Using AMF as a file format

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, ActionScript 3, Applications, CSSAug 26th, 2009 | 4 Comments Flash is a great platform. You can build applications for the browser, the desktop, and… well, what else is there? When building applications, especially those with a document-based model such as the Aviary apps, Odosketch, My Canvas, ZenStudio, the apps on acrobat.com, and many others, you need a file format for the document or project. Or some way to save it. What Not To Do You don’t want to save each item into a table in the database. I know a guy…who had a dream…that his friend did this. This guy’s friend in his dream had a table for each item that needed to be...

360 Flex, best developer conference

Posted by Jacob Wright in Applications, GeneralFeb 3rd, 2009 | 1 Comment I just got word I will be speaking at 360 Flex. I’m really excited. I’ve had a lot of fun there in the past and the crowd is much more developer centric than other conferences, which makes for more interesting conversations and presentations. I recommend 360 to anyone, but especially to developers. Go register now. I’ll be presenting “Cloud computing with Flex”. I’ll talk about the services available to scale your application, but I want to focus on how you can build an app with zero server-side code. It’ll be an AIR app that stores its data on the cloud. Here...

Layered Content, 2 Parts

Posted by Jacob Wright in AIR, Applications, Layered ContentJul 8th, 2008 | 2 Comments I’ve had some time between jobs recently and been working on Layered Content. Layered Content is a website management system or web content management system (CMS). I’ve had a lot of fun over the past two years using it, architecting it, and planning it out. When I started I was determined to make a usable CMS, one that didn’t require training courses to use, one that wasn’t too simple that you couldn’t make the website you wanted. A big challenge, but one I felt needed to finally be addressed by somebody. There have been a couple versions, the first was completely...

Working on Cascade

Posted by Jacob Wright in ApplicationsJun 26th, 2007 | No Comments So I know I haven’t written in awhile. I’ve been busy working on a web content management system (CMS) I hope to get my business off the ground and running. I’m pretty excited about it. About 49% of the people I talk to about it aren’t sure what the difference is between Dreamweaver and a web CMS. They’re the non-web developer people like my family and some of my friends. Another 49% (the web guys) aren’t sure why I would choose such an established market to make a product for and even after I explain my marketing strategy still scratch their heads over it. They...

Seeking Perfection

Posted by Jacob Wright in Applications, GeneralMay 15th, 2006 | 5 Comments I find myself always seeking for the perfect code, the perfect library, the perfect system. Is it healthy? My employer might rather a code monkey which will mass produce web applications. Sure, the code would be a pain to maintain, but we would make more money. Or would we? I was contracted by my company for awhile to one of their clients. While I was there I started making my own JavaScript tree menu in my spare time. The developers I worked with asked why I would do something like that. There are already a handful of tree menus free for download on the web. I was doing it because, one, I thought...

Writing (Beta)

Posted by Jacob Wright in ApplicationsMay 10th, 2006 | 2 Comments MyStickies has had a great launch. It has been pretty successful. Quite a few users have a hard time setting it up, but once that is done, they enjoy using it. As of the time of this writing 17,982 accounts were created, 119,400 notes have been placed, 31,108 notes are currently sitting on pages accross the web and we are getting between 50 and 100 new users each day. MyStickies started off with a “Beta” tag on it, but went public without the beta label though it probably should have kept it. Unicode support was broken, usability was lacking, and databases had moments of down-time. Why...