JUN 27
2009
at: 10:55 AM | Filed under:
Palm Pre
The real question is whether the "leak" was from within Palm, or from without. The smart money is that Palm released it, but regardless...get it while you can. The Palm Pre is considered by many to be one of the only real contenders to the iPhone. With it's innovative WebOS which allows developers to build real apps using an HTML / CSS / JS layer, applications should be soon pouring out from Palm's official app store.
JUN 26
2009
at: 7:38 PM | Filed under:
CSS
Over the past 5 or 6 years since I've gotten deep into CSS development, I've slowly and surely created a generic template that I use for any new HTML project. While it's not perfect, it's an excellent starting point for most new websites, or web applications. For quick development, I use a text editor called Editplus. It's fast, and offers a whole raft of features including the ability to define a template for any number of file types. The template I use contains most of the things that I want in any new document. While it mostly consists of CSS declarations, it does also have some quick hooks for jQuery, JavaScript, and CSS includes. So here it is...do you have any suggestions for good additions, or questions?
JUN 24
2009
JUN 21
2009
Most AIR application developers put lots of time and effort into the functionality of an app. It does lots of things, it slices, it dices, it juliennes. The problem is that, like many websites, those same developers don't put much time into, or even give much thought to, the interface. The AIR SDK provides a lot of power to developers when designing the look and feel of an app. In this article I'm going to show you how easy it can be to design, and use, transparency and custom buttons in your AIR application. Let's get started, but first, as always, here's a link to download the entire Aptana project. Oh, and here's what you'll need to follow along.
Project Requirements
- Aptana (standalone, or the Eclipse plugin)
- Fireworks / Photoshop (or some image editor capable of exporting transparent PNG-24 files)
JUN 20
2009
What the hell...here's another wallpaper. Also inspired by the user group tour, this one's got to do with the killer shirts that Adobe handed out to everyone. It features this sweet logo (found in the middle of the wallpaper), on a black t-shirt. I just started playing around with this one and this is what I came up with...hope you like it. Standard, widescreen, and iPhone versions available.
JUN 20
2009
I've got a new wallpaper for you guys. This one's inspired by the recent Adobe ColdFusion User Group tour stop in Nashville promoting Centaur (ColdFusion 9) and Bolt (ColdFusion Builder). While Greg Wilson was flipping between applications, I kept catching a glimpse of the Bolt icon. I immediately thought that it would make a fantastic wallpaper and that's just what I did. This one's inspired by what I saw on screen, but doesn't necessarily represent the final artwork for Bolt. Standard, widescreen, and iPhone versions available.
JUN 19
2009
Greg Wilson was in Nashville last night for the 2009 Adobe ColdFusion/Flex User Group Tour. He presented to a group of about 60 people at the Dave Ramsey campus in Cool Springs, TN. There was free food, drinks, and lots of great swag; both from Adobe, and from Dave Ramsey (thanks to both companies for the great stuff). The event got started at 7pm with Greg taking the stage around 7:30. He spoke for about 2 hours and covered lots of great features from ColdFusion 9 and the recently, publicly, named ColdFusion Builder (aka Bolt). Since I read blogs, follow mailing lists, and twitter religiously there wasn't a ton of stuff that I hadn't already heard about, but there were a few new features that I'd like to mention that really got the wheels in my head turning. I'll mention 3 of them in this post.
JUN 14
2009
You may remember the ColdFusion Bolt wallpaper that I released a while back. I designed it right after the announcement that Adobe was developing a ColdFusion IDE. Adobe will also be releasing the next version of ColdFusion, codenamed Centaur. This past weekend I decided that my site was a little light on design flavored posts so I whipped up this wallpaper to commemorate the pending release of ColdFusion 9. I've also written my first Photoshop tutorial documenting the steps I took to design the wallpaper! So dig in and enjoy...you can download the wallpaper below.
JUN 14
2009
This will be the first in, what I hope will be, a long series of Photoshop tutorials. First off, let's take a sneak preview of what we'll be designing...that's it to the right there. I'm using Creative Suite version 4, but most of these steps can be duplicated in older versions of either of these applications. The steps won't have any screenshots because I'll be recording a video that you can use to follow along. Let's go ahead and get started.
JUN 12
2009
at: 11:59 AM | Filed under:
AIR,
jQuery
Before getting your hopes up, no this isn't a post with real code, or even pseudo code. It's meant more of a challenge, either to myself, or to someone else, to take this idea and run with it. You know about my love for jQuery and AIR and so don't take this as a complaint. AIR (with jQuery) makes it easy for traditional web developers to build high impact desktop applications. But it could be even easier. Take the following examples...
JUN 8
2009
at: 9:51 PM | Filed under:
AIR,
Aptana,
video
Now that AIR tutorials and articles are becoming more and more widespread, and bloggers such as myself are offering complete projects which can be downloaded, I thought it would be a good idea to quickly review the proper way to take an existing project created in Aptana and import it into your Eclipse workspace. Sure you could create a new project on your own, then manually import the files...but that's too much work. Let Aptana work for you. As always, you can watch the video to the right for a quick reference. We'll be importing the project created during my jQuery and AIR: Writing content to the file system via drag and drop blog post. If you're using this project, go ahead and download that, then come back and we'll get started.
JUN 8
2009
at: 9:16 PM | Filed under:
ncfug
This is just a quick post to remind everyone of the user group tour showcasing the next release of ColdFusion. The Nashville ColdFusion User Group is proud to host this event again and we're planning on a great turn out. Greg Wilson from Adobe will be speaking on Thursday, June 18 at 7:00pm (next week!). We're going to have food/drink and a few thousand dollars worth of awesome giveaways!
JUN 7
2009
In this installment of my jQuery and AIR series we'll be exploring the ability to write content to the file system using AIR's built in file system access. We'll be copying images, and writing JavaScript variables as text files. We'll also be using jQuery UI's draggable and droppable libraries so that we don't have to write that functionality ourselves. First, a preview of what we'll be creating, and then we'll get started.
MAY 28
2009
I'll be presenting to the Nashville CFUG tonight. The session is titled "jQuery and AIR: Desktop Design for the Front End Developer".
MAY 26
2009
at: 10:09 PM | Filed under:
AIR,
jQuery,
video
I'm going to start a new series here, titled jQuery and AIR. The goal is to disseminate as much information about JavaScript powered AIR applications as possible. If you're here, then you're already aware that the lion's share of information about AIR relate directly to Flex. While some of the code can be instructive for JavaScript developers, it's by no means a 1 for 1 translation. I aim to change that. By the way, these example require either Aptana Studio, or the Aptana plugin for Eclipse 3.2 or 3.3, with AIR support. Both of these apps are available for free.
MAY 20
2009
During this year's cfObjective() I was invited to participate in one of Brian Meloche's CFConversation's podcasts. It's just been released and is available for your listening enjoyment over at the CFConversations website. That is all.
MAY 19
2009
I'd like to start off by saying thanks to everyone who came out for my session on jQuery and AIR on Saturday morning. I had a great time presenting, and I hope that you learned something from me. As promised, here's a link to download all of the presentation files, as well as my slide deck.
MAY 17
2009
at: 9:09 AM | Filed under:
cfObjective
So I'm back at home after a whirlwind 4 days at cf.Objective(). Let me just tell you that it was awesome. This was a week of firsts for me. First time at cf.Objective(), first time speaking at a conference, first time being included in the conversations and happenings of all of the "cool kids", and first time in a while being away for my family for more than a day.
MAY 15
2009
Big thanks to everyone who came out to the iPhone / mobile application development birds of a feather session at cf.Objective. HUGE thanks to Lawrence at Apress, and Betsy at O'reilly who bent over backwards to get us material to give away at our session. As promised, here's a list of some of the resources that Dan, Josh, and myself came up with. Please feel free to add your resources in the comments.
MAY 14
2009
Keynote has started, Adam Lehman and Terrence Ryan from Adobe on stage.
