Brian Fitzgerald

Google’s code search allows visitors to search publicly accessible code for answers. It now includes ColdFusion.

technorati tags:coldfusion, google

Adobe has launched a new design center on their web site specifically for Fireworks. If you are looking to get the most out of Fireworks, this will be the place to stay tuned to. There’s already some neat articles up there including one on how to “Create a night scene with Fireworks” and “Creating lens flares using Fireworks”. Interested in participating in the Fireworks 9 beta? You can sign up for that also.

technorati tags:fireworks, adobe

Here’s just a couple of videos that show the Wii through its unboxing and demonstrate the gameplay on it with an upcoming game: Farcry Vengeance.

It was handy this year that the playstation 3 and wii launches sandwiched my birthday on the 18th. I've really had my eye on the Wii since its announcement though.

Even without the $600 pricetag that the PS3 is sporting, I've just resigned myself to the fact that I don't spend enough time playing video games anymore to enjoy the games that really need that power. I can't wait to watch it in a store, and it's that $600 that will keep me from wanting to pull out my wallet when I see a football game on it for the first time.

I knew that the Wii was going to be more available than the PS3, so I didn't have the feeling that if I didn't stand in line I wasn't going to get one, but I figured that I'd go see what the line looked like early on Sunday morning. I got to Target around 5:30 am and there was a line that stretched about a hundred feet. I really wasn't sure between the tent, chairs and people just there to stand in line with friends where I was. As the line started to wake up from what sounded like a mostly sleep-less night, people started to count themselves off and I appeared to be somewhere between 15 and 20, with 24 being available.

Around 7am, a couple of folks from Target came out started handing out tickets -- I got the pictured 17. They told us to clean up the area and be back by 8 at which time they would escort us through the store where we would be taken in groups of two to select accessories and games, then purchase the Wii.

By 8:30 I was back in my car with a Wii in hand. Only 3 1/2 hours invested, and I had a launch-day Wii.

The thing is a blast to play. The game that comes with it -- Wii Sports -- is simple, but very fun. It includes Bowling, Tennis, Baseball, Golf and Boxing and serves as a nice demonstration of the Wii remote and Nunchuck. The best thing about these games is that they are the types of games that are appealing to just about anybody and you need almost no instruction to play. They are just intuitive and fun.

• More religion in politics
  (tags: HSLuthBlogs)

I started visiting Brightcove a couple of years ago when Jeremy Allaire (creator of ColdFusion) mentioned it at the 2004 Macromedia MAX Conference in New Orleans. It took a long time before it became publicly available, and even then it seemed to be geared towards professional media producers and not something available to the masses.

I'm not sure when things changed, but recent visits have excited me as it became clear that Brightcove would make it very possible for non-professional media producers to get their content online in a way that was easy and looked great. Brightcove (and DiVX's Stage 6) allow for the creation of "channels" so that you can put an organized set of media online that can be browsed and viewed easily. The other nice thing about these channels is that it provides the content creator some ability to provide custom branding around the videos instead of having the hosting company's logo all over the place (like youtube, yahoo or google).

I have begun a new player at LPS. It will be a while before it goes public (if it ever does) but consider this your invitation to take a look and let me know what you think. I'm just going to start throwing whatever video I have access to up there.

technorati tags:video, brightcove

• Microsoft Zune software review with screencast
  (tags: zune)
• Kuler
  A new application on Adobe labs that allows users registered with Adobe to view, review and submit color schemes via a sharp-looking rich internet application (flex?).
• 10 best extensions for Firefox 2 | CNET News.com
  CNET lists their 10 favorite add-ons for Firefox 2.
  (tags: firefox)
• HERE I STAND: Meeting Jesus
  (tags: hsluthblogs)

If you tried visiting my blog yesterday, you may have seen a short-lived experiment as I considered moving my blog from Wordpress to Blogger. My only real reason for trying Blogger is that I've really become pretty fond of Google's other tools and figured that I might as well do everything that I can in one place. I discovered quickly that Blogger is no Wordpress.

Today, Ted Patrick of Adobe found his blog's feeds broken as in Google's upgrades of Blogger, they disabled all RSS and RDF feed publishing and moved everybody completely to Atom. Of course the biggest problem with this is that you just broke the feeds of thousands of blogs and are going to force millions of readers to fix their subscriptions. Bad bad bad...

technorati tags:blogger, google, wordpress

Adobe put out the first non-beta release of the Flash 9 player with full-screen video this week. Brightcove is already utilizing it.

Try it out here…

technorati tags:flash, brightcove, adobe

Ryan Stewart uses Google Trends to compare Rich Internet Application technologies and shows that Adobe Flex is ranking best compared to other environments like OpenLaszlo. I ran his query then added AJAX and they were blown out of the water - basically flatlined at the bottom of the graph.

technorati tags:flex, apollo, ajax, openlaszlo

Half Full? I realize this comes from the "Cup Half Empty" saying, but by itself it sure doesn't sound like much of a toast. "Here's to a tolerable life..." Maybe they are trying to save some money by encouraging half-full cups of coffee...

• Leopard 9A303 Screenshots and Features
• Apple Announces iPod Airplane Integration [Updated]
• Core 2 Duo MacBook Also Supporting 802.11n?

New beta for Mac today offers many new features and improvements.

technorati tags:skype, mac

• OpenStreetMap
  Project to create a publicly-available, open-source map
  (tags: map gps)

I've always been a map/navigation freak, so it's no surprise to me that I have found this geocaching quite addictive. I enjoy the creativeness of the quests. I like how each of the caches that I have found so far have introduced me to a place that I would probably have not otherwise visited. I'm also pretty stunned by how big the community around this is. Here's a couple things that I have learned in my short time doing this

• Don't take something if you don't have something to put (this is mentioned everywhere, but I screwed it up on my first find).
• You really should have some sort of "signature" item to leave. I still haven't figured out what mine will be. This can be something simple like a card, or fancy like a custom coin.
• The two most important things I have found for a GPS is an easy way to enter waypoints with Long/Lat data and some sort of base map (the first of these being more important than the last).
• Don't wear anything that you don't want to get muddy/wet/etc. You never know what you are going to find when you go looking for a cache. Be prepared for the worst.
• Bring a pen or pencil. Most caches seem to have this, but they may be disfunctional. Don't get there and not have a way to record it.
• Take a camera. I haven't done this yet, but having a photo record of where you have visited would be a good idea.
• If your GPS does not have a built in compass, get one. You don't really need something that allows you to accurately find a bearing (over $15), just one that can allow you to find north so that the data on your GPS screen means something (under $5).
  

technorati tags:geocaching

• Colors on the Web - Color Theory for web designers - color combination, color wheel, color schemes
  Another good-looking web color and color theory site
  (tags: colors)
• $398 Compaq Laptop at Wal-Mart
  I'm sure that this is a quality piece of uhh... laptop
  (tags: laptop walmart crap)

I mentioned the term geocaching in my last post. Geocaching is a sort of scavenger hunt, or hide-and-seek game where someone hides a small “cache” and then puts information online to help people find it. The clues online include GPS coordinates to where the item can be found typically with some vague visual clues to help once there. My wife and I tried our first last night as there was one only a few blocks from our house. We struck out through the neighborhood with our GPS in hand and found a small park in the middle of a large block accessible only by a narrow sidewalk that divided two houses. Once to the park, we went about search every nook of every tree, bush, hole until we found the cache. Generally caches have a log where you can record when you found it along with goodies that you can take provided you leave something in its place. It’s a fun activity and could be fun for a whole family. It’s amazing how many caches there are, probably hundreds just in the Lincoln area. It could also be a very fun way to get to know somewhere you are travelling.

Learn more at geocaching.com

I've written before about geotagging photographs. This has become super easy since Flickr has added a geotagging function in the last few months. Sometimes, this may not be enough though. Tomorrow, my family and I are headed to Maine and plan to do a little boating (cold boating). I was interested in the idea of taking my GPS and my camera and finding a way to link waypoint data from the gps with photos that I take. I found that a program that I have used before, JetPhoto, will do this and I was off to trying to make it work.

First, I needed to find a way to connect my GPS (an old Garmin GPS 3 Plus) to my macintosh. I found a data cable for the GPS, but USB was just finding its way onto the first iMac when my GPS was made, so it has a PDA-like serial cable. I figured that I could then maybe use a Palm USB Connect adapter to convert the serial to USB, but there weren't appropriate drivers available for it. So, I found a similar adapter by Dynex at Best Buy that said it was OS X ready. I plugged it in, installed the software and... nothing. I went to the Dynex web site to see if they had a newer version of the drivers, but they didn't. Viewing the readme for the drivers told me that Dynex actually had a company called prolific make the drivers. I downloaded those and things were starting to look up.

Since JetPhoto only seems to match up GPS data with a list of photos, and doesn't actually connect to the GPS itself, I needed to find a way to connect to the unit. I downloaded GPSBabel, which seems to be the current GPS transfer application of choice for the Macintosh, but my GPS proved to be a little too old (I think) for GPSBabel to deal with it. So, I did something that I almost never do, went looking for older software. I found GPS Connect, a discontinued GPS connection tool for OS X and Garmin receivers. Finally, I had something that could see my GPS. I was able to download content from it and put things on to it. With this running, I was also able to effectively use LoadMyTracks which put my GPS information directly onto Google Earth and Geocaching menu which makes it easy to put coordinates from Geocaching.com directly on to your GPS.

All of this done, I'll see if I can't do the photo/gps thing on wednesday when we head to Casco Bay.

The sour feeling that’s in my tummy this morning tells me that today is Student Vote at Lincoln Public Schools. This is the fourth time that we have done student vote online (we do it every two years) and I’d like to think that I’ve gotten a little better at it each time – until this year. Things have really felt like a mess this time around. The biggest thing that has killed me is not having ballot information until the middle of October. Last student vote, I was able to demonstrate the finished application to those attending the vote kickoff in mid september, this year I didn’t have it completely ready until last week (Halloween-ish). On top of that, LPS was not in session last week, so many people are going to be trying to get all caught up this morning as students come in. I’m expecting a lot of unhappiness and frustration today and hope to be proven wrong.

While Flock is still my favorite browser, I’ve been working a lot with Firefox to see what I think of it. I like it. As is typical, I think that the appearance of the windoze version seems a little more polished than the mac one (which is funny since they used different themes for them this time). I think the greatest thing that was added in this version is a built-in spell checker that checks anything you type into any web form. I know we’ve spent a lot of time at LPS putting spell checkers in web applications when that functionality really does belong in the browser. Here are some things that I’ve done recently to make Firefox more useful to me (read: more flock like).

• Del.icio.us has a very nice new add-on for firefox that does a full replacement of the Firefox bookmarking system with a del.icio.us-based one. Now anything I bookmark in either Firefox or Flock ends up in the same place (and a place that is available to everyone).
• Performancing is a decent blog posting tool that integrates with Firefox. I'm using it right now to compose this. I haven't explored everything that this tool does, but it does give me access to my categories and lets me add tags.
• I'm using the GrApple (Uno) theme along with the Uno mac theme and with a couple of differences, you can barely tell the difference between Firefox and Safari (or even Camino once applied there)

There are plug-ins that try to account for some other Flock functions like tying into Flickr (flickrFox) and doing news reading (sage), but they don't even come close.

• del.icio.us/help/firefox
  Del.icio.us has a new firefox extension that is superb! It replaces the built-in bookmarking in Firefox with a del.icio.us powered one. It makes it very easy to create, tag and search your favorite sites in a way that is accessible to others that may be i
  (tags: delicious firefox bookmark)
• Repository of Recorded User Group Presentations (by dozens of speakers)
  A searchable database of Acrobat Connect (Breeze) presentations that have been created for user group use.
  (tags: cfug mmug breeze coldfusion dreamweaver adobe macromedia)

• Security Bites Podcast: Firefox 2 beats IE 7 | CNET News.com
  (tags: ie firefox security)

See photos from max attendees here

Max 2006 is over so I guess that means that its time to take a look back over the last couple of days.

One thought that was going through my head this evening was how much this conference confirmed my feelings that web development is getting more exciting and doing anything but standing still. There was so much excitement at this conference around new ideas and directions such as Apollo, Flex and integration of PDF and Flash technologies.

Second, Adobe needs to lighten up a little bit. The 2006 version of Max had a much more corporate feel to it, and it didn’t feel right. There were a few more suits and ties this year that I remember from the past. There were fewer freebies to be had. There were more disclaimers before discussions. Adobe tried to play cool by providing all the pop and candy we wanted, but I don’t think anybody’s love was getting bought. It may sound stupid, but sending everybody out of the conference with an Adobe jacket or other strongly branded item would have helped solidify a little loyalty.

Third, the conference needs to either focus on coders (not my choice) or expand and bring the whole design community together (awesome!). The Max signs all said “The 2006 Adobe Conference” and yet, except for PDF jockeys, the traditional Adobe user would not have found much for them at this conference. Go BIG! Photoshop, InDesign and Illustrator should all be covered and celebrated. Do sessions on Premier and After Effects. Become THE creative conference. It would be amazing and certainly the event of the year.

These are some pretty basic ideas and certainly not the most important things I’m taking from this conference – just things on my mind right now. Tomorrow we travel back to the great plains. I’m pretty excited to see my family and begin trying some of the things that I’ve learned here.