O’Reilly: Inside RIA

Learn how to enhance your stand-alone installation of Flex Builder with some of your favorite features from Eclipse's Java Developers Toolkit and Web Standard Tools by dropping a few jars into your plugins directory. In this entry we'll discuss the TODO/FIXME tool, Snippets, Mylyn integration with Trac, and a fix to menu crashes in Leopard.

Brad Umbaugh and I were interviewed on The Flex Show last week discussing our use of 3D in Discovery Earth Live. You can check out the full interview here if you're interested. In the interview we discuss the nature of 3D interfaces, some things to think about when attempting 3D, and just barely scratch the surface on the differences between Papervision3D and Away3D. Kinda timely given Andrew's post on 3D just a few days ago. Finding the "right" way to use rich innovative features like 3D is a topic I'm really passionate about. We didn't get into the usability aspects of it as much as I'd liked in the interview, but I'm hoping to do a panel at MAX or Web 2.0 NYC later this year and get more into it. Is that something you'd be interested in? Leave us a comment if you don't mind.

Conditional compilation allows developers to tell the compiler not to include certain parts of their code unless a set of conditions are met. Apparently Adobe added this feature to Flex 3, though I hadn't heard anything about this until this morning when Jim Cheng mentioned it to me. In this entry we'll examine the ways conditional compilation can improve development and help attract members of the opposite sex.

DARE is a simple AIR server created by Ted Patrick that allows developers to re-build their AIR apps as easily as they rebuild their AJAX apps. In this entry I'll review DARE and discuss my experiences building a quick and dirty AIR application out of the InsideRIA homepage.

When is good is a minimalist web app designed to help you schedule meetings. In this entry we walk through their simple interface and discuss its strengths and weaknesses.

Microsoft announced support for SWF in its next version of Silverlight. Does this spell trouble for Adobe?

Searchme is a new search engine that allows users to graphically browse the web using a cover-flow like interface. In this post I discuss the benefits and weaknesses of using new visual interfaces in search engines.