Damian Beresford

Adobe released AIR (an overloaded word these days in the technology world) this week and its been very well received. There is already a substantial list of AIR applications released with many more to follow I’m sure.

The Flex 3.0 SDK was also released after a long beta period. Flex is a fantastic toolkit, we use it to develop our online financial tools and it rocks. That said, we have no immediate need for AIR, the browser is the platform as far as we’re concerned. Although that’s not to say we won’t have a need for it in the near future, hypothetically users who have security/privacy concerns may be more comfortable downloading and using our tools off-line where their data can be stored locally, so we’re very much keeping AIR in mind (and it’s a fantastic tool to draw upon if needs be).

But, is AIR as ‘game changing’ as Adobe are touting? Not yet in my opinion, and not in itself. If, however, they manage to:

• a) get AIR/Flex apps to run on mobile devices (and Adobe seem to be making great strides here to achieve this). This really would cover all platforms, and bring ‘write once, run anywhere’ to a new level.
• b) develop this ‘C/C++ to ActionScript‘ compiler, which overnight could result in a huge mass of applications that can suddenly be run in Flash Player.

then yes, it really could be ‘game changing’. It’s going to be fascinating to watch. Hats off to Adobe, of all the companies out there they seem to be making the most effort in evolving how software will be developed in the future (and hopefully *all* tools will be on top of an open source and standard specifications foundation).

Came across a rather annoying issue in the Flex PhoneNumberValidator class today, it seems that the minimum length of a phone number you can have is 10 (which is not the case in Ireland), and this value is hardcoded (see line 159 here, ick!).

Ended up hacking together a sub class with a configurable ‘minLength’ attribute, available here.

Also submitted a bug report to Adobe. We’re using Flex SDK beta3 and are eagerly awaiting the full release (for some time now, whats the story lads?), and also the move to making it fully open source (where I could of submitted a patch today instead of a bug report!)

I myself will be the guest speaker at next months Waterford Open Coffee Club on March 7′th next, I plan on doing a dry run of my ‘Outsourcing’ presentation that I’ll be giving the following day at Creative Camp.

The Waterford coffee club has gone from strength to strength in the last while, with new faces appearing every month. Its primarily a networking event and the format is very simple: we meet on the first friday of every month, a guest speaker will make an informal presentation on a particular topic for 20 minutes or so. That’s followed by free form conversation and general networking discussions over coffee. I’ve yet to attend one and not learn a lot!

Also as you can see from some of the profiles on the website, there is quite a mix of businesses and backgrounds represented, as well as the local business support groups (SEEP and SEBIC in particular). The focus isn’t internet/technology based, the last few presentations have been on banking, networking, marketing, and hiring practices. The meetings generally take place in the Arclabs building in Carriganore, Waterford (although in theory it can be anywhere in Waterford, in January for example it was on in the SEBIC offices).

See the website for more information, new members very welcome. Also check out the Cork and Dublin equivalent open coffee clubs and the Irish Open Coffee Channel.

I love when API’s just work: we’ve started using FPDF to generate PDF reports and its working out quite well indeed. To be exact, we use it to modify existing PDF’s – our reports start life in Word, are then saved as PDF files, and then additional content is injected into the user generated documents via FPDF magic.

It allows us to give the user a tangible detailed report that can be printed off and studied. For example, one of the calculations screens in our Redundancy Calculator (still under development) looks as follows:

And here’s a sample of how the a section of that information looks in the generated PDF (which is both a combination of the help and results):