Arno# - The cutting edge of developer waffle

I attended Adobe’s onAIR event in London yesterday, and I’m pleased to report that it was a great day; well worth attending. Andrew Shorten, a Platform Evangelist at Adobe, provided the keynote (more of an introduction to what the day would bring) and generally organised the day. So many thanks to him for doing such a good job (though I didn’t win any of the prizes he gave away, so I won’t thank him too much ;))

The event covered creating AIR applications using Flash/ Flex and HTML/ JavaScript, security considerations, the APIs that provide access to the local file system and let you control window styles (chrome as the presenters called it) etc and rounded off with some amusing demonstrations from Lee Brimelow.

I met up with a good friend of mine, Laurence Barry, who had a moment of Flickr fame when he appeared in the centre of the “London venue is packed” photo. I’ve enhanced the image below to extend his moment of vague fame for a another day or so:

I missed out on the glory due to someone in the foreground blocking me, so have added a subtle blue arrow to show where I am in the picture.

Currently AIR applications install and run on Windows PCs and Macs. A version for Linux is in the pipeline., though no release date was offered. As ever, the Adobe employees refused to speculate on when/ if AIR might appear on other platforms.

Laurence raised a very good point regarding AIR though, that I hadn’t really thought about: what actually is it for? To explain: once people were happy with desktop applications. Then the web came along with its Ajax and Flash features and Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) became the rage. Yet almost as soon as RIA technologies take off, here is Adobe offering a product that enables those RIAs to be turned back into desktop applications. So why not just build a desktop application, using .NET/Mono, Java etc, rather than using technologies that were never really designed for application development?

InfoWorld ran a really useful article yesterday for anyone looking to buy a laptop. The article considered various “optional extras” that many laptops now come with and questioned whether they were worth the money. Draft-N wireless, fingerprint scanners, built-in hard-drive encryption and free-fall sensors are worth having. Solid-state drives, special screen coatings and built-in mobile broadband probably aren’t worth the extra cost.

You can access the whole article as a single web page here.

If you have never used Windows PowerShell, you are missing out on a hugely powerful command-line tool. Not only does it show up the dos window/cmd prompt for the joke it has been for decades, it gives even the most powerful Unix shells a run for their money. (I’ve spent around ten years of my life using just about every last features of, what is in my view, is the most powerful shell out there - ksh. So I like to think I know what I’m talking about here). If you are using Windows and use a cmd window on occasions, then you should be using PowerShell. Grab yourself a copy of the free PowerGUI, join the community at powergui.org and you’ll probably never touch cmd again.

Of course there is a world beyond Windows, and if you use a MAc, Solaris, Linux etc, you are likely thinking “so what?” Well a new Mono-based developement, Pash, is set to change all that. The developers of Pash aim to recreate PowerShell on those other operating systems. If you are a developer, then you may be interested to know that the project is still pre-alpha too, so there is plenty of opportunity to show off your skills by helping out.

With this year’s January and February being so mild, I’d assumed we would get no snow this year. When it started this morning, I dismissed it as a brief flurry that wouldn’t settle. Luckily I was wrong and we enjoyed a great snowball fight with the neighbours and built snowmen after around 10cm fell in the morning.

Microsoft’s woes over Vista take-up continue despite the release of Service Pack 1, and this time it is due to the popularity of the likes of the Asus Eee.

XP SP2 is a good quality, stable operating system, that meets most people’s needs and this is what is causing the problems. Whilst XP has made Microsoft lots of money, they obviously want rid of it, so that they can make lots of money from Vista. Microsoft declared to the world that XP will be no more as of the end of January 2008, but the resultant outcry was sufficient to convince Microsoft to change their minds. So the death of XP was put on hold until the summer of 2008.

Recently though, speculation over XP’s future has surfaced once more. The reason is that a growing number of cheap, low spec laptops have begun to appear on the market. These devices tend to ship with Linux installed on them, but due to its popularity, some people are keen to have Windows on such devices too. Such machines are too low powered for Vista though. And so Microsoft has recently found itself between a rock and hard place. If it stuck to its guns over retiring XP, it risked losing out in a growing new sector. If it climbed down, then it risked Vista sales.

So last Friday, Microsoft announced their compromise decision: XP will be retired, except for low-spec devices such as the Asus Eee. This is effectively an admission by Microsoft that Vista is too big and bloated to meet the needs of an emerging market, and that Microsoft cannot do anything about it. This will do Vista’s already poor reputation no good at all.

Yesterday saw the usual flurry of April Fools, both real and virtual. The two best in my view were:

Flying penguins by the BBC

Richard Branson announces Virgle, and Google plays along

Special mentions go to:

Tim Wheals, a long term friend of mine, who put tape over the diodes on all the optic mice in his company. Now that’s dedication! And yes, his name really is Wheals and yes he really is a roller skate instructor (hey, that means I get to use the phrase “nominative determinism” in a blog post, for his name is a classic case of an aptronym).

Phil Haack, long time blogger and TDD evangalist, who announced he was hanging up his blogging coat. The real mention goes to Tod McKenna though for one of the funniest comments to a blog post ever.

Microsoft released a preview of version 4 of their desktop search a couple of days ago. Apparently it has “fixed most of the reported bugs causing a majority of distractions users have seen since Windows Vista RTM” - according to the Windows Vista blog. I installed it and tried it out. Perhaps it is just me that views the inane “did you find what you wanted” message when nothing was found as a bug, as it is still there. And perhaps it is just me that finds the lack of search option when right-clicking on a drive or folder a distraction? I know I can left click to make it the current folder and then use the search box, but why can’t I have both options?

Perhaps it is just me being reluctant to adapt to a new way of searching. It is certainly faster than the old XP search. And v4 automatically supports source code files and the like, not just office docs and pictures. What we gain with speed though, we seem to lose with usability. The interface is just plain clunky in my view. As a poster on ActiveWin puts it:

“…it still suffers from a confusing interface and occasionally incomprehensible behavior. Microsoft needs to realize that it’s not just speed that’s needed when you search, but intelligence as well…”

Oh well, it’s only a beta. Perhaps if enough people complain, they might make the release version usable.

I upgraded to WordPress 2.5 this morning. It ought to have no noticeable affect on the blog, as the changes are more geared toward making the admin feature set of WordPress richer and more powerful. If you notice any oddities over the next couple of days though, it’ll likely be due to the new version.