(See? I promised my next post wouldn't be about gigs.)

I realized a few months ago that, unlike pretty much everyone else I know, I don't regularly use an RSS reader. Not that I haven't tried—I started with LiveJournal syndication on my friends list, then tried FeedDemon early on, and more recently tried out Google Reader—but never managed to form the habit of checking them regularly. Both of them are fine apps; the problem was with me. Every time I sat down and saw that I had a gazillion unread items in my hundreds of feeds, I didn't know where to start. Eventually I just gave up trying to keep up.

Around the same time I came to this realization, Adobe AIR 1.0 was publicly released. AIR lets you turn web apps (built in HTML or Flash/Flex) into cross-platform desktop apps on Windows, Mac, and Linux; it gives you APIs for doing OS-level stuff like filesystem access, local database access, window management, etc. I wanted to try to write an AIR app just for fun, and it occurred to me that I might be able to make something that would solve my RSS problem.

The result is Snackr, a ticker-like widget that lives on the bottom (or side) of your screen and scrolls random items from your RSS feeds. (It's called "Snackr" because it lets you nibble on your feeds. Guffaw.) Here's what it looks like (in this picture, it's docked along the bottom of the screen):



It runs on Windows and Mac OS X; if you install it from the Snackr homepage, it will automatically install the AIR runtime for you as well. It also runs on Linux if you install the Linux AIR alpha from Adobe Labs.

I'm actually finding Snackr really useful—it helps me keep up with blogs I want to keep up with, and also gives me a great smattering of items from sources I wouldn't normally read regularly. If you try it out, let me know if you like it.

Tags: flex, geek

The project I've been working on for the past year and a half, Adobe Flex Builder 2, has just gone out the door, along with the rest of the Flex product line. (Actually, it went out the door last Friday, but is officially available today.) If you build web apps with any kind of complex UI, or if you do Flash web app development, you should really check it out--download the free Flex SDK or a trial of Flex Builder.

As part of the launch, an article I wrote for the Flex Developer Center on creating graphical skins for Flex apps is now live.

And, just for the heck of it, I'm starting a work-related blog, much ado about something. Now I have two blogs I can let languish for long periods of time.

Tags: flex, geek, work

news.com jumped the gun (with some inaccuracies) on some announcements we were going to make tomorrow that I think are pretty cool, so I thought I'd mention them here.

The big news is that we're planning to release the Flex SDK for free--not just the beta, but the shipping product as well. This includes the Flex compiler and framework, as well as (of course) the new version of Flash Player.

( What does this mean? )

The other news is that Beta 1 of the Flex product line (including the SDK, Flex Builder, Flash Player 8.5, charting components, and FES) will be publicly available tomorrow from Adobe Labs. We've made a bunch of improvements to the framework and the IDE since the Alpha 1 release a few months ago--if you're at all interested in building Flash apps, you should definitely check it out.

Tags: flex, geek, work

For those of you who were interested in downloading the Flex 2 alpha, it's now available at the new Macromedia Labs site, along with info, samples, forums, etc.

Tags: flex, geek, work

Kevin Lynch gave a great demo of Flex and Flex Builder at Web 2.0 the other day, showing how you can use them to build a Flickr photo browser from scratch in five minutes. (The first part of the video talks about how Flash and AJAX can work together; the Flex demo is a few minutes in.) Unfortunately the video is a little dark, so you can't read some of the code, but it gives a good sense of how Flex works, and of how little code it takes to build a dynamic, visually rich app.

(Calling the demo app "Flexr" was my idea :))

Here's a link to sign up to be notified when the public alpha becomes available. And here are links to some informative blog posts from Sho Kuwamoto (my boss, whose name some of you t.b oldbies may recognize) and Mark Anders (who used to run the .NET team at Microsoft and is now helping manage the Flex product line).

( ...Click here for ramblings about a cool UI feature of Flex that I worked on... )

Tags: flex, geek, work

It's been public knowledge for awhile, but I never got around to mentioning it, and we officially announced the details today...

Macromedia preps Eclipse-based Flash builder (news.com)
Our own blurb

Basically, it's a framework (called Flex) and an Eclipse-based IDE (called Flex Builder) for developing Flash apps using MXML, an XML-based language, and ActionScript 3, a dialect of JavaScript. The Flash authoring tool isn't required; you can use it to build custom artwork, but the framework comes with its own built-in look and feel.

Flex makes it really easy to get data from HTTP/web services and bind it into controls, and to create simple (tasteful) effects; you can build a little Flickr photo browser with maybe 20 lines of tags and code, complete with little fades and things.

The Flex framework has been out for awhile, but you used to have to buy an expensive server to use it; now we're distributing it with the IDE. AS3 is also a real OO language, with strong typing, good debugging, etc., and the runtime is much faster than in previous Flash player versions.

Tags: flex, geek, work