Brian Fitzgerald

As long as I’ve been posting Flex info Here’s information about installing the Flex SDKs on a mac.

This is a couple of days old but the major soda makers have agreed to replace the fully-loaded pop that they sell in schools nation-wide with water, juice and sport drinks.

technorati tags: soda

Adobe has released an update for Dreamweaver 8. The 8.0.2 updater is available for macintosh and windows and improves code generated by Dreamweaver for server behaviors and for active content such as Flash.

technorati tags: adobe, dreamweaver

Beta 3 of Adobe’s Flex version 2 is available on the Adobe Labs site. Flex is a development environment that allows rich internet applications to be built via XML or Adobe’s FlexBuilder application to be delivered via Flash. Steep learning curve, but incredible results.

technorati tags: flex

You have got to see Norelco’s new web site advertising their new BodyGroom shaver. It’s hilarious (and made with Adobe Flash!).

I can't wait for the column specification in CSS3 to become a standard in browsers. In the meantime, Firefox 1.5+ (and of course Flock), support parts of the column spec through their own stylesheet selectors.

• Here's an example of it in use
• Here's information about using it in Firefox

Pete Freitag is in the middle of a series of posts he calls “How to build a form that isn’t annoying”. There isn’t a lot of useful information here, but good things to think about. Steve Krug said “Don’t Make Me Think." Pete here, seems to be saying, “Don’t make me work.” There are a lot of things that we do with forms (pull down menus for example) that could be much easier for a person to fill out if it were presented in a different way.

MacDevCenter.com evaluates a few FTP clients for Macintosh.

If you have words, phrases or code that you find yourself typing over and over, you should take a look at Textpander. I downloaded it this morning and I think that it’s going to be very useful. You can feed it long amounts of text (great for chunks of HTML code) and assign abbreviations to them. For example, I assigned the basic code of a HTML page to “<html” and the opening and closing of a P tag to “<p”. Now I can write a simple HTML page from scratch in seconds using any application on my mac (not just the cocoa ones).

For the “I’m sure I’ll need to know this sometime” file: Here’s a post about log file management in JRun.

Will Richardson discusses the difference between teaching kids to be ‘lifelong learners’ and ‘lifelong teachers’. Included is a video podcast from an elementary classroom teaching others how to do podcasting.

kuwamoto.org has a sneak peak at Flex beta 3.

Rumor sites are reporting that Leopard (MacOS 10.5) may have peer-to-peer sharing abilities in the OS that would allow the system to share with other computers system and application updates. This would be a opt-in feature that would be rewarded by Apple with free songs or other incentives. Benefits would include faster downloads, less bandwidth for Apple and the ability to more easily update computers in an institutional setting without soaking the incoming bandwidth. Sounds great to me.

ABC’s new streaming service is amazing. Through their use of Flash they have created a site that is both compatible with many platforms and browsers as well as beautiful. Not a lot of shows there right now, but probably the ones that most want to see: Desperate Housewives, Lost, Alias and Commander in Chief. I hope that this is successful enough to encourage the other networks to follow.

I haven't seen any of these on TV yet but Apple has started a new Mac vs PC ad campaign.

Here's an interview at photoshopsupport.com with Scott Bourne about the current landscape of photo management/cataloging applications including lightroom, aperture and iPhoto.

I have long wondered what the future of JRun is as it has been a long time since version four came out and you almost never hear about JRun from Macromedia/Adobe. I was surprised and happy this morning to read that the next version of JRun is ready for beta testers.

While Adobe and Macromedia merged around six months ago now, they have continued to maintain separate web sites that served their unique audiences. Until now. At some point in the past day or so, the macromedia.com domain was finally redirected to the new adobe.com website (which looks a whole lot like the old macromedia site). The macromedia name will probably hang around as long as the current versions of macromedia applications are current. As they are upgraded, the name will eventually disappear altogether. sniff

Explorer (I’m not sure what else to call him) Dan Buettner gave an impressive presentation at the NETA spring conference on Friday morning. You can catch his presentations (keynote and followup) on the NETA podcast page. You can view the web site of his current project, Blue Zones, here. Finally, here is a link to his latest article in National Geographic on the same topic.

technorati tags: neta06, blue zones, dan buettner

The keynote and feature presentations at this year’s NETA conference are being podcast. You can find them here.

technorati tags: neta06, podcast

Yesterday I helped Kristi Peters with her Firefox workshop. Here are some extensions that were referenced during that workshop.

• Tab Sidebar
  
• Forecastfox
  
• Search Engines
  

technorati tags: neta06, firefox

I will be at the NETA Spring Conference in Omaha today and tomorrow (April 27th and 28th, 2006). I am teaching a workshop on Thursday morning and will be attending the conference the rest of the time.

Have you used SubEthaEdit from CodingMonkeys? It’s a fantastic text-editing program that allows you to collaborate with others on the same document at the same time. If you need to do real-time collaboration on a document, it’s the best thing I have ever seen. If you don’t, it is still a fantastic editor that recognizes many code languages.

Why am I telling you this now? Because for today only, it is the the feature software in BLOGZOT 2.0 on MacZot.com. BlogZot takes a piece of software and offers it for a great price, but then it gets better. Every time a person blogs about the deal and tells MacZot about it, the price drops by five cents. A person can purchase at the going rate any time, or wait until the software becomes free. Today, the Coding Monkeys, that make SubEthaEdit, has offered to give away up to 3,000 copies. That figures out to about $105,000 in free software given away by MacZot and theCodingMonkeys!

SO, if you have a blog, start blogging. Otherwise, keep an eye on MacZot and get your cheap or free software later today.

Mozilla has published an interesting list of requirements for Firefox 2 along with priorities for each.

Yay! I’ve always gotten the feeling with McNealy that he was more wrapped up in being proud of himself than doing good work for Sun. I hope that the new guy can turn Sun around.

Sun Microsystems co-founder Scott McNealy has stepped down as chief executive, replaced by President Jonathan Schwartz, the company said Monday.

McNealy, who will remain chairman, led the server and software company through the dot-com bubble, but the Santa Clara, Calif.-based company hasn’t returned to consistent growth or profitability.

McNealy steps down at Sun | CNET News.com