing, Google Calendar finally adds CalDAV support. "CalDAV is an open protocol that allows calendar access via WebDAV. CalDAV models calendar events as HTTP resources in iCalendar format, and models calendars containing events as WebDAV collections. This allows you to publish and subscribe to calendars, share them collaboratively, sync between multiple users and sync between multiple devices."
For now, the only application supported by Google Calendar is Apple's iCal. "With CalDAV support in Google Calendar, you'll be able to view and edit your Google Calendar events directly in iCal. Any changes you make in iCal will automatically appear in Google Calendar the next time you sign in (and vice versa). If you use iCal while offline, changes you make will be saved and updated in Google Calendar when you get back online." Read full article...
By P. J. Connolly July 25, 2008 — AJAX and Adobe Flex don’t always get mentioned in the same sentence, but 4D sees rich Internet applications as the way to bring applications to a wider range of devices than ever before. The company unveiled yesterday the second release of 4D Web 2.0 Pack v11, a combination of the company’s new 4D for Flex and an update to its AJAX framework that is aimed at developers writing for desktop, mobile and Web systems. The framework’s update to version 11.2 adds the ability to enter and edit data through the touch-screens on Apple’s iPhone and iPod Touch, as well as offline data entry via HTML 5. Adobe AIR is also newly supported, as is the Firefox 3 Web browser. Meanwhile, 4D for Flex provides what the company calls the first direct Flex-to-SQL connectivity.
by: XML News Desk As the number of XML files in enterprise organizations significantly increases, architects, application developers, and data integration specialists must deal simultaneously with the growing number of XML formatted messages on the network as well as their rapidly expanding file sizes. While XML has become the ‘de facto’ standard for transferring data from one step to the next in a business process or between applications, there are more and more occasions when files are easily exceeding 50–100MB in size, causing performance slow downs and memory overloads. This paper describes the challenges associated with parsing very large XML files in today's systems and offers a solution with HydraSDO for XML. It is specifically targeted to overcome the challenges associated with traditional methods of parsing.
Key features of HydraSDO for XML include: - Optimization for very large XML file
- Lower memory footprint
- High speed parsing
To read more on HydraSDO for XML download Rogue Wave’s White Paper.
iday, 25th of July 2008, Romanian FUG (Adobe Flex User Group) had another Romanian meeting. Once again meeting place were chosen - a pub. Guess Adobe so much interested in Flex Evangelism in Romania that poor local FUG had no better place to be except this pub. Andrei Ionescu, Romanian FUG member, write in his blog: We spoke about Flex/AIR applications, future ones and released ones, and we also spoke about Fx{r} and how can we improve it. It is funny actually and sounds very strange, Romanian FUG boils in own juice of very few people (barely 10) and always forgetting to notify other members that some events will take action at certain place and time. Last meeting, I assume by photos posted, been only with 5 people, even less than I was expecting... Most of them working for Quask's Romanian office, so all these spontaneous meetings for me look in the same messy way as whole Quask. Sorry guys, but I'm laughing my ass when geeks getting for a beer in some pub and call it FUG Meeting. Get real, guys!
by Dr. Herong Yang This set provides introductions and tutorial examples on JavaScript shell command included in the JDK package. Topics include downloading and installing JDK 1.6, ECMAScript engine, running JavaScript code in command line, interactive or batch mode. Read full article...
from LiveSide - Windows Live news and interviews by John OBrien Angus and dev.live.com have just announced that the July 2008 refresh of the Windows Live Tools was released today and includes some updates and bug fixes to the existing controls and importantly the release of the much anticipated Virtual Earth ASP.NET control. Other major changes are: - SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer control upgraded to Silverlight 2.0 Beta 2
- SilverlightStreamingMediaPlayer Control supports Videos in Silverlight Streaming
- IDLoginStatus control supports transparent background
But the main attraction is the Virtual Earth ASP.NET control. It is a .Net 3.5 control designed for Visual Studio 2008 and does require a script manager (ASP.NET AJAX) to be added to the page to begin. The control is a complete drag and drop experience, drag the map from your toolbox onto your design surface and resize to suit. As you would expect all V6 properties can be set as properties of the control, there is a full set of client side events to map to any JavaScript you require and a set of server events for server suitable events, like mouse ‘onclick’ but not ‘onmouseover’. (the later would fire too many events to be handled server side) 
Read full article...
from Flash Enabled Blog by Carlos Pinho 
Andy Zupko wrote an awesome tutorial showing you how to create a dragable 3D object using papervision 3d and as3. A nice and ellegant approach to the CameraObject3D method. FYG the as file is only 9k!!! Read tutorial and download source.
In order to set up your IIS to serve Adobe AIR applications, you need to do few changes in your IIS configuration so it will handle additional MIME type. First of all find your IIS Manager in Control Panel\Administrative Tools: 
When you double click on it it will open you a manager. Select "Web Sites" or single web site that suppose to handle your AIR MIME, select Properties and it will populate Web Site Properties dialog. 
Then, select HTTP Headers tab and on the bottom of it click MIME Types button, it will populate one more dialog: 
In this dialog, select New and in new MIME Type dialog enter following: - Extension: .air
- MIME Type: application/vnd.adobe.air-application-installer-package+zip
Then click OK, dialog will close. Another OK and you will close another dialog, and so on. Well, you got your AIR MIME ready to use.
by By Elizabeth Montalbano, IDG News Service As part of its move toward greater openness, Microsoft is becoming a platinum sponsor of the Apache Software Foundation Microsoft expanded its support for the open-source community on Friday by giving money to the Apache Software Foundation, the first time it has given money to the long-standing open-source project. Microsoft also said it is contributing code to support a PHP (Hypertext Preprocessor) project and committing to offer royalty-free specifications for Windows Server and .Net Framework protocols as part of its expanded support for the open-source community. The company announced its plans at the O'Reilly Open Source Convention (OSCON) now being held in Portland, Oregon. [ Track the latest trends in open source with InfoWorld's Open Sources blog. ] Under increased global pressure from technology regulators and open-source competitors, Microsoft has moved toward a more open development policy for some time. In February, it made its boldest move yet to support open source by promising greater transparency in both its software development and business practices, and opening up previously proprietary APIs to some of its major products, such as Windows and Office, for third-party use. On Friday, Microsoft strengthened those efforts by becoming a platinum sponsor of Apache, a sponsorship that includes a $100,000 donation to the organization. According to Microsoft, it has communicated with Apache in the past but has never contributed to the foundation in this way. Microsoft also is providing code to a project called ADOdb, which is a database abstraction library that allows PHP-based applications to communicate with a range of databases. PHP is an open-source, freely available scripting language developers widely use for Web development. Through Microsoft's contribution, ADOdb can now communicate natively with SQL Server's database driver, the company said. Microsoft is adding to the list of protocols covered under its Open Specification Promise (OSP) as well, including protocols for technologies built into Windows Server and the .Net Framework. The company launched OSP in September 2006 as a pledge that it would not take any patent-enforcement action against those who use certain technology APIs. Protocols released as part of OSP can be freely used by third-party developers. In addition to its increased open-source investments, Microsoft released updates to IronRuby, an implementation of the Ruby programming language for Microsoft's .Net programming framework. The company said it plans to ship all standard Ruby libraries implemented in the Ruby programming language as part of its IronRuby distribution. It's also participating in the RubySpec project, which aims to write a publishable specification for the Ruby programming language, and has created a separate open-source project under the Microsoft Public License called IronRuby-Contrib. That project aims to promote collaborative development of code for IronRuby.
by Games and Tech So it’s no big secret any more that in ActionScript 3, the MovieClip class has a hidden method that enables developers to add frame scripts at runtime. However, with great power comes great responsibility. It would help if this were documented in the Flash docs but it isn’t. If you don’t want your SWF files to crash when using this method you MUST ensure that the playhead is stopped before calling this method. I discovered this by experimenting with when, and what I could do with this method, and yes you can remove any frame scripts added at design-time or run-time (at least with the current version of Flash player). Actually, the playhead does not have to be stopped if you are setting a null frame script. Read full article...
by Simeon Bateman I have been working with ActionScript for a long time. And I have to admit I don’t know if the reason I never noticed some of the functionality was it was added after I read the documentation, or if I just never looked close enough to pick it up. But never the less I find that I have been overlooking some gems that are built in and so I wanted to make sure that you are not overlooking them as well. Read full article...
There is might be a need to retrieve flash variables passed to your ActionScript/Flex application. <object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" width="550"
height="400"
codebase="http://download.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=6,0,40,0">
<param name="src" value="app.swf?file=sample" />
<embed type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
width="550" height="400" src="app.swf?file=sample"></embed>
</object> It is quite simple to get flash variables in application that made with Flex framework: Application.application.parameters.file; But application in pure ActionScript, like with using SPAS or AsWing UI frameworks (or totally without any of these), requires a bit different approach. In Actionscript 3 variables that are passed in through query string have been moved to the parameters property of LoaderInfo instance. LoaderInfo(this.root.loaderInfo).parameters.file
by Ted Patrick I had a situation where I needed to edit an FLV today. And went searching for an application to edit this common file format. It seems that the only FLV editor on the planet is written in Flex using Adobe AIR. I am really impressed by the application and I actually think it is one of the best AIR applications I have used. It is a simple utility and gives you direct binary editability into an FLV file. You can inject and edit FLV metadata and crop at any FLV keyframe. Download RICHFLV AIR 
by Javier Julio Recently, I was working on my first Flex project where I was consuming XML via a service. Whenever I wanted to make data changes with the service, I was required to send in an XML packet. Since AS3 has native support for XML literals, I wanted to create my small XML packet inline. Read full article...
by Dion Almaer 
Steve Souders gave a talk at OSCON yesterday where he demonstrated the new Firebug Lite 1.2. Today Firebug Lite 1.2 was released. This new version was built by Azer Koçulu, creator of pi.debugger. Azer joined the Firebug Working Group, morphed the GUI to look Firebug, and added it to the Firebug code base. Firebug Lite is a subset of Firebug that can be used in IE, Opera, and Safari. The previous version provided console.log functionality. In Firebug Lite 1.2, Azer added the ability to inspect DOM elements, track XHRs, and navigate HTML, CSS, and JavaScript. You can embed it in your pages and enable debugging. I prefer creating a Firebug Lite bookmarklet that I can launch on any web page. Instructions and more information are available on the main Firebug Lite page. If you like a little Firebug love when you debug non-Firefox browsers, check out the very much improved version!
by Adam DuVander  Get your user’s voice into your app, even if they don’t have a microphone on their computer. MyVox uses a phone number and unique pin code to let users record messages with any ordinary phone.
The hello world example gives an idea of what the process is like. After the user finishes the phone call, the audio is immediately available via a WAV or MP3 file. Sites using the API include rapper Ludacris’ online music community WeMix. To get an idea of how developers are using MyVox, check out the application gallery. It’s pretty cool that MyVox is providing a bridge between a phone and the Internet. I do have questions about how useful the service will continue to be in the future. Audio input is being built into many new laptops. Add in increasingly powerful mobile phones and I wonder if MyVox would have been more useful five years ago. The service is supported with a very short advertisement at the beginning of the call. MyVox is a project of well-funded Voodoovox, who aims to be the Doubleclick of audio advertising. See also:
By Adam DuVander, Monkey Bites Four months after announcing their new mobile web browser, Opera has finally released a beta version for Windows Mobile. Symbian support is expected in the future. In February Opera announced they also intended to support Linux-based devices. 
The most noticeable change in this new version is an iPhone-like pan and zoom interface. Rather than starting with only the viewable portion of the web page, the browser shows the entire page, so the user can choose the content to view. This feature, which should finally bring enjoyable browsing to Windows Mobile, could be the reason the mobile beta is only available for phones with touchscreens. Read full article...
RSS, or Rich Site Summary, is an easy way to stay informed of the latest updates to your favorite sites without having to actually visit them each individually. For those who have sites, it can be a great way to increase readership and get information out about your blog, website or business. Either way, RSS enables users to navigate the Web in an easy, fast format and to access information at the click of a button. This collection of tools will give you everything you need to get started or improve how you're working with RSS. Read full article...
Written by Mike Gunderloy Google is on a roll. Hot on the heels of releasing its internal Protocol Buffers data interchange format, it has open-sourced Google XML Pages (GXP). Though the project page reports this as version 0.2 beta, don't be fooled: according to a presentation about the technology, this is the templating language behind AdWords, Blogger, Google Reader, Google Analytics, and other properties. As it currently exists, the GXP technology is firmly tied to Java, although a C++ code generator is in the works (and the existing code is included in the open source download). Now, if you're building web sites with Java backing, especially within the enterprise, the odds are pretty good that you're currently using JSP. Given the number of tools and frameworks that support JSP, why should you consider switching? The first obvious reason is that this is clearly proven technology: you have to assume that if Google has put this code into major production, it works. But beyond that, GXP implements a number of useful and interesting features. My favorite is automatic escaping and quoting of content: using GXP automatically protects you against a huge range of cross-site scripting attacks. Another nice feature is validation (according to document type) of the content you include. For example, in an HTML document, GXP's compiler will flag things like unknown and misused elements and attributes. Other key differentiators of GXP include built-in space collapsing, well-designed modularization, and built-in internationalization support. Despite the attractiveness of its design, though, tackling GXP at this point is definitely a task for early adopters. That's because the documentation varies from "sketchy" to "nonexistent." The authors have promised to remedy this, but for now, reading the source code is your best bet. A good place to start is with the contents of the java/test/com/google/gxp folder - the unit tests will give you a strong sense of what markup you can pass to GXP, and what the results will be.
Joa Elbert just posted:  As André already mentioned we have finally got an Ogg Vorbis Encoder in ActionScript 3. André wrote a lot about the benefits already.
Now what I really like about the encoder is the way we could minimize the encoding time by ~50%! I know two implementations of Ogg Vorbnis. One is written in C and another one in Java. What we did first was just getting it to work and it looked pretty much like the C/Java version. Then we started optimizing the code by comparing the encoding results always to reference files. I am quiet happy because on my machine we reduced the encoding time from 32sec to 16.5sec with simple optimizations and tricks. Read full article...
Quite interesting post i found today on Google System blog today. Most feed readers let you import and export subscriptions using the OPML format. For Google Reader, you'll find this option in Settings > Import/Export. But what happens when you need to export the feeds from a single folder so you can share them with a friend or upload them to a site? Google Reader lets you export the feeds from a folder: http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/-/label/FOLDER
(you should replace FOLDER with the actual name of the folder) Another way to share the subscriptions from a folder is to make it public and to use this link for the OPML file: http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/USERID/label/FOLDER
(USERID can be obtained from the public page created by Google Reader) This also works if someone shares with you the page of a public folder and you want to obtain the list of subscriptions from that folder. If I share with you my Googlers folder:
http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers
you can easily obtain the link to the corresponding OPML file by replacing shared with public/subscriptions:
http://www.google.com/reader/public/subscriptions/user/13577231804381328821/label/googlers What it doesn't tell you is that this FOLDER thing is actually a tag. Remember when you share some items on your Google Reader you have tagging there? Yea, that's the one! So in my case if I tagged something with "clothe", my public list for this tag (FOLDER;)) will be http://www.google.com/reader/shared/user/16248031352690247492/label/clothe Now, USERID, another pain in the ass way to obtain things that should be simple, but requires some clicks. See the "Your Stuff" in the corner menu you have? It has "Shared Items" link on it, click there and you will have some page "Your shared items" appeared. It has a link "See your shared items page in a new window." Click on it and will give you a new page, address of which ends with some loooong number, that's your USERID.
Aswing guys just announced AsWing GuiBuilder 1.4.2 release, with the haXe code generator contributed by Johan Coppens, now GuiBuilder could be more useful for haXe developers. (see also Using AsWing/as3 with Haxe) 
You can download it here now: http://code.google.com/p/aswing/downloads/list Updated source code also available over SVN.
by Flash Enabled Blog One cool thing you can do in Flash and Flex, is to create custom classes in order to help you to repeat certain tasks in a easily manner. Today i show you a collection of some cool custom classes, which can help you to develop more and faster. SoundManager The SoundManager is a Singleton that does exactly what it says. It has a host of methods to choose from that should make adding sounds to your projects super simple. It has a dependency to TweenLite for the sound fading Active Window Blur Blurs a background (MovieClip or Sprite) behind a transparent window (MovieClip or Sprite). TweenMax TweenMax builds on top of the TweenLite core class and its big brother, TweenFilterLite, to round out the tweening family with popular (though not essential) features like bezier tweening, pause/resume capabilities, easier sequencing, hex color tweening, and more. YouTube A simple light class to connect to the YouTube gdata API and source playlists and featured videos. Pulse Particles Pulse Particles is a general purpose AS3 particle system. Animated Bitmap The AnimatedBitmap class provides functionality for Bitmap objects that are animated by using a series of still images. When creating a new AnimatedBitmap you provide a BitmapData object that contains an image that consists of the ’single-frame’ images for the animation. QueueLoader The QueueLoader is an actionscript library for sequential asset loading and monitoring. QueueLoader is designed to be used with Actionscript 3.0 and has become an open source project. If you are interested in contributing please contact the project leader. Prioritization The url prioritization class, it works with Loader, URLLoader, and Sound Objects (and maybe NetStream objects one day). This will let you set a priority for requests so they execute in the right order, take a look at currently executing requests or loading requests. DistortImage An updated version of the original DistortImage class for AS2, which allows you to programmatically distort images. Layout class This class - rather, a collection of 3: Layout, LayoutConstraint, and LayoutManager - provide that functionality to objects in Flash CS3 through ActionScript 3 using a somewhat similar API (though ActionScript only, no authoring interface). Using these classes you can constrain objects to the top, right, bottom, left, or center them horizontally or vertically within a layout. There are also controls for height and width as well as a property for maintaining aspect ratio. Color Sampler Class Color sampling engine for DisplayObjects. Takes a defined sample area (width, height, x, y) of a BitmapData object and computes the average color within the area. The RGB, red channel, green channel, blue channel, hue, saturation, and brightness values are stored from the sample. 2D Character Rigging Classes The AS 3 rigging classes are used for skelton rigging and skinning of 2D characters. The rigging class library is organized around the development of highly specific articulated rigs. The current focus is on humaniod bipedal characters. XML Loader Class AS3 XML loader StyleCollection The StyleCollection class lets you create groups of styles that are applied to and automatically updated on subscribing components. It supports both instance and renderer styles (setStyle and setRendererStyle respectively), and uses component introspection to apply only relevant styles to each component. StyleCollection exposes a robust interface, including a static interface that provides global access to named styles. Easing Easing is a Singleton that lets you do dynamic point-to-point property tweening. It is able to manipulate virtually any property of any object on or off the stage. CSSLoader The class enables you to load CSS files into your flex application during runtime, a functionality Actionscript3.0 lacks. Autocomplete Text Field Create an automcplete text field in an AS 3 project. fZIP A little Actionscript 3 class that enables you to load standard ZIP archives and extract contained files while the archive is still loading. Reflection Class Generate reflections from images
This example will demonstrate how to combine the Microsoft ASP.Net Server-Side Framework with the Backbase Client Framework. It will focus on making the adjustments required for integrating ASP.Net WebForms and UserControls in a Backbase-enabled AJAX application. It does not demonstrate how to create an AJAX application. If you are interested in seeing this code in action, please read the Creating an SPI with Backbase and ASP.NET tutorial. For more information on Ajaxifying existing ASP.Net applications, please see the Progressive Enhancement of ASP.Net applications tutorial. Read full article on http://bdn.backbase.com/client/examples/aspnet
Adobe has released the second beta of Flash Player 10, code-named "Astro". Developers are encouraged to update and test their existing Flash applications so that they work with Flash Player 10. Flash Player 10 introduces new features that Adobe bets will significantly enhance the experience in Flash-powered web applications. According to Adobe, the technology now enables content creators and web developers to use 3D effects, create custom graphic filters and effect, take advantage of advanced text layout engine, enhanced drawing and sound APIs, all at little performance penalty since the company has significantly improved run-time performance across platforms. "Adobe Flash Player 10 introduces new expressive features and visual performance improvements that allow interactive designers and developers to build the richest and most immersive Web experiences. These new capabilities also empower the community to extend Flash Player and to take creativity and interactivity to a new level," says Adobe. Continue Reading The Full Story
by FlashMyMind This tutorial is all about external Actionscript 3 classes. I will teach you how to linkage movie clips to an actionscript class and then we'll create an external class. The end product in seen above. The movie uses one external class and only a few lines of code is written in the main timeline. So why do we use external classes? To put it simple, external classes help you to stay more organized. External classes are part of a programming paradigm called "object oriented programming". The subject is very broad, so I will not go into that. In this tutorial, you don't need a great knowledge of OOP anyways. SO start your Flash IDE and let's get started! Read full article:
daniel bulli left a blog post about sorting XML by attribute with ActionScript 3: "I love working with E4X, but I wish there was an easy way to sort an XML based on an attribute." Read full article...
By Charles Babcock, InformationWeek
URL: http://www.informationweek.com/story/showArticle.jhtml?articleID=209101379 Few open source databases are displacing commercial Oracle, SQL Server, or DB2 systems, but they are being adopted for use with new, interactive Web applications, small portals, RFID applications, and other new workloads in the enterprise. Noel Yuhanna, database analyst with Forrester Research, said these uses are increasing the adoption of open source databases and increasing the size of the market from $850 million this year to $1.2 billion by 2010. Open source databases, which are freely downloadable, produce revenue from users who pay for training, technical support, consulting, or a commercial version of the product. Another way to measure annual open source database revenue is to note it still falls short of the price that Sun Microsystems paid to acquire one of the systems, MySQL AB, which it bought last February for $1 billion. Other open source databases are Ingres, the embedded system; BerkeleyDB, now owned by Oracle but still open source code; PostgreSQL, which finds its way into products from EnterpriseDB and Greenplum; and Derby, an Apache Software Foundation database project. MySQL is the most popular and is used by such Web heavyweights as eBay, Travelocity, and Google. "Open source databases have come a long way in delivering reliable, robust; and secure database platforms. Forrester estimates that 80% of application requirements can be met using only 25% of the features and functionality that closed source commercial databases offer," wrote Yuhanna in a July 17 "Market Update" report. Open source database functionality can meet the needs of 80% of existing business applications, he added. A key ingredient of the current uptake of open source database for new applications is their maturity, he added. "Some customers are running mission-critical transactional deployments with over three terabytes of data on open source databases, while others are running very large workloads that support hundreds and thousands of concurrent users," he noted. MySQL in particular has built out a thriving ecosystem around the core database, with partners and independent software vendors making use of MySQL in vertical applications, he wrote. But in many cases, it is impractical to replace an existing commercial system with an open source database. The commercial systems have proprietary characteristics, such as Oracle's PL/SQL extensions to the SQL data access language, or T-SQL in Microsoft's SQL Server. A considerable investment in rewriting stored procedures, applications, and queries has to accompany a conversion effort, he noted.
by moockblog If you load a .swf file into Flash Player 9 with ActionScript 3.0 and subsequently wish to remove it from memory, you must first deactivate it, and then dereference it. If you dereference the .swf without deactivating it, it will continue to consume resources and in some cases might never become eligible for garbage collection. Here is an unofficial list of tasks required to deactivate a .swf file: - Tell any loaded .swf child assets to disable themselves.
- Stop any sounds from playing.
- Stop the main timeline, if it is currently playing.
- Stop any movie clips that are currently playing.
- Close any connected network objects, such as instances of Loader, URLLoader, Socket, XMLSocket, LocalConnection, NetConnections, and NetStream.
- Release all references to cameras and microphones.
- Unregister all event listeners in the .swf (particularly Event.ENTER_FRAME, and mouse and keyboard listeners)
- Stop any currently running intervals (via clearInterval()).
- Stop any Timer objects (via the Timer class’s instance method stop()).
Note that the preceding list is, by definition, insufficient because it is neither exhaustive nor officially maintained by Adobe. If you know of a task that needs adding to the preceding list, please sent it to me via email (username colin, domain moock.org). As of Flash Player 10, the preceding tasks can be performed automatically by calling the Loader class's new method unloadAndStop(). For further discussion, see Charge #2 in my Inside RIA article, The Charges Against ActionScript 3.0 and Grant Skinner's article Additional Information on Loader.unloadAndStop().
by Dave Keen I like Actionscript 3, I like Flex, I like Flash and I especially like PureMVC. In fact, I like them so much that its about time I wrote a fully fledged tutorial to help the rest of you like them as much as I do. The code we are going to recreate here started life as a technical test for a job I was interested in. Unfortunately it ended up not being for me, but the code itself lends itself excellently to demonstrating how to use PureMVC as well as creating a decent application along the way. As you have probably guessed from the title we’ll be creating a simple but fully functional Jabber chat client. Its not exactly going to be feature rich, but by the end of this tutorial your application will allow you to login, logout, show your buddy list and have one-to-one chats with your friends. Chatrooms, invites and all the other bits of Jabber goodness are left as an exercise for the reader Read full article...
homer gaines posted quite nice comparison article on importing images within ActionScript 2 and 3 versions: If you are going to develop flash based content using AS3, you should know it takes a bit more work to do simple things. For example, say for inistance you want to load an image into a movie clip called “imgHold_mc” using ActionScript 2, you could use the following code: function loadImage() {
imgHold_mc.loadMovie(imgUrl);
}
loadImage();
-or-
var url:String = “imgUrl”;
function loadImage(link:String){
imgHold.loadMovie(link);
}
loadImage(url);If you wanted to do the same thing but using ActionScript 3, you would need to use the code bellow: var imageLoader:Loader;
function loadImage(url:String):void {
imageLoader = new Loader();
imageLoader.load(new URLRequest(url));
imageLoader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, imageLoaded);
}
loadImage(imgUrl);
function imageLoaded(e:Event):void {
imgHold_mc.addChild(imageLoader);
}
With the power of the underlying Mozilla Gecko engine, Pencil turns your excellent Firefox 3 browser into a sketching tool with just a 400-kilobyte installation package. Pencil will always be free and can run on virtually all platforms that Firefox 3 supports. Visit Pencil Project website...
If you are building SWF10 content and discovered that your SWFs are no longer working with the refresh of Flash Player 10 beta that went live on Adobe Labs last week, you will need to download the latest compiler from the Adobe Open Source site. Read full article...
from Anirudh Sasikumar HTTPService has lots of functionality that is indispensable and fits in along with other classes of the mx.rpc package. It handles concurrency and can decode responses into object, xml, e4x, array, etc. But when it comes to data in binary format, people tend to use a URLLoader instead of trying to get HTTPService to understand binary data. All you need to do is specify a custom channel which in turn uses your URLLoader and override the processResult function of HTTPService to handle binary data. In this article, we'll extend HTTPService to support GZIP encoded responses (which currently is missing from AIR) in addition to decoding to the appropriate resultFormat. Read full article...
By David Hurth Six Revisions has put together a great list of Flash and ActionScript resources. Since Flash is used throughout the web for animation and with ActionScript you can do some pretty nice programming to go with the animation it is nice to have some good resources. Read full article...
While increasingly more websites are fully or partially based on AJAX, it is still difficult to develop complicated AJAX applications. What is the main issue which causes this difficulty in developing AJAX applications? Is it asynchronous communication with the server, or is it GUI programming? How can a multithreading JavaScript library help to ease some of these issues? Read full article...
by Caleb Johnston After late-night conversations amongst coworkers and friends over beers, I’ve discovered that many flash developers remain unfamiliar with AVM2’s inter workings. Read full article...
 JavaScript 2 is becoming increasingly important. Learn how to take advantage of JavaScript 2 while still running in today's browsers. Leverage your current JavaScript and HTML skills to build applications that run in Flash 7-9, DHTML and more with no code changes!
OpenLaszlo 4.2 includes a new JavaScript 2-based compiler that translates JS2 syntax to a variety of formats, including JS 1.5, Actionscript 1 & 2 and Actionscript 3. When Firefox 4 is out, we'll be ready with native JavaScript 2.0 support! Come learn about this exciting new development, and about the new features designed to make developing complex apps easy, including cross-browser history and vector graphics support. Read full article...
by Design Reviver Some amazing things can be done with images in ActionScript 3. One of these is the ability to encode a display object as a JPEG, and thanks to the JPEG Encoder included in the AS3 Core Library, doing this is actually quite simple. In this article, I will show you how to create a flash file that encodes a movieclip as a JPEG and allows the user to download it to their own computer.
In this article, Stefan Tilkov explains some of the most common anti-patterns found in applications that claim to follow a "RESTful" design and suggests ways to avoid them. Read full article...
via ajaxian.com What does your CEO do? Paul Colton, CEO of Aptana, gets his fingers dirty. He just wrote a post about accessing COM objects from JavaScript with Jaxer. This is possible as the JavaScript is running on the server, and this server is running on Windows. You can download the source code to check it all out.
An ActionScript 3 library for reading and writing Excel files. Currently reading numbers, text, and formulas from Excel version 2.0-2003 and writing numbers, text, and dates to Excel 2.0 is supported. No server-side help is needed. Documentation and samples are at http://code.google.com/p/as3xls/
Some of the proposed features for the Microsoft ASP.NET AJAX published Code Plex. Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax framework can be used entirely as a client-side technology leveraging specific ASP.NET services or data, or even without an ASP.NET server, by utilizing the Microsoft ASP.NET Ajax libraries directly. Download documentation in Word or PDF format...
by FlashEnabledBlog.com Yahoo! Astra Flash / Flex Components are a very cool extra for the available sets of Flash and Flex components. They are easy to skin and lot’s of documentation is available too, so any developer can be able to extend the features of the ASTRA Components. Read full article...
The project would allow Flash pages to be returned in a search, meaning millions of rich Internet applications will become searchable. "The Flash Player is going to be used by Google and Yahoo on their servers to run Flash content at runtime," Everett-Church said. "This means much better search results for end-users. [Until now], it has been a challenge to search Flash content on the Web." Read full article...
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