Wow what a week. Been a busy one at work, so not alot of time for my personal projects .

I did however find time to jump in on Alan Musselman’s Breeze session. I have never used breeze before and this was a great place to experiment. We even had multiple screens running with two people showing stuff at the same time. Very cool. Met some great people and saw some really cool things that were going on. I can see how usefull breeze would be for the coperates too. If you havent seen it in action (and I dont mean just logging in for a trial) I would really recomend jumping in on Alan’s biweekly session and come introduce yourself. Ill definately be visiting again. Nice work Alan.

Some cool examples of work coming out on the net. Tim Oreilly posted about some cool usage of flash with  Yahoo maps quoting "This is the value of getting Flash designers involved in your mapping application: they know from beautiful."   And too right check these Priate map, Radar map.

Another Graphic asset management is planned and was reported by Digital Media Minute.  Fluxiom is a Ajax (and I spose web 2.0??) online application. But they havent got any demos just yet, only a funky video showing some of the features. Even still it looks pretty damn cool!

And finally I read a really good story that touch home with me, about a guy who has spent 10 years of his life trying to achieve the impossible. Making colored bubbles. Not hard you may think, but after staining his skin the whites of his eyes and using dangerous acids this article may have you thinking again. Good on him sticking to his guns and making it a reality. I think he deserves all the success he gets! His first successful version was washable, then achieved something amazing. a colored bubble that when it poops the color dissapears. reinforces the old addage 10% inspiration 90% persperation

Yep I have been back working on the Fabulator but first a little on a different project that distracted me. I got the AS3 Msn client working in a c# wrapper and am woring on the GUI. The new security settings in flash are a pain in the rear but I can see they are need for the wider development comunity to accept flash as a new development platform. I have a few ideas for that joined with subersion.

So onto Flabulator.  Its my c# implementation of flash widgets. After failingto find an answer to the flash transperancy issue I pressed on and got a working alpha. The next major issue I have hit is managing the dragging of the widgets. For the alpha I just had a black border upon focus with resize handels to drag and resize, but this wasn’t ideal. In other similar applications you might notice what a couple have name the dragger. A small icon in the top corner allowing dragging of the widget. I would really like to steer away from this in the Flabulator. The problem stems from the fact that as soon as the flash ocx has focus you loose access to the mouse events in c#. So I released the alpha to a couple of people for comments and recieved some really encouraging ones, along with finding a few forum posts about people watching it with interest. I have someone helping on the project now (I will check with them if its ok to mention thier name) so things might move a bit more quickly. Im currently refactoring it to provide a satble base for further features.

I have found (especially when creating the MSN client) that moving in between AS3 and c# to be easy/seamless and the flex development to be really quick. I am really hang out for the XML Data provider classes in the next release of Flex2 as I can then serialize classes from c# into data providers for flash through the external interface. Man thats a mouth full of geek.

One handy class for you c#’ers out ther I found in the Flex builder 2 help files. Its a serializer for Flashes external interface. Under All packages >> Flash.External >> ExternalInterface and about half way down the page. It allows you to just create an instance then call String request = serializer.EncodeInvoke("testExternalAPI", arguments);
and it will build the xml structure for you.

So keep an eye out for a beta of the Flabulator, LOL and some update photos as we come to the end of Movember with my moustache really beginning to bug me, but its all in good fun.

Apple Planning Intel iBook Debut for January?

Yep I wish I could get me grubby mits on one of these but alas I fear it may be like buying the first of a new technology…pretty cool till 6 months down the line when the decent versions come out with more options, but I really cant wait for the speed of the mac OS on an intel.

 Check out the story HERE      (just to point you at the story)

"Lamborghini Murcielago, BARGAIN !!! Traded this car on a property. Must SELL and will SELL !!! Imaculate Condition. Serviced from new by Independent Prestige (Giltraps.)

Giltraps have the identical Vehicle for sale, they say for their one $425,000. We SAY for our one, MAKE an OFFER to day ! We are SELLERS !!!"

Check out the auction HERE 

And well heres the reason you dont let people test drive a car like this.

Not Playing with you either this car was crashed yesterday morning here in aucks. Poor bugger. Love to hear the excuse on this one. I was just driving along and this alien just………Bugger.

Ok so you want to do some DHTL and AJAX, and you really love the look of windows 98! Well the first place I would recomend you go is BINDOWS.NET. One of the guys at work pointed me to it last week. It has all the ushall components that we flash/flexers have come to enjoy including the Accordion pane and group box. It even has an app laucher similar to that found on Macromedia.com for the flex components.
http://bindows.net/bindows/samples/applauncher/

The best thing about this famework is its xml driven. Yes that right its a javascript version of flex. you create your page in xml to describeyour layout and insert any specifc javascript in the xml, parse it with xsl and bam you have your windows 98 application running using SOAP, webservices, of any dynamically loaded data. Wonder if there is an ide for development? Be warned though this framework isnt free……..or cheap. But as with most of these things it was cost 20 times that to develope yourself. So basically you can go about building a replication of your windows form application on line using AJAX for data transfer.

Which brings me to my next cool site to check out. I stumbled upon this one when looking through my blog refers. It hits close to home And I really love the idea as its something which I started (and subsequently have let gather a few cobwebs) a while ago. An operating system made in flash. Check out
http://adrien.beraud.org/flashosClient/5/flashos.html . Its pretty cool but im a little unsure what some of the features are as I cant read french. The mouse cursor is interesting too! The best thing it has flavours of OSX and windows