Tour de Flex

If you will like to explore the capabilities of Flex, beyond what was provided by the Flex Style and Components explorers, you need to check out Tour de Flex

It's an Adobe AIR application that runs on all platforms just like Java. You can download it for manual installation by clicking here or install it by clicking the badge below:

Thanks to James Ward, Gregory Wilson and others for making this happen.

Vacation!!!

I'm currently off on vacation to Kano, so I'd be doing no blogging for the next 3 weeks to 1 month. But once I'm back, there'd be lots of stuffs for you to benefit from on this blog; tutorials, articles, design works and lots more. See you then

Free Online Java Magazine

Java Jazz Up is a free online magazine on Java technology. It's a monthly publication and it usually covers everything that revolves around Java. Lots of open-source projects and Java frameworks are being discussed. The August edition focuses on JavaFX technology. Do check out their site to download your own free copy

Randy Pausch's Last Lecture

I stumbled across a writeup on James Gosling's blog and I felt I had to also support the fight against Pancreatic Cancer by creating an awareness for it in my own little way. Randy Pausch, a charismatic young college professor, as ABC News puts it, finally lost the battle against pancreatic cancer on the 25th of July, 2008. He gave a last lecture on the disease, and the video of his talk has been viewed over 6 million times and downloaded over 10 million times. A book is also being published by Hyperion on his last lecture. Randy, though I didn't get to know him or read about him while he was alive , did greatly on Alice which has been hugely used in teaching. He however gave the world a beautiful example of dying eloquently. His Last lecture was one of hope, grace and optimism. I can't imagine how it was for him; knowing that your days on earth are numbered and still moving on to make an impact in the last days instead of worrying to death about his circumstance. Randy, you'd greatly be missed. Thanks alot for creating the awareness about the killer disease before you eventually lost the battle against it.

So I'm putting forward the question to you, 'What would you say or do if you knew you were going to die and had a chance to sum up everything that was most important to you?'. If you had only six months to live, like he did, what would you do? How would you live your life?
The Pancreatic Cancer Action Network (PanCAN) say that approximately 37,170 Americans will be diagnosed with pancreatic cancer in 2008 and 33,370 will die from it. How many people will die from it in a country like ours? If you've seen the kind of diseases that most of our old people here in Nigeria battle with, you will not but pray to God that you never experience such in your old age. The disease is said to be the fourth leading cause of cancer death in the US, and unlike other cancers, during the last 30 years, the medical community has seen very little advancement in prolonging the lives of pancreatic cancer patients. The video is highly inspiring. Instead of focusing on his death, he spoke about his childhood dreams, and he went on to attain quite a number of them, but they didn't all come easy. It's a video that will stir up something inside of you to get more done and work towards fulfilling your goals if you have one. One statement he made that I'd also like to leave you with is this: "The brick walls are there for a reason, they are not there to keep us out, but are there to give us a chance to show how badly we want something". So why not fight against this disease with me, by creating the awareness. You can get to read more about Pancreatic Cancer on wikipedia. Read the more about his last days on ABC News

JavaFX Preview SDK is finally out!

I'm pleased to announce to you that the preview release of the JavaFX SDK is out for early adopters to try out. Go to www.javafx.com to check it out. This preview was developed to empower users proficient in web scripting technologies (such as HTML, CSS, AJAX, JavaScript and ActionScript) to create connected applications that run in standard web browsers as well as on the desktop, as described on their website. Very good direction I must say. We've waited long enough for this.
There are some issues I'm not comfortable with while browsing the JavaFX website which I believe Sun should address.They need to still work on the site to enable we the users to get a better experience in interacting with the website. Some of the most essential features that need to be worked on for now is the way content is being loaded, create a smoother transition of the lightweight panels, and browser history needs to be supported. I see no advantage the users derive when you put AJAX, and nifty Javascript effects to use, but use it wrongly. While the user is viewing a particular section, the content of subsequent pages that the user might want to be should be loaded while the user is busy on this page, so that when the want to proceed elsewhere, the content is immediately shown if it has already been preloaded instead of showing us a useless throbber. Secondly, going back to a previously visited page involves showing the throbber again, and requesting for the same information from the server. This shouldn't be. One thing I seem to have noticed about Sun (correct me if I'm wrong), is that they tend to put people who are not skilled at working perfectly well with a technology work to do with that technology; that's why we've been having crappy look-and-feels since the onset of Java civilization. When developers become designers, what do you expect? But even that notwithstanding, I believe they should look into the issues I've raised. I can see that Mootools was used for the nifty effects, I urge you to please optimize the code to make it faster for the users; this is because the transitions are not smooth. The internal scrollbar too doesn't respond well to mouse scrolling.
Overall, I'm impressed that the Preview SDK is out so that early adopters like us can try it out to see if there's a future for it in our workflow.

Trimming spaces in JavaScript

This is the first of the series of Tutorials I plan to put on this blog for whosoever might be in need of such information. Much more elaborate tutorials will be put up soon on GWT, GWT-Ext, Swift3D, Papervision3D and a host of other technologies.

Programming in Java and PHP has given me the impression that the trim() method which can be found in the aforementioned languages will be present in most popular languages. To my dismay, I looked hard for that function in the String class while doing some JavaScript coding recently. Luckily enough I did eventually stumble upon the regular expression that would help to trim leading spaces as well as trailing spaces in a string. It's as follows:

var s = " Adobe Flex is a good technology for implementing RIAs ";

//To remove leading spaces, i.e.spaces before the string s, use
s = s.replace( /^\s+/g,'');

//To remove trailing spaces, i.e.spaces after the string s, use
s = s.replace( /\s+$/g,'');

//To remove both spaces(i.e.both leading and trailing), use
s = s.replace( /^\s+/g,'').replace(/\s+$/g,'');

You never know, it might come in handy someday.

Acrobat 9 will revolutionalize PDFs

I've always opted for Acrobat 7 to Acrobat 8 because of the latter's heaviness, until recently when I became more comfortable with it. I stumbled on a write-up recently on what Acrobat 9 is bringing our way and I became very excited. Here's an extract from the writeup

'Acrobat 9 Pro Extended has all the capabilities of Acrobat 3D version 8, but also so much more… There’s a Video-to-Flash transcoder which allows drag-and-drop of any type of multimedia format onto Acrobat 9 Pro Extended, and it’s converted to Flash video automatically. And, Adobe Presenter – a powerful add-in for Microsoft PowerPoint, is included! This technology is so cool. It allows you to add audio, video, and SWF in a PowerPoint presentation and then save it to PDF for viewing offline'

Click here for more information

del.icio.us plugin for FF3 is simply great!

I downloaded del.icio.us plugin for Firefox 3 yesterday and all I can say about it is that it's simply awesome. Why not give it a shot?

• No more round trips to the server whenever you try to bookmark a new site
• All your web bookmarks are imported into the browser and you have the option of exporting your browser bookmarks to the web

I haven't gone through their list of new features, but I've just stated my experience so far with the plugin.

Another great Illustrator!

Need inspiration? Neil Duerden is another great illustrator to watch out for. His designs are greatly inspiring.

Sony Ericsson dazzles us with their 8.1Mega-Pixel camera

On June 17, Sony Ericsson announced the new C905 Cyber-shot phone, a slider-style mobile phone with 8.1 mega pixel camera. What really got me interested was knowing that it had 'Face Detection'. I've only seen this feature on the high-end digital cameras and not yet on a mobile phone; but it's good to know that better times are here. It's also supports the Capuchin API, enabling flash lite applications to communicate with JavaME, creating infinite possiblities. JavaME has some cool features like Bluetooth communication, access to Contacts, 3D, Web services, File Connection API and a host of other features that Flash Lite doesn't currently have and since you can create spell-bounding apps with Flash-lite, the duo are going to be a crazy combination. can't wait to lay my hands on the phone and do some development on it. Click the screenshot above to find out more or click here

FF3 Happy Birthday to you - from IE7

Firefox 3 got another cake from it's fellow friend/foe, Internet Explorer, when it was released a few days ago. Funny, don't you think? The one they got during the FF2 release is still in the refrigerator, but anyway, M$ft will keep being themselves. Click on the image above to read the full gist.

Firefox 3 finally out!

Firefox 3 was scheduled to be finally ready for download on the 17th of June, 2008. That day when I got to work, I logged on to www.mozilla.com/firefox to go and download my copy of the great browser; only to get there and find out that the Release Candidate 3 (RC 3) was still there while the full version 3 wasn't available for download then. It was until later that a colleague of mine told me that due to time differences there will be some lag in the availability of the download link on their site. But I'm happy to announce to you now that Firefox 3 is now available for download with a lot of features