[DB75]

MXDJ Voices of the Community Interview

I recently had the honor of participating in the MXDJ Voices of the Community issue. Jeremy Geelan contacted me and asked if I would answer a few questions based on my experience with Macromedia's tools. I started back in 1998 when Flash 3 was bangin'. I wish I could dig up some old stuff to give everyone a good laugh. It's amazing how we evolve in everything we do.

My piece starts on page 2 and only a couple of the original questions are featured. At any rate, Macromedia has some of the best tools for web/multimedia developers and I'm optimistic this will improve with the Adobe merger.

I'm working on a proposal for another MXDJ article and will post the details when it's finished. If you're interested in past articles I've written then please feel free to check out:

http://mxdj.sys-con.com/author/198baldwin.htm

and here's an RSS feed:

feed://mxdj.sys-con.com/author/198baldwin.rss

Enjoy!

BlueGPS Beta Update

I apologize to those of you who are waiting for the beta version of BlueGPS. I meant to get it ready this weekend but didn't have time to get around to it. This afternoon I came down with a bug so it will probably this weekend before I can finish up.

BlueGPS now has the ability to post GPS data to the server at regular intervals. I'm going to make this user-configurable and have the ability to "Mark Current Location" for a single upload.

The UI will be extremely basic for beta purposes and I'll be working in the next couple of weeks to clean it up and make it look somewhat appealing. For now you will be able to upload data to my server and if enough people request it I will make this user-configurable as well. Most of the BlueGPS users are not developers so this functionality doesn't really appeal to them.

Another option it to expose the upload GPS data from a Web service for those interested in retrieving it. I'm not sure if I want to take this load so we'll see what happens. At any rate, i'll shoot a link out this weekend for those of you interested in the Java version of BlueGPS.

BlueGPS for J2ME - Beta Screen Shot

This doesn't seem like a big deal, but let me mention how hard I've slaved to get the J2ME version of BlueGPS up and running. Let me also say this task would have been 10 times harder without Benhui's Bluelet library. At any rate, I just wanted to post a preliminary screen here.....it's completely ugly, but serves as a proof of concept. I will get around to the UI soon.

I already have a few users interested in functionality such as being able to specify a remote URL to post GPS data to. The other is the ability to create a timer to allow the app to upload GPS data in regular intervals. I think these are two features that need to be implemented before I release the initial beta version. I'm hoping to get it done this weekend but we'll see. Check out the screen below and please post any suggestions you may have. I can't tell you how excited I am to have this in Java and not have to deal with maintaining the Symbian version.

GasBum Adoption Rate and Data Plans

I've been receiving a tremendous amount of positive feedback on GasBum. It's been a fairly slow process of getting the application out there but it's gradually beginning to pick up. At any rate I've been suprised with the amount of friends and family that don't have any sort of data plan for their devices. What amazes me is the fact that every other commercial on TV is about downloading video or MP3s to your device over the air.

It makes me step back and think for a minute how well is data really doing? I think it still turns out that the killer application for mobile devices is voice. The next big thing is most likely email. With that being said I think the market has a LONG ways to go before we can expect to see the number of users with data plans come anywhere close to those with broadband. It's a tough market for developers writing application that are data intensive. I know Apple/Cingular are pushing the new ROKR phone, but I think the adoption rate will be slow.

Sorry to get off on a tangent and a lot of the GasBum users are having connectivity issues. I don't know if this is an issue with a data plan not being available or security restrictions on the device. At any rate I've posted a network connectivity MIDlet that users can download if they're having problems with GasBum.

The feedback has been great and if you have any suggestions or problems then please post them here.

GasBum Beta Released

Every now and then I get off on some random tangent and end up doing something off the wall. I won't say that this is off the wall, but was driven by impulse that turned into a couple of late nights over the Labor Day weekend. For once this was driven by my wife, family and friends. Normally I'm the sole driver of some wacky idea.

After a late night conversation about the current state of gas prices I decided to take action and write an app that pulls the cheapest prices from the web and makes it accessible directly on a Java enabled device. Right now I'm only showing the three cheapest prices, but plan on extending this more in the future. I'm also planning some cool functionality if users find this app useful.

I think it will ultimately help people save a good amount of money since the prices of gas can vary by fifty cents within a given zip code. The name of this brainchild is GasBum. Please feel free to check out the GasBum site and download a copy. If you have any questions or comments please feel free to post them here and I hope you enjoy!

Here are some screens of GasBum on my Nokia 6620:

Flex Problems with PopUpManager and Field Focus

I've been struggling with this one ever since Macromedia released their V2 components. The PopUpManager appears to be giving me all sorts of focus problems with different text field components. Here's basically what happens. Look at the Flex example below and click on the "Focus with PopupManager" button. When the popup is created and the form is displayed you'll see that the text field has focus. You can even start typing and the field receives the input. Now here's the kicker. Try to put your mouse into the field and select some of the text you typed. You'll see that the text is highlighted, but once you release the mouse button the selection is lost. What's even crazier is if you click anywhere on the popup window outside of the text field and then try selecting the text again it works.

I wanted to rule out a problem with the text field so click on the "Focus without PopupManager" button. This basically loads a similar form into a Loader component. You'll see that the text selection works in this instance. Strange. It appears to be an issue with the PopUpManager. I'm going to contact Macromedia and see if they can shed some light. This might seem minor, but it's seriously limiting the usability of our application.

Microsoft Blocks Mac Browsers

I was attempting to check out the latest gas prices this eve on MSN Autos. I was a bit suprised to receive an error message when browsing with Safari. So I fired up trusty 'ole FireFox because I refuse to use Internet Explorer on both OS X and Windows. Can't give in to the man.

Anway, you can see the error message below:

I thought it was pretty lame to only support IE so I decided to fire up my XP laptop from work. As you can tell I was really desperate to find out where to get the cheapest gas. I started up FireFox (on XP) and tried to hit the url again. Lo and behold it worked! Can it possibly be true that M$ would write code that wouldn't accept browsers from OS X?!?! What's even worse is that they try and say it's a browser issue which definitely is not the case. Surely not, but this post reminded me not to put it past them. Shame on you M$. I will find the offending code and exploit you! There's always the case that M$ doesn't test their code on OS X, but I still think there's no excuse for this.