When I first ‘really’ shifted from Macromedia Director to Macromedia Flash (instead of just using dumb little pieces of Flash within Director) — one of the things I missed most was Director’s message window; this little window allowed one to code completely in short term memory — creating and manipulating objects, as well as creating library (cast) media, or even external files (vLists were fantastic). Flash didn’t – nor still doesn’t — have this type of object manipulation.

When I started dabbling in Ruby, I was happy to find that the IRB worked in a similar was as the Director message window. But lately I’ve been working more in php, and specifically, in wordpress; attempting to setup my development environment to work in a way I’m used to in other languages — with debugging ability more than just printing out log messages. So far I’ve got xDebug up but it seems I’ve either got to allow it to break upon first line (which happens EVERYTIME a page is displayed) or… well that’s really it because breakpoints aren’t working in the php page. Hopefully someone else can point out how this is done..

HOWEVER the one thing I’m really jazzed about is the WordPress Console plugin that I just found via this article that describes it’s use — and I’ve got to say it’s already proving it’s (virtual) weight in gold.

WordPress Console Introduction from Jerod Santo on Vimeo.

From January to September of 2011 I was the sole front end developer for a new global financial application built from scratch for a Hong Kong based company called Investlab. Created as a cost effective solution for bankers and their clients to access global markets, it was architectured in a very modular way, with nearly all areas as self contained widgets that could exist in any configuration; working alone or inter messaging other widgets.

The backend architecture used JMS brokers, ActiveMQ and STOMP for messaging, keeping everything in cache rather than as database objects. Passing data through a socket connection to the front end, Flex utilized a number of very interesting frameworks to allow a very quick and clean modular approach.

PureMVC and it’s subset Fabrication allowed me to create Flash a multi-core (a sort of multi-singleton approach) application using multiple flex modules built from the same value objects, models and interchangeable views while retaining their own controllers. PureMVC’s multicore has a utility called ‘Pipes’ (think plumbing) that allows the modules to communicate, but Fabrication really came in handy as it did all the heavy lifting of ‘fabricating’ the piping structure; allowing one to send messages from one module to another with ease. For example if moduleA wants to send a message to all modules within the main application it would do so as “*” and all modules could receive that message if interested; if moduleA wanted to communicate with moduleB it could do so as a named module (i.e. “/modules/moduleB”). Or multiple instances of the same module could receive a message sent to ‘/infoModules/*’ etc.

Programming as modular widgets allowed us to revisit exactly how the user would interact with the system easily, and within this short time frame there were a number of developmental changes and tests. Taking a bit of the unused Verizon interface I tried to sketch out some ideas on how the application could function, this one based on initial ideas given to me.

I was also asked to mock out a version the way I thought would be best, in this case I thought a tablet / iPad application would work really well.

The demo at this point is nearly a full featured product, saving data to the cache and taking orders through the rules.
The ability to create users and accounts, attribute them to a firm, give each account a base currency and country. Users can trade on multiple accounts, tracking orders, lots and balances. A user can look up symbols on multiple exchanges under multiple currencies, seeing historical data or recent news articles on the symbol before putting in an order.

Mix Client Demo from G Schafer on Vimeo.

Meanwhile there’s been so much CHANGE. In the world of technology (Flex compiling to mobile devices, one of my heroes — Steve Jobs — dying) or my world at home (remarried, have a new son born 10/9/11, bought a house) — so that the last thing I wanted to do was post on my own site. But that’s not the way it should be, is it?

Stay tuned.

This looks interesting: two Air Apps that help localize languages for Flex apps; made free by David Deraedt:

From June to October of 2010 I worked on a really interesting project that a whole new spin on the hiring process: Unrabble. What made this so interesting was the way it automated the hiring process to cut down on the time spent shifting through a ream of resumes. In a way, it’s like the ‘iTunes of job boards’ as it ranks candidates based on skills that the hiring manager decides are most valuable — so if you’re looking for that mysql admin with java skills and cobol experience, that applicant would be pinned to the top of the heap.

It also incorporates google searches and social media sites such as Facebook and LinkedIn directly in the hiring process as applicants’ experience and information would be right there for the hiring manager to see. Along with a great visual timeline of experiences is what they call ‘Brags’ — little boasts about achievements (i.e. “I singlehandedly brought in 3 million of revenue to my company”) — the candidate can ask colleagues to confirm as true and verified bring a whole level of micro-referencing to the application process. It’s quite brilliant actually.

Even at the onset of the application process from the applicant’s perspective Unrabble asks all those questions that aren’t *directly* part of a job but have a huge bearing on a company culture — if they prefer to work in large vs smaller companies, or what they’re passions lie.

Much like iTunes the hiring manager can continually rate an applicant through questions and interactions, changing needs of the job, sharing an applicant’s information with a colleague or finally through meeting. The best candidate will always bubble up to the top.

The interest in Unrabble has been hot; along with being named one of the hottest startups at DEMO Fall 2011, the Next Web named it as one of their favorite startups. It’s also been featured in the Financial Times, Venture Beat and Portfolio — you can read more about these at Unrabble’s blog.

Here’s Kevin Watson speaking at DEMO Fall 2011:

or take a look at all the examples of use on their YouTube channel.

In rethinking the Hyperion Books website we imagined how the website could best be explored; when you enter a book store or library you can lose hours of time as you naturally progress from subjects of interest, or seeing what other works are by a favorite author. Thinking of what constitutes a book or author and how to take the user from stepping stone to stepping stone across a stream of information until they were ‘miles from home’ was the real fun here.

The original Hyperion Books website was a bit of a mess; it seemed almost everything had to be entered and cross referenced manually on the website in order to match a very involved and archaic database of books and authors; author information would be within a book item in the database as text rather than as a pointer to the author — these pointers would’ve allowed a much more involved experience as book could lead to author could lead to book, etc. The biggest use of time was really getting the data together; once the data was correct, it was fairly simple to implement book posts and author posts being displayed; I then created ‘smart’ carousels that used different logic depending on what type of carousel was set.

When I first took the job reprogramming the website my first thought was to use Drupal as the main framework; but WordPress 3 was in beta and I started to think about custom post types — a book item and author item, and how categories (fiction, drama, comedy) or tags could really enhance the user’s experience. I couldn’t wait for the beta to be released however, and begun using the WordPress 2.9 framework with a plugin called Magic Fields, that would do all the things that custom post types would do — as well as allowing the admin to upload images for headshots, or setting prices or isbn codes. Everything that could be done I needed it to be simple for an admin to …well… administrate. WordPress has matured *quite* a bit in the past few years; and the idea that an open source project like itself could become not only a standard as a blogging platform but a serious CMS is quite astonishing.

On the home page, the admin can choose what books will show up in the large main carousel, or a book can have Featured Item or Best Seller ticked off and show up in either category; nothing new there. However on a book’s page, the carousel would show items as You Might Also Like.. based upon tag information the book being viewed. Reading an author’s bio would show other Books By Author. The nice thing about all of this is that this all these carousels are the same carousel; the admin merely has to pulldown what sort of carousel to set in which area; these different templates (home page, author template, book template) have defined areas for the widgets to function.

Not only does the normal wordpress tags allow the carousels to be fed with pertinent information, it also allows a user to explore products in a new way, such as clicking on a book’s subject and getting a list of other fiction books.

On the New and Forthcoming Titles page, books are listed by publishing date so that books can be added to the database as they’re ready and can be displayed one month in advance. Books can be bought from the website and based upon the ISBN information, bought from a number of different online shops.

Take a look at the embedded video or head on over to the website to see explore www.hyperionbooks.com for yourself.

Ok – for the past week we’ve been having TERRIBLE speed issues within the Canton CT area – especially on upload. I pay for the business speed ($188 a month for just digital tv and cable) — and over Vonage I’ve been getting a terrible delay. Skype is the same way.

Right now I’m attempting to upload a 352meg video file to my server and it’s taking about 5 hours — did a quick test on comcast.speedtest.net:

That doesn’t seem right, does it?

Course on speedtest.net (and using a server back in the old neighborhood of Clifton NJ) we got this:

Gotta love this:

Another app created for Scribelabs and their customers – the Advertising Research Foundation. A sort of ‘iTunes in the sky’ this Flex app allowed authenticated subscribers to either stream and view ARF content or download to their iPod. Fun little example done in Flex and using custom TileList renderers…

More information can be read at scribelabs.com

Can’t write it as well as described on Scribelabs’ site: “Podium offers browser-based, live multistream broadcasting and videconferencing. Built on Adobe technologies and delivered via Flash Media Servers and CDNs such as Limelight Networks, Podium is used for small geographically dispersed meetings and large-scale event broadcasts.”

A Flash / Flash Media Server / CDN mashup that allows the virtual meetup to be streamed across the web in real time…for more information check out the pages at scribelabs:http://www.scribelabs.com/software/scribelive/

Hmm – this looks interesting:  advanced data vis components for Flex – Diagram, Timeline, Gauges and Maps with spark-like renderers (mxml).

IBM ILOG Elixir 3.0 beta | RIAgora.

There’s a fork of Flutter called Magic Fields that seems to be updated for WP 2.9; so I’m attempting to use that for the initial setup, will report back how well it functions; but so far the ability to create custom post types with their own properties / image uploaders seems to be the thing I’m looking for…

I’ve not posted on a number of interesting tech developments of late (Adobe vs Apple) and what that means for third party iPhone / iPad compilers (appcelerator’s Titanium, Elips from openplug, Unity3d) — but I’ve been extremely busy working on a few websites utilizing WordPress and writing some custom widgets and plugins utilizing the fantastic jQuery.

I’ve been blown away getting under the hood with WordPress and jQuery – creating custom post types, smart widgets and who knows what madness — and it’s definitely something I’ll be doing a lot more. I had been looking at drupal for these two websites but it’s definitely way more granular than I needed for these two gigs.

I’ve got some Flex players I’m finishing up as well and a lot more data wrasslin’….

Don’t know how this escaped my attention, but my old buddy Tom Higgins of Unity (ex Macromedia Director ambassador) posted that Unity Tech signs a three-year deal with LEGO!.

Ah — it’s funny; having recently been playing with Quartz Composer again, I’m feeling the need to delve back into 3d world…

This is an interesting video — demonstrating how drupal can be used as the base system for iPhone/iPad/Android using Appcelerator Titanium — even if it’s painful to listen to the ‘I Got Drupal’ music video…

YouTube – iPhone, iPad, Android Apps using Drupal as base system.

The conference session can be found here from April 2010.

A few good videos by Doug Winnie showing the steps from inception, wireframing to handing off the UI to a developer:

All the episodes can be found here.

Whew; have been working on getting this site updated on a dev server, and finally got it up and running with fixes on the production server — just have would like to change the way the contact page works — there’s no real UI response that a message was sent… I’ll probably do a quick fix using the current mail scheme and then add cforms or something.

Great video from TED on the power of motivators –and specifically for those that need to think creatively; the old stick and carrot only works for tasks that require heads-down work…

Christian Cantrell showed an example of how to better control nested loops by labeling each of the loops… very cool, had no idea.

In my forays into mobile development and appcelerator.com‘s Titanium for developing on iPhone and Android, I also found phonegap that allows a trifold approach for Android, iPhone and Blackberry.

Blackberry development on OSX isn’t quite supported as yet but Aziz Uysal has a great tutorial about getting the Blackberry SDK and simulator up and running on osx.

How To: Implement Facebook Connect on the iPhone in 5 minutes from Cat Lee on Vimeo.

Well, the newly fixed Macbook, after spending a week getting it nearly back to the same state, realizing I’ve lost a lot of music I was working on (some of it was *really* good), and getting a weeks worth of work done, has decided to freak out with the video display…

… strangely enough, it was fine all day; I left for an hour to go shopping and when I returned it was *not* in the same state as I left it. Got it to boot into the OS/desktop *once*; began to do some work, but then it did the weird every other pixel flakeout with the moire pattern…

I can debug and test, patch and peruse to my heart’s content, but if there’s no electricity there’s not much hope of anything happening… like a castle built upon the sand.

Today the power went out not just in my building, but seemingly my whole section of town since the traffic lights were out as well. With no power comes no responsibility it seems (and yes I’m looking forward to Kick Ass)… so right now I’ve gone to the local Barnes and Noble to piggy back on their working electricity and internet, hoping to see the two home computers come online on Skype to know when to go home..

….oh joy; school just called to tell me that the kids are being let out early, so I’m the one that gets to deal with my child’s withdraw of moving objects, tv, and video games. We might have to venture out into the world.

Update: power came back on, machines rebooted and signed into Skype.. got to watch the dog freak out.

I know that Dreamhost (my host provider) has supported Passenger for Rails apps running on Apache, but I’ve only gotten a taste of it lately, as I was setting up my development machine as a LAMP stack with Rails and now Passenger (including the MacOSX Passenger pane).

I’m actually quite astounded how quick it is to set up; see for yourself:

http://www.modrails.com/

Apple seems to be really pushing for developers… too bad I’m on the east coast…got this via linkedin:

Apple’s iPad and iPhone Software Engineering division is growing tremendously, so we will be having a job fair at the Apple campus in building 4 on Friday February 5 from 11am to 8pm.

We are currently hiring for:
- Software Engineers from embedded level up to UI (applications, frameworks, firmware)
- Wireless and cellular software development and test
- QA Engineers (black box, white box, test tool developers)
- Software Engineering Project Managers (telephony, multimedia, build, factory)
- Carrier Field Test Engineers
- Software Engineering Management

You can check out all iPhone Software Engineering job opportunities at www.apple.com/jobs/us /corporate.html and click on the iPhone Engineering Division.

Please send your resume to iphonejobs@apple.com and bring copies with you. The attire is business causal. We are growing a lot, so please also tell your friends. Thanks and we look forward to seeing you on Feb 5 to join us in pushing the evolution of mobile communications.

Dan Ryan
iPhone Software Recruiter
408.974.5859
dryan@apple.com

http://www.linkedin.com/in/danielryan

Address:
Apple, Inc.
4 Infinite Loop
Cupertino, CA 95014

Directions:
- 280 to DeAnza Blvd
- Turn left on Mariani Ave
- Turn left onto Infinite Loop
- Drive around to building 4 (4 Infinite Loop, the “back” side of Apple’s campus) and park
- Go in the lobby of building 4 and ask for the iPhone SW Job Fair