cfObjective(ANZ)
Posted by: Toby in Uncategorized on February 17th, 2009
It’s been under wraps for a while but we’re finally ready to announce it - the premier enterprise ColdFusion conference - cfObjective() - is coming to Australia! More specifically it will be held in Melbourne on the 11th and 12th of November 2009.
It’s a 2 day event packed to the hilt with advanced level content and fascinating sessions. For anyone who has wanted either a dedicated CF conference or one with more hardcore topics then this is the one. For more details check out the website:
We’re very excited about it and really looking forward to getting it together. if you’re interested in attending or speaking or just have some ideas please join the mailing list on the website, and let us know what you think!
More details to come 
Flash - coming to an iPhone near you
Posted by: Toby in Actionscript, Flash, Flex, iPhone on February 1st, 2009
Magnificent news today - Adobe and Apple are have actually confirmed they’re working together on getting flash onto the iPhone! I don’t know if I’m behind the times or anything but it’s news to me so I just had to blog about it. Of course we’ve known since last year that at least Adobe was doing some work on it, but now it’s official that Apple is involved in the effort also. This is very exciting for those of us who’ve been harping on about it for a while now. I’ve been doing some work on Objective-C coding for the iPhone and will continue that, but it’s cool to think I might be able to leverage my AS3 skills on it at some point in the not too distant future.
Comments in the various news articles make clear that we’re not going to see a standard flash player release on the device, but more likely something new. Steve Jobs is quoted as saying that the browser plugin doesn’t have enough functionality built into it, so I will be interested to see where they go with this. Obviously getting any kind of flash onto the iphone can only be good for adobe - and I can’t but think it would be good for Apple too. While the App store has been doing well, iphone development doesn’t really seem to be going very far very fast, and I think a lot of that is due to the app store itself and to the nature of coding for the iphone. Opening up the platform to the much larger flash platform community could see some awesome things happening.
Of course this doesn’t mean the device will become open - maybe we’ll still need to deploy flash apps through the app store, who knows. All I care about is that there’s finally some official word that something is at least being attempted! Here’s hoping it is seen through to fruition and that we can all start hacking flash and flex on the iphone 
Source:
http://www.appleinsider.com/articles/09/01/31/adobe_apple_working_together_on_flash_for_iphone.html
blog move
as you can see the blog looks really crappy again. I’ve just moved servers and took the opportunity to upgrade to the current version of blogcfc, so when I get around to it I’ll modify the templates again to make it look pretty
Aussie Telcos do it again
Sigh. Once again the telco’s in Australia have utterly screwed the pooch. Check out this summary of just how messed up it it.
I was going to order one of these tomorrow - now I’ll wait.
Google’s internal data format open sourced
It’s called Protocol Buffers and apparently is what Google developed and use to handle the data within their enormous systems. Will be interesting for hardcore geeks, and might also be handy if implemented for remoting or webservices somehow. If anyone’s playing with this, let me know.
Coffee, Coffee and more Coffee
In the last 7 years, my coffee machine as it turns out has made 9,869 coffees. That’s… a lot of coffee. Bought in September 2000 it’s one of my favourite purchases, and even though I’m drinking more tea than coffee lately it’s still awesome to have a machine that makes great coffee from just one single button push, including fresh grinding
Flash search engine crawlable
Posted by: Toby in Actionscript on July 2nd, 2008
Check it out here in the Adobe press release: Adobe makes Flash crawlab;e
This is a great step, and really encouraging to see. Between this and the work being done with google analytics etc flash is becoming more and more viable for content delivery on the web.
One thing that irritates me though is the uninformed attitude about flash. I used to be in complete agreeance that flash should be removed from the web - when it was nothing more than annoying intros to websites when we were all on dialup. With the work that’s happened in the last couple of years flash is an amazing platform that is now being tailored to do the things actionscript geniuses were finding hacks for years ago - and it’s a wonderful platform for application development. Read the comments at slashdot on this story though and it gets a little frustrating. Yes there are still muppets building useless things in flash and not using it well but how is that different from any other technology? I’m of the belief that flash has made serious inroads in the developer’s mind, I’m just looking forward to when the public start seeing actual flash applications and judicious use of flash in websites as a good thing.
… beats the hell out of javascript.
Scotch talk slides
My apologies to those who were waiting for this - here are the slides from my talk at scotch this year. I’ve exported them to a pdf to avoid issues between keynote / powerpoint etc.
I hope they’re of some use - as always feel free to give me a yell with any questions if you have them.
Additionally those who asked for a copy of my coding standards document will be receiving it tonight or tomorrow.
** udpate ** something weird was happening with the download file, I’ve switched it to just the pdf now.
CFML Language Advisory Committee
Ben Forta has blogged regarding the recently announced CFML Language Advisory Committee - a very good read. Despite some cattiness and mild fundamentalism in the comments it’s worth checking out - I’m very glad to see this happening, and will be keeping a close eye on progress, getting involved in any way I can.
Congrats to Adobe and those on the committee - that’s what I call forward thinking.
Firefox 3
A while ago I switched to using safari full time on my macbook pro as it was faster and better integrated than my current version of firefox at the time. Today like many millions of people I downloaded firefox 3 and I have to say I am absolutely blown away. I love the new features that I’ve seen so far (it seems you either love or hate the new url bar), the cleanliness of the interface and my god it’s fast!
Plus an extension called picLens - if you haven’t tried it I urge you to check it out. It doesn’t work with all sites but it makes browsing google images, amazon products, deviant art pics and a number of other things an absolute dream. It also stops the weird issues I was having with flex builder where I’d run an app and it would load in safari, then the safari window would close and I’d have to do it a second time. Now my flex apps load super fast with no problems. And for a change, the default theme is the best one I can find - nice and clean and light.
Well done and thank you to the Firefox team!