After talking about how Agile is a state of mind, not a methodology, it was shown that the problem is making time to do a proper job of the user experience, in a rapid Agile world with shorten time scales compared to the discredited waterfall type model.
Because agile encourages teamwork and cross discipline working, this close working benefits everyone.
I don't think it's that uncommon to have two different installs of the excellent media player Amarok (for instance one at work and one at home) which share a media collection (over Dropbox or manually with rsync, for instance).
The problem is there is no way to synchronise the scores and ratings between these two computers, so I've had to build one.
I figured it might be useful, so here are the details of the steps to take, and a small Perl utility need to help out.
The latest Flash Camp event was held in Manchester last week, and was a day-long series of talks designed to inspire Flash and RIA developers - a 'taster' as we were told during the brief warm up.
Right off the bat everyone who went got a bunch of awesome freebies, from Thermos mugs to Adobe Rubik cubes, full copies of the FDT ActionScript IDE and a free film from the blinkbox streaming site; fairly awesome for a free event.
Antony and Jerome are co-founders of Ribot - a design lab specialising in enjoyable small screen interfaces and experiences. They're not Flash specific.
Over the last 20 years they've seen the world move from analogue to digital, but much more recently gone human - there isn't a third party any more (like a mouse) between the the experience and the user.
They explained that mobile is very constrained (RAM and display size, network latency, etc.) but this gives you scope and focus- a challenge.
This was kinda the rest of the Adobe Catalyst demo from the key note. I cant see much else that makes going from a mock up to a real app this easy. Using tools like Balsamiq and Napkee is close, but they can't work on an actual comp from Illustrator or Photoshop.
We have found a treasure of old photos thanks to Nanna & Gramps.
I have upload the first 50ish photos that are linked to me by the Dawson name, pop along and have a look http://rachaelandtom.info/gallery/v/Rachaels-Photos/mum/
The two Mikes from Adobe give an overview of their current products and future plans- not much I hadn't seen at last months Scotch on the Rocks but in terms of out reach this was a great way for giant-multinational Adobe to connect with the smaller people who use and promote it.
They talked about how there has been a digital explosion across multiple devices, mostly mobile devices, and that this going to continue.
Here's a handy list of all my posts about the Scotch on the Rocks ColdFusion/Flex web developer conference.
Day 1: Parts [node:1606, title="one"], [node:1607, title="two"] and [node:1608, title="three"]
Day 2: Part [node:1609, title="one"] and [node:1610, title="two"]
See you all next year at the top secret location next year !
(It's been announced by now, but everyone there got a sneak heads up and a chance to buy tickets earlier than anyone else).
All modern Linux distributions have a concept of keeping themselves up to date with an online system of 'repositories' of applications that anyone can run.
Adobe have handily set one up for their AIR runtime, and provide instructions for RPM based systems that use 'yum' (like Fedora and RedHat) and DEB based systems that use 'apt' (like Ubuntu and Debian).
Although OpenSuSE can use yum, by default it has it's own 'zypper' system, but it can use the RPM repository anyway.
Mark Drew
Mark is always a popular speaker, and he started his talk with questions around what happens when your web site gets popular quickly ? As an example he used the ubiquitous country list dropdown box. Does this really need to be a query ? Obviously not (countries hardly ever change !) but does it really need the next normal solution, and Application scoped cache (or cachedWithin CFQUERY) ? You could use CFCACHE to cache the whole HTML fragment.