O’Reilly: Inside RIA

The New York Times released a special reader application built in Adobe AIR this past weekend. It's a pretty slick application, and an example of AIR done right.

Vidoop is a User Experience company focused on web security. They offer a set of products and services to provide security to web users and developers, but they take a unique approach to security that provides a much better experience to end users than normal password or captcha systems. Vidoop provides three main services, all of which are based on the same underlying technology and methodology. The services are: Vidoop Secure - an all around security portal for your web-based applications myVidoop - a password manager for individual web users Vidoop Captcha - a captcha system Vidoop advertises as being bot-proof, but not human proof. I started using myVidoop for my own browsing / password needs about a month ago after seeing some of the team demo their service. I started off somewhat skeptical of the whole thing - do we really need another password management system? After about five minutes my skepticism died in the fiery glory of fan-boy fanaticism, and it hasn't died down since then. This service makes sense, and it actually works.

While out at SXSW earlier this year I ran into Rob Spiro from Aardvark. Aardvark is a crowd sourcing application that allows its user base to ask contextually based questions of each other through instant message or email without viewing personal information. Rob was nice enough to get me into the beta, and I've been trying Aardvark out for the past few weeks. In this entry I describe how Aardvark works, and why it's going to make a huge impact once it launches to the public. I currently have 19 invites - hit the comments section at the bottom of the post if you want in. :)

Smashing Magazine has a pretty comprehensive collection of AIR resources and tutorials up on their site today. They feature all of the Adobe hosted stuff (official resources, support, free samples, etc.) as well as highlighting some of the better community resources including Scalenine.com, Aptana Studio, and the De MonsterDeBugger.

Valleywag isn't entirely wrong - SXSW is one giant party. Just about every major tech company, from Facebook to Google to Frog Design to Digg to Tumblr to Blogher to...well, everyone, had a party, and most also had a major presence on the trade show floor and in the panels.

I hear a lot of talk about "best practices" these days, and I'm sure you do too. As design has become a more visibly important differentiator for web development professionals and companies, understanding the "best way" to accomplish any given task has been a big deal, leading to a plethora of blogs, conferences, podcasts, etc. on the topic. How can I communicate that there's more information to fill out? How can I make my form most intuitive? How can I present an intuitive interaction? These are the types of questions "best practices" are called upon to answer.

This week some of my co-workers got really excited by the "Done Manifesto." I love a good manifesto, but I disagree with this one for several (good?) reasons and on a very gut-level. Here's why.

My fellow developer and friend John Blanco got bored over the weekend and wrote a library for creating and maintaining (fake) thread processes in AS3 for the Flash player. He's calling it Ender Lib, presumably after the great Orson Scott Card series, and you can find the library on Google code and official launch on his blog.

ILOG announced the release of Elixir 2.0 this morning. Elixir is the powerful Flex charting framework available through ILOG. Elixir 2.0 provides several new modules to Flex: a calendar, heat maps, Gannt charts and pivot/OLAP charts. I'm particularly excited about the Gannt charts. I tried to build one of my own sometime last year and found it a much more daunting task than I'd originally imagined.

The first official Flex BugQuash will occur Saturday , March 28th, from 10am-8pm PST. What's a BugQuash you ask? A mighty gathering of coding heroes from great to small coming together to fix as many bugs to the Flex SDK as possible in one day. The event is sponsored by Adobe but driven by the open-source Flex SDK community.