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OpenPyro wiki updates, and plans going forwardNovember 30 2008

I have been talking a bit around OpenPyro quite a bit in my recent blog posts but I wasn’t sure if the project was gaining traction until MAX SF this year where I actually had more than a few conversations around OpenPyro. Oh wow, that was awesome! But I realize we haven’t been doing a great job communicating progress or direction around this project, or gathering feedback. So I spent a few hours today writing up the Intro and the Development Themes pages on the OpenPyro wiki. Both are also linked off the main project page here.

Please take a few moments to read the pages. If you are interested in this project in any capacity (influence direction, mark bugs, request features or contribute code), please join the OpenPyro google group. To make it even simpler, I am including an inline subscription box here:

Subscribe to AS3 Pyro User Group Email:
Visit this group

On our side we are going to be busy being even more transparen

When terrorism hits homeNovember 27 2008

Last night Mumbai suffered what some news reporters called the worst act of terrorism India has ever seen. Mumbai unfortunately, is no stranger to acts of terrorism but these attacks were of a completely different kind, the attackers definitely suicidal who just wanted to kill as many people as they could before they themselves were killed. Even after 24 hours, the drama still is not over with the security forces still trying to rescue people who have either been taken hostage or have been stranded locked up in their rooms.

I was glued to the NDTV live steam for most of the night and since I have woken up this morning, and on tracking the story on search.twitter.com as well as occasionally jumping to BBC news or CNN. My first emotion was anger. Mumbai was my home for a while and its still my favorite city in the world. And to see it virtually being held hostage by these loathsome assholes enraged me. My sentiments towards the government and the security forces were those of sympathy almost, they are trying their best arent they?

But I talked to my brother over chat then and another friend who also often visits Mumbai, and they were less so. The attacks in Mumbai weren’t unexpected, after the recent attacks in other big cities where Mumbai was conspicuously out of the list. Its the job of the government to keep its citizens safe, and it failed miserably this time. While the on site journalists kept insisting that the city will bounce back and take it in its

Notes from Max 08November 23 2008

I got back from San Francisco this morning taking a couple of extra days at San Francisco to do some tourism. So I figured I’d put down what I had learned this year before the workweek clouded all that to a distant blur.
As usual, MAX was f-ing awesome. I have tried to make it to MAX every year since I graduated and joined the corporate workforce and Comcast has been pretty awesome about making sure I could do that on their dime. This year was no exception and most of the Flash team from CIM was there at MAX as Adobe showed of the cool stuff they have been working on.
My strategy for MAX this year was a little different than earlier. Traditionally I have tried to get deeper into technologies that I work with everyday. This year, with so many new ideas being shown at MAX, I decided to take sessions on the things that I did not work with between 9-5 and would be really easy for me to miss. I have to say it worked out pretty well.
Let me start off by saying: HOLY S**T, the Flash Platform is AWESOME and the pace at which its evolving is just incredible. Below are some of the best sessions I attended this year:

Using C++ Libraries in Flash Player and Adobe AIR
This was definitely one of the best sessions I attended at MAX this year. The session introduced Adobe’s Alchemy project that compiles C++ code to Actionscript bytecode that can be r

Simple OpenPyro example with source: Image ViewerNovember 15 2008

Work on OpenPyro goes well, and I keep getting people asking me for examples of the framework in use. After receiving another request today on an OpenPyro example, I figured I'd write a quick widget and release it with the source. So check out this very simple Photo Browser app. The source can be found here. The application is simple on purpose but shows some parts I want to highlight. The widget is a List module on one side and an Image container inside another container on the other side. As you click on a list item, the source of the Image component changes. Here are some key parts of the code:

Measurement:
This of course is the main thing I worked on in OpenPyro. In the main class, the shell lays out a header and a PhotoModule component and a Spacer vertically using a VLayout object. The PhotoModule is sized by setting its percentWidth and percentHeight to 100, and the layout does the rest. Pretty sweet.
The List component within the PhotoModule class is sized similarly with a width of 200 and the ScrollPane is sized at 100% of the unused space.

List with custom renderer:
The List module implementation here is also an interesting example that shows how a List module can work with custom renderers. The code looks like:

PLAIN TEXT

BarCampPhilly 2008: What a blast !November 10 2008

This weekend Philadelphia was host to its first BarCamp event. For the uninitiated, BarCamp is an international network of user generated conferences — open, participatory workshop-events, whose content is provided by participants (wikipedia link here). Barcamp is described as an "unconference", with the sessions being a lot more casual and more like conversations than presentations. Having been to a bunch of conferences before, I definitely found the organic nature of BarCamp rather refreshing. When I walked in at 8:15-ish in the morning, I had no plans of presenting anything but swept by the energy in the group, I ended up giving not one but two sessions (more on that later).

Working for Comcast, and pretty familiar with how it is most often a subject of blame than praise, the biggest surprise for me was how positively the attendees spoke of Comcast. For example, a session on ROI on social media was dominated by a discussion on the @comcastcares twitter account run by Frank Eliason from Comcast support. Always available a tweet away, Frank has been answering twitter users when they have Comcast related troubles. The conversation around how Comcast "gets it" was definitely new (kudos @