Currently browsing posts under the tag: web 2.0.

Albelli Photo Book Followup: Adobe Air App

Written by: StevenHodson on May 13, 2008

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Albelli said 7 days from upload to delivery via UPS Ground, and it turned out to be eight. I’d call that close enough to call “as advertised”. Overall, the quality of the photo album is very high, and what one would expect to get from a company that has dedicated itself to just making made-to-order albums, and doing them right. The only disappointments are very minor, and are all due to my own inexperience or inattentiveness. As you can see from the below pics, I made an album of my wedding last year, and I did a pretty lousy cropping job on a couple of the shots. I clipped the top off the cake for crap’s sake. If I make another, I will use higher quality images, as well. They did, however, do a very good job given the quality of the images I provided.

I took a couple pics of the album for you to gaze upon in wonderment, and, as promised, I have ten or so codes for the readers to give Albelli a try with a completely FREE medium photo book. Sadly, as I lamented in the original post, Albelli only ships to the lower 48 states of the USA. Maybe they’ll find a way to do something about that oversight at some point, but from experience, international shipping can be a PITA.

If interested in free stuff (who isn’t) email Bill with a request. I’ll post an update when they’re gone.

Edit: Codes remaining: 0!

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Category: Software

Let’s AIR it out a bit

Written by: StevenHodson on April 23, 2008

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I know, I should be shot for that title. I’m used to it, I’ve been playing Call of Duty 4 and if there is one thing I’m very good at, it’s getting shot. Frequently.

In my last post, I waxed whiney about the weakness of offerings for Adobe Air. What I see the most of is applets for interfacing with things that already have interfaces and apparently silly games and widgets, but I got to thinking. This is a pretty new thing. Perhaps I’m expecting too much this early in the game. The developers are just getting their teeth into this thing, and once I put on a new perspective, I started to see that ‘water testing’ looks to be the name of the game. That in mind, let’s look a at a few more AIR apps that show what can be done with these new tools.

iSpy

iSpy is very new, only published a few days ago by Rich Tretola, but I played with it for quite a while. Available as a desktop app, iSpy accesses your webcam and monitors the feed for movement levels per your settings, then captures a still image and saves it to your harddisk at 2-3 second intervals until the movement goes back below the threshold. Home security, babysitter monitor, the possibilities are many. I’m thinking of pointing it across the desk into the master bath so I can determine which of our dogs has been pooping on the rug in front of the sink while I’m away at the work-place.

Some features I would like to see would be the ability to run hidden, or at least minimized, and the power to specify the folder to save the caps in.

File Furnace

Nicely showing the power of tools formerly reserved for your browser is File Furnace, a file-destroyer that purports to permanently delete unwanted files.

It has no features, and a rather annoying noise of something “burning” that cannot be shut off, but I submit it for your consideration nonetheless. GetDataBack, a rather powerful data-recovery tool, was unable to restore files I “incinerated”.

Snapshooter

Another RIA that displays the power potential of AIR is this offer from Safari Development. Enter any valid URL into Snapshooter and grab a snapshot of the page. To me this shows valid movement toward truly linking your desk to the rest of the web.

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Category: Software

I know it’s new, but C’mon

Written by: StevenHodson on April 15, 2008

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image I’ve been scouring around for Adobe Air apps worth breaking reviewing, and I must say, I’m coming up a little bit on the side of disappointed.  Just looking at the list of over 70 AIR apps at the Adobe AIR marketplace, the choices are looking bleak indeed. A lot of what’s there is either a (IMO) a pointless widget or just another silly interface for Digg, Twitter or Reddit, or simply border on redundancy as opposed to just opening the page in your browser. There are a couple, however, that are beginning to show the capabilities of the platform, like cleVR Stitcher, by Matt Kane at www.clever.com, an applet designed to ’stitch’ together photos into panoramic images.

Also interesting is .merlin, from www.coursevector.com.  I know a couple font freaks with thousands of font on their system, and this handy little applet can extract the actual name and organize your font collection into a much more user-friendly library.

Truly starting to show the power of AIR is the NASDAQ Stock Market RIA, (RIA -Rich Internet Application) bringing configurable stock info right to your desktop in a well-designed, attractive interface. While good for the home investor, it’s good for NASDAQ as well, minimizing resource usage as compared to the thousands of ‘F5′ mashes every minute with a web-only interface, keeping their site snappy, and saving on bandwidth costs.

Despite my initial trepidation, I’m beginning to get excited about this. Both Adobe Air and to some degree MS Silverlight have some real potential to do what some companies have been trying to do for ages now – bridge that cavernous gap between your desktop and the web once and for all.

So to all the devs out there, take advantage of what’s looking like the Next Big Thing and give us something to tear up!

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Category: Odds & Ends

Adobe Air, What’s this now?

Written by: StevenHodson on April 10, 2008

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A few days back, Steven discussed, briefly, Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight. He’s even given the Air Media Player a run. I’ve never been too big on Web 2.0-type stuff, (OK, I think it’s far from the “wave of the future” so many Kool-Aid freaks think it is) so I don’t pay it much attention. As a result, I hadn’t much more than heard the names.

With that, I set out to discover the purpose behind Silverlight and Air, and as a kind of precursor to doing some reviews of Air and Silverlight apps, give a short rundown of why, exactly, you should even give a damn about them.

An example of a desktop app would be Microsoft Word, an example of a full Web 2.0 app would be Google Docs. Adobe Air is a kind of hybrid between desktop based applications and full-blown Web 2.0 browser apps.

Silverlight and Air are known as Cross-Platform Desktop Frameworks. One of the issues that plagues both desktop and Web 2.0 apps is the fact that not everyone uses the same platform. Some use a PC with Windows. Some use Linux. Some use a Mac with OSX. Then you can toss in all the different web browsers. It can test the nerves of a web developer to make a 2.0 app that plays good with all those, even harder, perhaps nigh impossible to make one for the desktop with any remarkable features. Ask Steven. When he was still into dev, I recall many conversations with him trying to get something to run in XP and Vista, said conversation containing language that would make a longshoreman blush.

This hybrid approach gives developers the power to code applications in the languages Flash, Flex, HTML and Ajax, which currently are mainly found on web sites, into applications that can then be deployed as a desktop application. This opens the floodgates for a slew of apps that will work, theoretically, on any computer, with any operating system, with any browser.

As I said, I’ve had my misgivings about Web 2.0, my chief concerns being availability and security. Time will tell, but Adobe Air and Microsoft Silverlight have hit close enough to the mark to be sure that WinExtra will be keeping a close eye on things.

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Category: Software