Yep the first NZ Flex User group meeting is later today. Get yourself sorted and head down. We have some great things lined up for the first meeting, and apart from meeting alot of the other Flex developers around NZ we also have import from OZ to tease, (though they are really great guys).
Its a great chance to chill out and meet other like minded people, see some of the cool things New Zealand has been putting out there and have a cold one while your at it.
Check out the details for the meeting HERE.
Hot on the heels of Ryan Stewart's discussion promoting open source related post I just was told about an open source alternative to Apollo. Now obviously it wont have all the cool flash player based control, but its an alternative for the Ajax folks. And we all know they love OS.
Dekoh will be releasing public beta on Monday at the Web 2.0 Expo. But if you want to know what Apollo is up against, they have posted a Dekoh vs Apollo data sheet HERE
But my favorite part of that is they are both Free (as in Beer).
We can all see the value of creating a flex application that behaves as a flex application but has benefit of accessing certain parts of the desktop, or just being a desktop application. But not many people are talking about the "addon" value. Hey maybe I made a new web 3.0 term.
Consider your options of making an Apollo application that can load gmail, but has a side panel full of your outlook contacts loaded from the disk, that has interactions with gmail like populating the "to" form field. Or that Ebay app that was released allowing you to sign in and manage your watch list or currently running bids. I think alot of the value of apollo will come from being an "addon" to existing web applications. Being a bridge between current desktops application data and a web applications interaction.
Problem I am finding with one thing I am working on in this space is that not all sites have API's that I cant access anything to perform certain actions. So I have to break out to screen scrapping. And that is most certainly going to get me into trouble, not to mention the hack factor for the application.
How are sites going to feel about other developers loading pages in an Apollo application and modifying the behavior of the html upon loading it in.
Apollo in its early public alpha situation doesn't show a lot of the planned functionality for the html control, but as things progress and more features are added I'm pretty sure this is going to be a big appeal of the Apollo platform.
On todays episode of WTF we take a look at a Javascript raytracer engine. I was over at Ajaxian and noticed that a guy named Adam Burmister (who just happens to be a fellow Kiwi – good on ya mate!) wrote a Javascript 3D raytracer so as to learn more about bowser elements. Well hey why not. It may be as he calls it "The Worst Application of JavaScript Ever" but damn cool effort none the less.
The raytracer can be found HERE. Increase the quality setting to punish your processor for being bad.
