Smart Phones: Open Source, Android, and iPhone

I'm not an iPhone hater, I'm really not. I definitely understand the appeal and right now iPhone is the undisputed champion of smart phones. But it's just a matter of time before more open (e.g. open-source) platforms take back a lot of ground. I'm betting on Android.

http://blogs.techrepublic.com.com/10things/?p=808

Flex Drag-and-Drop: The Definitive Tutorial

Flex After Dark has just published a new (our first) tutorial on how to Drag-and-Drop in Flex.

Drag-and-drop lets you move components and transfer data in a Flex application via the mouse and ubiquitous "click-drag-drop" paradigm. All Flex components support drag-and-drop operations with the proper enablement.

Click here to learn how to Drag-and-Drop in Flex at Flex After Dark...

Digg Profile

My Digg profile: http://digg.com/users/bennybeta

Google App Engine 1.2.3 with Django 1.0

Up until recently Google App Engine only had pre-1.0 Django support built-in. You could of course jimmy it to work with 1.0, but it was a little unnatural. Now with GAE 1.2.3, Django 1.0 support is baked in. Google App Engine + Django = Nice!

http://groups.google.com/group/google-appengine/browse_thread/thread/fab4e52646994dff/93bdf272719b724c?pli=1

App Engine Task Queue API

You can now perform offline processing on App Engine by scheduling bundles of work (tasks) for automatic execution in the background.

http://googleappengine.blogspot.com/2009/06/new-task-queue-api-on-google-app-engine.html

Ubuntu Fixing "Papercuts"

Canonical, the company behind the popular Ubuntu Linux distribution, is launching a new project to improve the usability of the platform. The developers aim to identify and resolve 100 minor bugs that negatively impact the Ubuntu user experience before the release of the next major version in October.

http://arstechnica.com/open-source/news/2009/06/canonical-to-boost-ubuntu-usability-by-tackling-papercuts.ars

Google Maps API for Flex/Flash

The Google Maps API for Flash lets Flex developers embed Google Maps in Flash applications. Similar to the JavaScript version, this ActionScript API provides a number of utilities for manipulating and adding content to maps through a variety of services, enabling you to embed robust, interactive maps applications on your website.

Flex-Spy

Flex-Spy allows you to inspect and dynamically change most properties and styles of the visual components in your Flex application. You can - for example - try out a specific width or a background color for your component before changing it in your code.

Mahalo Flex

I am now the proud, but reluctant, owner of the Adobe Flex page at Mahalo.com. I'm not sure if I like that anyone can claim any topic, but I plan to be a good steward of the page. Also, I am willing to hand off ownership of the page to a deserving, Adobe-employed maintainer if asked.

Adobe Forums

I am now a top contributor on the Adobe Flex Forums. I don't feel too bad tooting my own horn because it's a reward for helping others learn Flex. Besides getting help on the forms, another great way to learn Flex is at Flex After Dark.

ImageMagick Conversion

One great thing about Linux is that you can find efficient command line tools for just about anything. Currently I've been using ImageMagick's convert command line tool to convert all the pages in a PDF to separate images of just about any format. It's great and takes almost no time.

convert -quality 90 -resize 800x600 -density 300x300 Fxad_DragDrop.pdf Fxad_DragDrop.png

Note, the density parameter is important. Adding "-density 300x300" significantly improved image quality, while adding "-density 600x600" consumed my machine's processor until I killed the process.