This past weekend, a few folks who’d never met got together at the EUI office for some good ol’ fashioned nerd fun. Adobe Seattle held a bug quash, and allowed developers all over the world to help out.

I freely admit I’m not a bug quash level developer, but I am good at hanging out with people I don’t know and (i hope) creating a fun non-sucky environment.

We hung out from 11a – 5p drinking soda, eating pizza (Ordered with Dominoes really cool pizza RIA).

We actually did cause two bugs to be closed, though not through actual code writing. But hey, there’s two less bugs in the bug base because of the efforts of the Denver Bug Quash crew, and me (I mean I bought the pizza and soda)

over all it was fun. I hope Adobe does more of these events. It’s funny to me to see events now from the frame of mind of someone who does events, cuz the bug quash was an example of barely controlled chaos most of the first 3-4 hours. That should be smoother by bug quash 2, assuming there is one, but still, its funny to see non event people do events.

I’m working on a tool to view (hopefully) live survey data for when we have booths at conferences. We’ve come up with a simply iPhone survey, and want to be able to see the data in, more or less, real time.

I’ve been working on it, largely at the office, checking the code into SVN when I’m going to work from home. At some point in the last few days, I ended up with Flex Builder 3.0.2. Probably my best friend Adobe Updater.

The other night, I wrapped up at the office, checked in all my code, went home, fired up Flex Builder. When I went to test the app, ADL fired up, then immediately vanished. weird. Tried a few more times, still no joy. Restarted Flex builder, restarted my Macbook, nothing. Checked to make sure my Flex Builder was up to date, it was.

After finally giving up, I check back at work, app runs. Then I check to see if that Flex Builder was up to date. It wasn’t, 3.0.1, so I updated. Ran the app. ADL vanishedright after launching.

I decided to run the app in debug, see if that revealed anything. It did sorta. The message was just about useless, something to the effect of “The app crapped out before the debugger could connect”

I say just about useless, since it was enough to lead me to Cameron’s blog, where he mentioned an error he had gotten. It wasn’t the same error, but since I had just moved from 3.0.1 to 3.0.2 and AIR 1.5 had recently been released, I figured I’d check it out. Sure enough in my app descriptor it was set to 1.1 for AIR.

Now I certainly don’t need Adobe to hold my hand, but really, maybe just a few more descriptive error messages, shoot I’d take a message that gave me a few possible causes that I could run down on my own.

Why make things harder than necessary? What a frustrating waste of a night, just because Flex Builder and ADL couldn’t suggest I check my app descriptor.

I’ll admit I wasn’t onboard with Android, and am still not sold, but I have to admit, watching the video, and reading some of the live blogs from the event yesterday, the G1 is compelling.

The UI might be a bit too unstructured, it looks like you can drop an icon any old place you choose, but I’m guessing you can auto arrange too. But the overall experience seems solid. Compass street view, push Gmail? Hotness!

There’s an app store too.

Based on the pics of the app market on Giz, I have to say, Blech.

I’m the first to jump on the apple-bash-wagon for their app store process. I think their choke hold is hurting the market. I think their ambiguous rules, and Refusal to allow any competition with existing Apple apps, will stifle innovation in the short and long run. There’s only so many flash light apps we need. Hopefully 11 is it.

I think the solution lies in the middle. Google has said, there’s NO restrictions, which means the number of CRapps, will be in the thousands. While I’m sure that those apps will be voted down over time, etc. The odds of fining an app that you want go down just as rapidly as CRapps are added.

While Apple shouldn’t be so black box, and draconian, google might want to implement even just a few basic controls, before the market is swamped.

From Giz:

There’s a good side to the open no-limits, no-approval nature of the system: developers can publish anything they want. No prohibitions and controls means that developers will be able to access any part of the hardware, allowing software that is not allowed in the iPhone App Store, like tethering. On the other side, this may also bring bad things to the user end, since it opens the door to potential problems and conflicts that may affect the stability of the Android cellphone.

Unfortunately that’s Apple’s stated reason for their draconian practices, Steve doesn’t think we should have the ability to crash or brick our phones with 3rd party apps. Supposedly Apple vets apps for this. Still, it also allows Apple to block the apps they simply don’t like. Booo

Then I lost all sense of self, and slowly went insane, for an hour.

I’m no dummy, but man, setting up PHP and Word Press on my mac was PAINFUL.

Getting PHP up and running, check.

MySQL. been there done that, check.

word press install, no check. kept getting “error connecting to database”

Googling revealed many posts on this topic, in the Word Press forums, the MySQL forums, and Apple. All talking about where the mysql.socket is kept, and how it should be in one place, but isn’t and many ways of working around that.

No joy.

Finally I did another search for Word Press on 10.5.x, which yeilded even more threads on the database error topic.

Then 6 months ago, on this thread, jonokane posted this gem,

Followup: After spending what seems like an absolutely ridiculous amount of time on this, I have figured out the embarrassingly simple issue.

localhost != Localhost

My Mac identifies itself as Localhost, NOT localhost! Learned something extremely obvious…. :)

So the config should look like this:

It certainly shoulda been obvious! I know the Mac is *nix, and capitalization is key, but it was just too close, too obvious. It was also the default, so it never occured to me to think on it.

So, lesson learned, and now, next time I do this. This blog post will light my way!

Jordan Snyder and Drew McLean are working on a cool Surface music synth app, that interacts with objects on the surface. By using the object tags, provided by Microsoft, you can place something on the surface, and a menu expands around it to interact with the music.

The idea is that each object can represent an instrument, or something like that, twisting the object increases the volume, each slice (in the pics) would be a button you could interact with, or a slider, etc.

Jordan and Drew are working hard on this, the next time there’s pics to post, it should have a much improved UI, and I’ll try to grab some video.

The surface is only kinda impressive. Before I started with EUI, I took a look (sshhh) and it was kinda cool, though not as responsive as I’d like from something like that. Andy tried to show me the piano app, and it didn’t respond to him at all. I’ll grant that Andy is kinda a tiny guy, so maybe the Surface didn’t know he was there, :) but still.

The pond app, is pretty cool, but that’s a pretty expensive fake koy pond. Not to mention heavy.

I do think the Surface, opens some really cool doors. Having now sold my left kidney for an iPhone, I’m a huge fan of multi-touch UI, and gestures, and such. It really does open up computing to a whole new level. I find myself constantly wishing my mouse could do what finger do on an iPhone.

Stay tuned for more cool Surface stuff from us, this is only the beginning!

Wanna work on the Surface? Build iPhone apps? Let us know.

Who knew that there was another alternative, that’s existed for who knows how long, the CBZ and the CBR.

Essentially they’re zip and rar files with a different extension, that comic reader apps know how to unpack.

I got turned onto this scene at 360|Flex San Jose, and found an app for the mac called, Jomic. It’s not an easy experience but certainly interesting to read comics on my laptop on long flights.

So my point (other than wanting an excuse to post my Domo Halloween pic) was to say I heard about a really kick ass Android R&D project we’re working on here. With today’s Tmobile announcement, Android is officially leaving the vaporware space and hitting the mainstream.

Android has (or might have, or will have) some cool potential, and we’re making sure we’ve got that knowledge when the train leaves the station. We set up an R&D project, and the team on it, decided to create an android comic reader. It takes the comic archive files from an SD card (An emulated one at the moment) unpacks and handles all the images. Totally a proof of concept, and purely research, but how cool!

It allows navigation by touch screen, and nav buttons, so that no matter what kind of android phone it is, you can navigate it.

I asked josh, one of the developers working on this project, what his thoughts on Android were,

“Android dev for me so far has been a breath of fresh air after doing as3 for so long.  I’ve missed java.  The xml based layout is nice and has obvious similarities with mxml, but has a long ways to go until it
catches up with the quality and power of that present in flex.
However, the android team has done a lot to even improve that aspect during the beta.  I have also come to appreciate that Android is basically a mini version of linux, so that also makes a lot of the aspects of how the phone will operate fairly intuitive.”

I asked what the hardest part of developing this app has been so far,

“The hardest part so far with our application has been the relatively
small heap size restriction (16MB).  One high res image alone can
easily bring our app crashing up against that limit.  But it’s still
manageable for the most part, and we’re figuring out ways in which we
can optimize our data caching to work around that restriction.”

Gizmodo has a video demo of the G1, which looks like it’s running some things that aren’t currently in the SDK. Wonder if there will be ‘flavors’ of Android that are carrier specific?

The G1 becomes available October 22nd. The video shows some pretty compelling features, it’ll be interesting to see how Android changes/improves the iPhone market, assming Apple pays attention.

*Watchmen is a trademark of DC Comics

Wanna work on cool and compelling Android apps? iPhone apps? Let us know

UPDATE (9/16): We just found out, we’re in. w00t!

We found out last night that we’re a finalist for CSIA DEMOgala 2008!

Out of 160 company’s, 25 have been selected as finalists. One of which is us! We showed them some still under development stuff, that we’re very proud of.Out of those 25, 20 will be selected to show off their products at DEMOgala. Fingers crossed!

We should find out some time today, whether we’re in or not.

From the website, “Join your fellow Colorado Technology leaders and professionals at the 2008 – 4th annual - DEMOgala Showcase and Innovation Conference of more than 100 speakers on 25 different panels and keynote panels to hear the newest trends in everything from mobile applications, online gaming, travel and the net, video’s effect on web commerce, social networking, corporate use of  Second Life for brand awareness, innovation and music, how mashups are expanding markets, new trends in finance, healthcare and green technology; and how national CEOs have raised millions by creating new markets through disruptive technologies.”

I hadn’t heard of CSIA prior to joining EUI, and now that I’ve checked out the site, and got to sit in on our demo, it’s definitely a cool organization, and a major asset to the Colorado Technology scene. I’m looking forward to hearing more about DEMOgala, and our participation!

According to Juan and Andy Patrick is the undisputed ‘Grill Ninja’, “Making the best burgers EVER”

I’ve yet to enjoy Patrick’s burgers, but I have been able to enjoy his blog. The default channel, is ‘design’, but take a look at the others, the links are in the top right. Patricks HI picks look incredible.

if you’re a designer, check it out, if you’re not, check it out anyways, he’d do it for you!

If you haven’t checked out the blogs of the rest of the EUI team, you’re missing out, take a look, at the blog tab for some of them, for those that aren’t listed I’ll highlight them here.

Rather, I’ve accept a job at as Community Evangelist.

I’m really stoked! It’s something I’ve been looking at for a while now, as possibly my next step in my career evolution. I love writing code and don’t see that stopping really, though it will no doubt lessen, and be more along the lines of demos and POCs, etc. I’m really excited about this opportunity! I came up with what I felt was a good job description, and EUI, agreed, and we all shook hands, then Andy hugged me, then the rest lined up and hugged me.. kinda weird but hey, you know I might get used to it ;)

I’ll be helping take some of the pressure off the team to be at events, blogging, etc (thought they’ll certainly continue to blog and speak, etc, since they’re more interesting than me.) and to help be a public figure for EUI, in the twittersphere, blogosphere, real life-o-sphere, etc :)

I’ll be making sure the cool things that EUI is working on, are out there and being seen, since they (we, I guess now, LOL) are doing some really cool stuff that the rest of the world and Flex-dev-o-sphere should know about.

Wish me luck! See you at 360|MAX

I’ll also be offering my community building expertise (that sounds showy, I don’t think it’s the right word) to clients as they role out applications, and such.

Wait, what about 360|Flex?

If you’re wondering how this might impact 360|Flex, it doesn’t. EUI made it clear when we were talking, that they didn’t want anything special on that front, they’d earn and pay for sponsorships like any other company. Speakers will still be picked on the merits of their topic, same as always. Which is good since I had no intention of providing special treatment, or preference for speakers. I’m really proud and happy that they brought it up first, that says a lot to me, and certainly eliminates one potentially awkward employer/employee moment, LOL.

360|Conferences, inc. is a separate entity, run by Tom and myself and short of being purchased outright, it’ll remain independent and objective regarding sponsors and speakers. So for anyone worrying about that, don’t 360|Flex ain’t changing, well it actually is, all the time, but not in that bad, schilly kind of way. :)

I will say it’s great to have an employer that is actually even remotely interested in 360|Flex. I’m thrilled to work for someone that appreciates the efforts and supports them!

I’ll be starting with EUI on 9/2