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July 2007 Archives

Angelika Theater filled with programmers On Wednesday we went down to Dallas to attend the OnAIR Bus Tour. We were on something of a tour ourselves, having first driven to Graham, TX for a meeting with a potential client, then to Dallas, then home, all in the same day.

Adobe puts on quite a show. They rented out a movie theater for the day, much to the dismay of all the people who came by wanting to watch a movie. They had plenty of free food, drink, games, etc. It’s pretty cool to walk up to a movie concession counter and have your choice of anything you want, for free.

The sessions were good, too. They walked us through what the Adobe Integrated Runtime is, what you can do with it, and how to get started using it. It’s a pretty interesting runtime. Nobody’s going to decide to build an AIR app instead of a web app, but I can see two scenarios where it would be the way to go:

  1. For web developers/designers who want to use their existing skills to build desktop apps.

  2. For creating widgets to supplement the functionality of an existing site.

And in fact, I’ve already got a few ideas that fall squarely in the second category. I think I’ll play with it and see what I can come up with. Maybe AIR will be useful, maybe it won’t. Regardless, we had a fun (albeit exhausting) evening with the OnAIR folks.

As part of my continuing quest to win an iPhone, here is my submission to the Mahalo iPhone contest:

CSS - Mahalo

This was fun to do, going through all the CSS links I’ve accumulated over the years and picking out the best for the page. It makes me think I might like joining their Greenhouse.

My wife’s Sony Clié died recently. Don’t feel too badly for it — it led a long and full life. The loss has been pretty hard on Angela, though. She kept track of everything on it. Once you get an organizational system in place, when it’s not there you feel like part of your brain is missing.

Good husband that I am, I have graciously offered to give her my Treo. Of course, I suppose if I did that I would have to get a new phone. I wonder if any interesting models have come out recently…

Actually, even though I feel the call of the iPhone as much as anyone else, the price tag is a little steep for me. So, while I wait for either the price to come down or my checking account balance to go up, I’ve been checking out various iPhone giveaways that have sprung up recently. If you’re interested in the different ways to get a free iPhone, I’ve posted a bunch of them on SweepsGoat.

(Side note: SweepsGoat just launched its own sweepstakes. If you like winning stuff, you should check it out, because it’s all about winning stuff by looking for ways to win stuff.)

On one of those sweepstakes, you enter by linking to ApplePhoneShow.com on your website or blog.

In another, you post “MeToday” videos on Viddler to enter. Here’s my most recent:

With apologies to anyone who watches it. Actually, I’ve had more fun with the videos than I expected. I don’t think video blogging is really my thing, but it’s a fun creative exercise, not unlike NaNoWriMo or Script Frenzy (Which I finished, btw. More on that later.).

Hopefully my efforts to do something nice for my wife will not be in vain…