Again Down - not site but me

I am again down with fever, cold, headache and what not. It's seems smoking and improper (or no) eating have screwed up my immune system.

Once I get sick, it takes little longer to get well, one of the reason is the worse combination - staying alone and being sick.

Anyway, I am going to be fine. I am going to have proper eating habit now and work on quit-smoking-plan.

Mixercast gets Series B round funding

It's good to see Mixercast raised good amount of money ($4.25 Millions) in Series B round. This validates the idea of Mixercast platform. I hope, we would see more kick ass features in coming months. I wish them all the best.

Update: Mashable talks about it.

Technorati tags:

Google monopoly - no more text-link-ads?

Google hates text-link-ads, I heard about it via Aral's post. When I checked, I found search-result count related to me and my blog have gone down a lot.

Google is trying to control bloggers by not letting them use any other competitor products like text-link-ads?

Google adsense sucks, hence people use other stuff (TLA etc). It all sounds like M$ approach. I had never imagined, Google would do that.

initRIA - an event for RIA enthusiasts

Bangalore Flex User Group, precisely Mrinal Wadha, is organizing initRIA on Dec 16, 2007. Haven't heard about it? Please read the details.

I hope to see good crowd and sessions there.

Technorati tags: ,

What I am up to?

Not many people know, I left Mixercast and joined Yahoo! *again*.

I have been busy settling down in Bangalore, which has changed a lot, it took sometime (three weeks) to find a nice apartment and driving/riding is more stressful.

Anyway, I am going to work on some interesting stuff in Yahoo!, actually there is a lot to do. I would keep posting, if I can :-) 

I have been active in flex_india list, I read flexcoders and occasionally reply some mails. I still read MXNA in digest-mode (three times a week) and regular blogs (everyday).

It's good to see Flex/Flash/AIR community growing globally and in India. Nice to see Adobe featuring Indian developers; Mrinal Wadhwa, a very passionate developer, has been featured on Adobe Developer Spotlight.

BTW! I feel AIR logo talks about specific technologies (it's based on) instead of problems AIR could solve. What happens, if one more technology is added to the stack, logo would be changed?

Keith and John have been doing some fun stuff with AIR logo, check it out here and here

SWFObject html/javascript generator

I heard about SWFObject html/javascript generator from a colleague. An useful tool for people who want to use Flash/Flex in their blog/webpage and not comfortable writing html/javascript code.

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Live Documents office-suite chooses Flash/Flex

Sabeer Bhatia, one of the guys behind Hotmail, has been working on Live Documents, which has been announced a couple of days back. Live Documents is an office-suite for web and desktop (AIR?).

It is interesting to see, Live Documents chose to use Adobe Flash/Flex as front-end technology.

I read Zoho guys on Flash, I understand, it makes sense to use a technology that doesn't have dependencies, easy to develop with, saves time, provides better experience to user and good for business. If Zoho guys think, they are achieving these goals with technologies of their choice, it's totally fine. I would love to see how they respond to Live Documents release.

But hey, there are some (Live Documents, Buzzword, SlideRocket etc) which think Flash/Flex is cool (faster to develop, easier to use, consistent experience and better for business).

Technorati Tags: , , , , , , , , , , ,

Adobe Buzzword

Adobe Buzzword is available, no need for private invite to use it. It took me couple of minutes to register, then I checked out Buzzword; I must say Buzzword rocks!

It has a usable, fast, responsive and sleek user-interface (UI). Buzzword also allows to save documents in different formats (.doc, office-xml etc).

It allows to insert images, tables, comments, notes etc. I loved the ui-interaction for each of these features. I don't know how to express in words without showing the screen-shots, so why don't you check it out :-)

Just wondering, who designed the user-interface of Buzzword?

Technorati Tags: , , ,

Setting position of Alert control in Flex

It seems, there is no direct way of setting position (x, y) of Alert control in Flex 2. The trivial method (setting x, y) is either buggy or there must be some official way, which I am not aware of.

I found some different ways to do that:-

var alert:Alert = Alert.show("Can you see me on random positions?",
"I am an Alert box", Alert.YES | Alert.NO,
this, alertClickHandler, null, Alert.NO);
PopUpManager.centerPopUp (alert);
var newX:Number = 200;
var newY:Number = 200;
alert.move (newX, newY)

</code>

var alert:Alert = Alert.show("Can you see me on random positions?",
"I am an Alert box", Alert.YES | Alert.NO,
this, alertClickHandler, null, Alert.NO);
var newX:Number = 200;
var newY:Number = 200;
callLater (alert.move, [newX, newY]);

</code>

Following, to me, sounds like a little expensive because we are asking for the immediate validation.

var alert:Alert = Alert.show("Can you see me on random positions?",
"I am an Alert box", Alert.YES | Alert.NO,
this, alertClickHandler, null, Alert.NO);
var newX:Number = 200;
var newY:Number = 200;
alert.validateNow ();
alert.move (newX, newY);

</code>

Technorati tags: , , ,

Apple Leopard (Mac OSX 10.5) for Indian users

If you are in India and own a Apple box, you must be wondering, how to upgrade to Apple Leopard? I figured out that, we are required to print an order-form(PDF), fill it and send (fax or postal-email) to Apple Singapore, address/fax-number is mentioned in form-document.

That's some work? Why can't we buy stuff from Apple/Adobe sites? Why Indian users are treated like this? I have raised this question in past, would be raising again in future.

Anyway, you can check out Apple Asia web-site to find out about Apple Leopard and download this order-form(PDF).

Update: I just noticed that form is for users/customers who purchase a qualifying computer between 1 October 2007 and 29 December 2007.

Technorati tags: apple, leopard, india, upgrade, store