Australian Adobe AIR Camps

Adobe will be running a series of free AIR Camps in Australia and New Zealand from 15 May (Melbourne) until 26th June (Wellington).  These will be all day events focusing developing and deploying AIR applications using Flex, HTML and Javascript.  You can find out more and register at the Adobe Pacific Events site.

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Talking about Cairngorm

There is a lot of informed and intelligent debate around Cairngorm and it's dependance on "Singletons". We have been using Cairngorm for the last six months and while we are aware of it's faults we also feel that it offers many benefits. It's not my intention here to get involved in an argument about it's strengths and weaknesses, I've made a few posts touching on this already. Instead I want to use this post to collect some of the better posts on this topic:

• Actionscript 3 : Not at the Children's Table Anymore : Bill Sanders - 20/04/2008
  
• Flex Frameworks Roundtable : Coldfusion Weekly (Podcast) - 18/04/2008
  
• Architectural Atrocities, Part 9 : Cairngorm's Model Locator Pattern : Theo Hultberg - 13/04/2008
  
• Using Cairngorm & Thoughts on Handling Those Pesky Singletons : Neil Webb - 12/04/2008
• Learning Cairngorm (Part 6) Dealing with the Singleton : Jeffry Houser - 27/03/2008
• MVC meet H-MVC : Dan Schultz - 07/02/2008
  
• SilvaFUG Flex Application Frameworks Presentation : Luke Bayes - 18/10/2007
• Cairngorm 2.2 - Front Controller Weak References : Alistair McLead - 03/05/2007
• Cairngorm: a tired old horse that should be put down : Espen Dalløkken - 11/04/2008
  

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Blogged With Flock

I just discovered a fun way to discover interesting blogs.  Simply go to Google and search for "Blogged with the Flock Browser".  This is the signature that Flock adds (if you choose to let it) when you blog from Flock.  I've found myself blogging from Flock more and more because it's just so easy.  You know the blogs that Google discovers will be of interest because interesting people use Flock.  Here's 10 Flockers blogs that I enjoyed :

• space to imajin
• S-O-S
• Gospel Graffiti
• zeitspur
• cornology
• Danyo says...
• Addicted To Placebos
• Live from Krypton
• Studio : Dedale
• Jacques Snyman
  

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Fave Widget Update

I moved my bookmarks from del.icio.us to Faves back when they called themselves BlueDot (my Faves). Since then I've posted more than once (11 times if we count this post) about their excellent service and converted a few friends along the way. I've also been using their blog widget for most of that time; it was simple and yet very useful. Yesterday Faves announced a new blog widget. The new widget has a neat "interactive wizard" to allow easy customization of the content and appearance of the widget. For example, you can filter Faves based on one or more tags; select whether to show only your Faves and/or your Friends Faves and/or everyones Faves. The best feature is that you are no longer showing a list of links from your Faves you are actually showing your Fave. Which means you can include the Faves thumbnail image, the Favers profile image, the link and the Faves note. This last bit is my favourite part of the new widget. Often a links title is less than helpful. The note can be a quote from the page or something you've written as a memory aid or an opinion about the page. Whatever it is you control the note for your Faves note. Which greatly increases the Faves usefulness.

The wizard also offers many options for controlling the widgets appearance. There are 8 fully styled Themes, a no style options and a option to fully customise 14 elements of the widget. In the end I was a bit fussy and went with no style so I could fully control the widgets appearance in my blog template. You can see the results in my sidebar near the end of the page. You can find the wizard at : http://faves.com/widget, but you'll need to be logged in to view it. You can also find out more about the advanced styling from the Faves Wiki.

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Flex and AJAX Testing with Borland Silk

Borland has released Silk 2008.  The first update to it's automated testing tool in over 2 years.  For this release they have rebuilt the products architecture to make it more flexible and to allow it to support applications it hasn't traditionally supported.  A significant element of this release is the ability to test Flex and AJAX applications and the use of Flex for application development.  Borland's Brad Johnson explains their choice of Flex :

"The reason is you have a vendor to go to who is in control of the spec and will answer the calls. We're not neglecting AJAX, but there are 200 flavors of it."

Quoted from InternetNews

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