The release of Google’s Chrome browser sent the blogging world mad, including myself. And after its release on Tuesday there were at least 3000 new articles and blog posts reviewing and analysing it. Most writers have equally been surprised at the bold movie by Google, who has long supported Firefox and their growing market share of web browsing.
Some of the initial questions after its release were, are they competing with Firefox? Does this end the partnership?
The answer simply, is no, and even though the Mozilla Foundation was surprised by the release (even though they won’t admit it), they don’t feel that Chrome is meant to be an attack against Firefox or a sign of impending doom for the partnership between Google and Mozilla.
It’s no surprise to developers that the requirements for an application are bound to change, and it’s because of this fact that there are numerous architectures for developing software applications that can ease the process of adding new functionality.
For Flex specifically, one such architecture is Cairngorm, which has been described here a fewtimes. But as easy as it is to manage important events in the application, even the best architecture fails to simplify a project. It always gets to a point where there are too many pages to keep track of.
Google Chrome first came to my attention on Monday via a Blogoscoped post linking to a comic strip that detailed the features of an upcoming web browser from Google. The comic strip, meant to be the initial ground-breaker to the public about the web browser, was created by none other than Google.
I checked the date several times to be sure it wasn’t April 1st, and even then I wasn’t fully convinced what I was reading was reality.
Nevertheless, the internet world was abuzz for a full 24 hours before Google announced a live conference to present and explain everything about the browser. I was also able to learn a few things about the browser before it was launched so I had a fairly good idea of what I was getting into.
About 2 weeks ago I was given the opportunity to step away from Flash and Flex and get back to the basics of application development: designing a database.
For those that don’t know me, I’ve spent my entire software development career before May of this year developing custom software solutions for a wide variety of clients. Being in a small team, this rendered me the opportunities to develop through nearly all aspects of the SDLC including designing a data model.
Previously most of my experience had been using Microsoft’s SQL Server, but now this time I’d been handed the challenge of an open source solution in MySQL. A few versions ago this might have caused me some minor heart palpitations, but luckily with recent versions of the product, there are a lot of creature comforts that I can work with thanks to the InnoDB storage engine.
As the technology of the world wide web progresses, so does the need for more information from users in order to access these technologies. Social networking sites like MySpace and Facebook require that personal information be published in order to gain functionality to more services, like finding other people with similar interests or finding friends you used to know by alternate names.
Identity theft has been around as long as identities, and the rise of the internet gave thieves a gateway in which to perform the action on a massive scale. Now, major corporations are the ones collection the information and there’s hardly a true word spoken about where our information is going.
I came across this site the other day and instantly recognized the interface. I also recognized the fact that it had a lot of thought put into the way it was designed. It’s a small, minimalist interface under which you can achieve a lot.
The idea of Streamzy is that you enter search criteria into the box, it returns streaming music in audio OR video form, and you can add and manage playlists (and save these if you choose to register and sign in). And by “return” it’s not simply providing links, it will play the audio and video streams in their respective custom players.
Kudos to the makers of Streamzy, it’s a very easy to use and useful (albeit probably temporary, see: copyrights) tool to search music while hardly lifting a finger.
Just this past week I had found myself wrestling with a Flex application that can crop images on the fly, and display in two different places and two different sizes, a thumbnail of the new image.
One of the biggest headaches in the process was Flash’s caching of the previous URLs when another one has been added in its place. Clearly this causes an inconsistency in ‘what you see is what you get’ (WYSIWYG). So I had to find a solution.
The Image component in Flex has a cachePolicy property (inherited from UIComponent) that will ensure the component’s bitmap values are not cached, but straight URLs are not affected by this.
Developing an application to administer content on a site or internal web application is relatively basic. You have a set of functional requirements sitting in front of you and the tasks to complete them are often straightforward. In a web-based PHP or ASP.NET application, the possibilities in arrangement of controls and convenience for the user are fairly constrained. They need to fit in a standards compliant way and in a good application, there needs to be as few page loads as possible. In a Rich Internet Application (RIA) using Flex, we can utilize Flash to build an interface in practically any way we want and allow as little or as much to be shown to the user at one time. Understanding the resources to accomplish this may be difficult, however.
There are a couple of Canadian Public Service Announcements that were released by an organization called Home Front that use an extreme circumstance to illustrate the fact that physical and emotional abuse is unacceptable against strangers, and therefore the logic is that it is unacceptable against those you love.
Obviously, the message here is very serious; domestic abuse is wholly unacceptable in this day and age and there is no excuse for it.
However, the skits in the videos released by Home Front to illustrate this dramatic message are so completely unpredictable and outrageous that it’s downright hilarious. Here they are, full of comedic shock that would’ve made even George Carlin blush.
