Well the first seminar has come and gone. Hope I didn’t bore everyone to bad.
I’ve put the slides up here.
Example page is here.
Hopefully I can get the video together soon and have that uploaded as well.
Hope everyone got something out of the training and now knows a little more then they did when they came in.
See you all in a week for the Javascript seminar.
Pretty soon we will have our coding standards set in place and released for all the students to see.
To actively enforce that procedures are being followed I’ve found this nice PEAR package – PHP_CodeSniffer
This will be something we can actively use to go through the code submitted by ourselves and students to make sure everything follows proper standards and makes it so it’s easy for all to read.
For those looking for a PHP editor, PDT version 1.0 has been released and should work for you. I’ve played with past versions of PDT and it worked great for editing code.
I saw an interesting blog post today about multitouch displays.
There has been a lot in the news lately (especially about Microsoft Surface) about these but what caught me as neat about this one was that it was written in actionscript. What makes that very interesting is how easy it is to roll out a Flex app to many kiosks with just a simple refresh. Web apps make roll out simple and easy with little to tip the user off (if done properly) that a change has even happened between visits.
Now the one down side to multitouch is that fact that it’s not really out there. But here are a few links discussing how to make yuor own device to accomplish this.
Touchlib – Open source library to power the software side of the touchscreen.
Jeff Han Presentation – Interesting presentation on what can be done in an interface like this.
NUI Group – Lots of info
Building site 1
Building Site 2
Building Site 3
Hope this gives people a look into what could be a neat toy to have in the future. With a lot of the cool desktop features that have popped up with OSX, Vista, and Compiz there coudl be a plethora of new ways to interact with your desktop and help to make things easier to work with. And to overall just look really cool 
It was officially announced here and a decent overview is here.
Well for me the Linux user this means little to nothing being that
a) it doesn’t run on Linux yet (though in the future it shall, it’s nice to see the work support and Linux in the same headine from Microsoft)
b) when it does will I even have a way to develop these apps for them.
I won’t have a chance to play with it till I get home and jump on my windows box but it will be interesting to see how it has changed since I last played with it back after the Vista launch (before it was actually named Silverlight.)
The Flash player has around a 90% penetration and is going to be hard to overthrow but Silverlight should still make it to most windows machines once here is a “killer app” that uses it. I would say I favor Adobe because right now the most up to date flash player (9) is on most OS’s but it wasn’t till recent that 9 was on Linux. If they started having all release at the same time it would be great to see but I most likely won’t so this is a toss up between the 2.
Basically both serve a purpose that is not really the same, even though they overlap. I look at Silverlight as being a great way for someone who already has an app developed for the desktop to move that onto the web. Flex on the other hand is where you would develop a Rich Internet App and then through AIR bring it to the desktop.
I’ll still be playing with the Flex SDK
It will be interesting to see how this all plays out.
Recently I have really had a desire to play with Adobe Flex. For those who don’t know what Flex is it’s basically a framework to allow people of a programming mindset to create flash applications. So instead of having to work with timelines, you work with a XML based GUI and Actionscript to make everything work. With this framework it gives me a chance to make some really interesting Rich Internet Applications (RIAs) and with the introduction of Adobe AIR these applications can become offline desktop apps.
And best of all the Flex SDK is FREE. The GUI Flex Builder is not free but you do not need it to create an application. Most of the tutorials out there use Flex Builder but it’s not really needed.
So one effect I found extremely cool that I saw when I attended PHP|Tek this last may was in a presentation by Mike Potter about cool things you could do with Flex. There was a interesting live chat application done by Active Media Architects called Activa LiveChat that used PHP in the backend but not through a webserver but by using sockets. This would help remove a lot of the overhead of using a web server to send things back and forth and would help them support more users. Another example Mike displayed (before his Apple died ) was of a book app that used transparencies for replicating a human anatomy book. I had seen something of this effect prior but not as cool as this looked.
So recently I was just searching around to see if there was any examples out there of this effect done in Flex and I came on couple things.
First I found someone who open sourced there implementation for people to use. You can get it here. Check out the Demo to see some cool effects.
Through that site I found another site with even more info. It has this walkthrough which explains the whole process. A great learning tool. Also it has this anatomy demo that I saw at the conference.
Lots of great things to see there. I’m hoping to use this in some projects in the future because it can give a stylish and smooth look to things for us. The ultimate end result will be to use our CMS to generate the content to create the books and allow people to modify pages inside the CMS and easily publish out.
This is a great talk from one of the developers at Plaxo. He echoes a lot of good points that most beginning JS programmers miss when they start out because as he says this is a completely different beast then the one you may be use to.
Enjoy.