A Haiku for Jaiku

So I don't know if Jaiku is pronounced hai-ku or yai-ku, but here's a haiku anyway:

Google bought Jaiku
I really envy those guys
With all that money

RubyAMF makes me happy

I've been excited about RubyAMF for a while, and I finally got a chance to try it out after I worked it into my MAX presentation last week.

Aaron Smith was there at MAX too, and once we met and talked I weaseled my way onto the project. Score!

Anyhow, I've got a lot to figure out about how things work, but I really love these two technologies, Flex/Actionscript and Rails, and I'm really excited about what Aaron has already accomplished getting a very easy integration path between the two.

So, hopefully I can contribute to the stability and longevity of RubyAMF, and people will love it and it will achieve world peace or something.

eBay Wins!!

eBay Desktop, created by EffectiveUI and product managed by Alan Lewis of eBay, has just won a MAX award! Nice work!

Wait... this just in.. we won a MAX People's Choice award too!

Awesome!

MAX Day Thermo

We've been hearing about Thermo for a while now, and yup, it's pretty sweet :)

Basically it's the best "design view" ever made, and it works for Flex. Designers can import Photoshop files (!!!!) and turn graphic assets into skinned Flex components using metaphors that they're used to, like layers and graphics tools.

Have a look at Aral's blog, where he's just uploaded 3 videos of the keynote today - it's a better explanation than I could give.

MAX Day One

Internet connection is a bit spotty, and I was running all over the place yesterday, so I'm a day off, sorry.

Best session yesterday was "Flash Internals" by some guys from the Flash Player team. Those guys were geek's geeks. Good information about the pieces of the player and how separate the renderer is from the part that runs the code.

My talk on Flex with Rails went fairly well except RIGHT as I was about to show the fruits of my labor during the code walkthrough, my COMPUTER... my fancy MAC BOOK PRO CRASHED. So that was pretty annoying, but I have another shot at it on Wednesday. Hopefully that one goes better, but still, I think I was able to spread some good word about Flex with Rails and why Rails has the best development experience of the available back end languages.

Got to meet Aaron Smith of RubyAMF fame, who graciously came to my talk. Got to introduce him to a appreciative crowd. We talked about a few things afterwards, a few ideas and Rails performance. Really great guy.

After that some of the EffectiveUI crew hit the streets with some of the Flex team till late. Made it hard to make the Keynote this morning. I'll have a post about Thermo soon :)

Flex and Rails resources

Thanks for coming to my talk at MAX on Flex with Rails. I really wish my computer wouldn't have crashed right before the last part of my presentation, so I'm glad you actually found this post since I never got to show it up on the big screen.

Here are some of the resources that can point you in the right place when you're starting on integrating Flex with Rails:

Books:
Pragmatic Programmers has the definitive word on Rails.
Flexible Rails was the first book to start talking about Flex with Rails and what a great match they make.

Interweb:
Peter Armstrong - author of Flexible Rails.
Aaron Smith - RubyAMF is an AMF implementation for Ruby
Derek Wischusen - flexonrails.net
Daniel Wanja - onrails.org
The Midnight Coders - Creators of WebOrb for Rails.

Let the MAX announcements begin...

Adobe acquired Virtual Ubiquity! Grats to the Buzzword Peeps, grats to Adobe...

Now, what other big office suite names are out there? Hm.....