blairsblog

Adelaide Adobe User Group

The Adelaide User Group has just annouced this months meetings details ...

http://www.augsa.org/2006/10/special_october.html

cheers
Mark

Awesome Skype plugin

I became pretty hooked on Skype this year, I now have 3 different Skype accounts for different purposes.

I also have a few SkypeIn numbers

- A UK one for my mum to contact me cheaply
- A US one for folks I talk to regularly in the US
- An Australian one for local inbound calls

All these get routed to the same Skype account ... but yesterday I saw plugin for Skype released from a company called Voxlib which just takes the Skype value proposition to a whole new level.

They allow you to connect your Skype account to their universal voice bridge which means you can use your Skype account from your mobile via SMS or a SkypeIn number and your Skype account will call you and connect you through Skype to any number you want to call !

So now you can benefit from great Skype call rates when you are on the go ... very cool technology

Australian Flex Breezo - 17th August 11am AEST

The Australian Adobe Marketing team have organised for a Flex 2 seminar to be delivered in the Australian timezone in a couple of weeks time over Breeze

You need to regsiter here  ...
http://events.adobe.co.uk/events/cgi/event.cgi?eventid=3729&country=pa

If you want to learn more about Flex it's a great opportunity ...

enjoy!

Official Australian Flex Developer Derby - Win a plasma TV !!

Hat's off to the Australian Adobe Marketing team for this one ....

Clare Gillespie, who among other things focuses on developer marketing for Adobe in Australia has managed to get an Australian version of the Flex Developer Derby kicked off.  You can find more details here ...

http://www.builderau.com.au/comps/adobe-flex-derby/

Can't wait to see the results of this one, just wish I could enter ... again well done Clare, great to see Adobe bringing this to places other than NA.

How cool is this - Flex for free ...

Flex 2 Annoucement

Australia finally catches up with the world (well Apple does anyway)

Finally Apple launched the iTunes music store in Australia today.  About time guys ...

Matt & Todd from the Flex team go down under

Check out Matt & Todd at the sneak peek sessions at MAX getting into the whole Aussie croc hunter thing.  Possibly a little Scott Barnes influence going on ...

On Google Video

Flex Enterprise Services

I just sat in on  Christophe's "Flex Enterprise Services" presentation at MAX, this technology is going to change the face of RIAs as we know it today.  It's such an elegant & simple way to build real time collaborative applications.  Seeing this sort of technology coupled with Flex Builder 2 I think 2006 is going to be an exciting year for RIAs

Incidently I'm going to be giving a similar presentation on Flex Enterprise Services @ the Asia Pacific MAX events in November and in Australia online using Breeze, again in November.

AS3 - Custom Namespaces

I'm sitting in Gary Grossman's session on "Next Generation ActionScript".  He just mentioned something interesting about having the ability to create custom namespaces for encapsulation of method calls in classes and packages.

So I'm used to having public, private and protected modifiers but AS 3.0 introduces the ability to create custom modifiers, I didn't get chance to take down the entire syntax but the resulting methods would look like this ...

myPrivateLibrary addWidget ( )
{

}

Interesting stuff ...

Flex Frameworks = Cairngorm

MAX kicked off for me this morning with Stephen & Alistair (formally of Iteration Two, now part of Macromeida Consulting in Europe) presenting on Flex Frameworks (in other words Cairngorm)

It was a great presentation in which Stephen discussed the fact frameworks are a much over used term and tried to position the different uses of the word, which I found very useful.

They went on to describe the Cairngorm framework using the Cairngorm Flex Store as an example.

The room was full and Stephen asked how many folks were using Flex in the room, almost all hands were raised, he then asked how many people were using Cairngorm, and about half the room raised their hands ... great news for Flex and Cairngorm.