iPhone 3G GPS not working for you?
by Neil Middleton 9:36 pm Wednesday, 30 July 2008.

Here at Monochrome towers we’ve all been having great fun with the new iPhone 3G launched a couple of weeks back.  It’s an interesting little device that brings a whole new side to rich internet application development - a truly portable device that supports 3G and location based services, all wrapped up in a really slick UI layer.  I’m sure it won’t be long before we start experimenting with it fully.

However, we did have an issue with one of the units we had where it was not recognising it’s location via the built in GPS.  We’d hit the little target button in Maps and nothing would happen - not a sausage.

After a fair while of tinkering we hit upon the solution.  We’d done plenty of reboots and restores with no avail, ad finally managed to solve it by pure fluke.

What we found was that if we hit the target button in Maps and left the phone just sat outside for a good 15 minutes, it found us, and from that point on worked like a dream, tracking our position to within a few metres reliably.  Apparently Apple are resolving this issue in a 2.0.1 update that is coming within the next couple of weeks, but if you’re having trouble now - here’s your fix.

Comments (1)


Want to know what’s coming in Flex 4?
by Neil Middleton 11:34 pm Monday, 14 July 2008.

A while back I posted an article listing the very small amount of information known about Gumbo, the next version of Flex. Well come more details are out and about now so I thought I would summarize them here for all to see.

1. 2009 is coming. Well, OK, that’s kind of obvious. What I actually mean is that there is a new MXML namespace coming in the form of http://www.adobe.com/2009/mxml. This is to take into account some subtle changes to MXML to help support tools such as Thermo. 2006 will remain so all your old stuff will still work for ever and a day, but 2009 will be there for those who want to develop on the new platform.

2. FXG - FXG is a new data format.  Essentially it’s Flash XML Graphics which is a way of describing vector graphics via XML.  This is going to become a very prominent format in the Flex/Flash space.

3. New skinning architecture that creates a cleaner seperation between style and functionality.  For more information, Ely Greenfield has posted a video which you can see below.  This is where the bulk of the Flex 4 development is happening, so be sure to check this out.  This will be integrated into the existing Halo component model.  As a part of this, there will be a few new components which are required.

4. Improvements in MXML 2009 for UX items such as effects, transitions and states.

5. General Performance improvements as always

6. Compiler Performance - The Flex 4 compiler will be faster than the Flex 3 one which means you can spend more time writing your code and not waiting for a compile.

7. 2-way data-binding

8. New Text features (that are currently in Flash player 10 - vertical text etc)

9.  Bi-directional layout (to support Arabic, Thai etc)

10.  New Video component in order to provide something a lot more robust.

So when is this coming? Well, as always, Adobe aren’t saying. but betting on Q3 2009 is a good one.

On a final note, there is talk at Adobe of creating a small lightweight scalable version of Flex more suited to devices that aren’t PC’s (essentially a Flex light).  This isn’t a fully formed plan as yet, and don’t expect anything soon (2010 is a realistic estimate).

Comments (1)


There’s a whole load more AIR on the way…
by Neil Middleton 3:37 pm Friday, 4 July 2008.

This morning I was confronted with an email telling me about Adobe’s new release of Acrobat 9 reader.

Whoop-de-doo I hear you cry…and that’s exactly what I thought (I don’t really care much for PDF).  However, I duly went to the download site and noticed a couple of small interesting things.  Let me show you Exhibit’s A & B:


Both of these options were presented to me when I went to download. This is a signicant thing.  Adobe are now using the pure ubquity of the reader software to distribute the AIR runtime.  This means that the installations of AIR and Flash 9 are going to be going through the roof, which is a good thing as it now means that, for us AIR developers, relying on the client user having the runtime installed is a little easier to predict and handle.

Flash and PDF Reader have got to be the most installed items of software Adobe have in their arsenal.  Overtime it certainly looks like AIR will be up there with them.

Comments (1)


BBC launches AIR-based news ticker
by Neil Middleton 12:35 pm Wednesday, 2 July 2008.

I’ve just seen on one of the many BBC editorial blogs that they have now re-released their age-old windows based news ticker application as an AIR app.

For me this is an interesting one for a couple of reasons - firstly, that this will result in a massive deployment of AIR across potentially hundreds of thousands of users, but also that they decided to not got down the Silverlight for any particular reason (and I’m sure Microsoft were trying to get in on this one).

Anyways, check it out and have a play.  Could it be the start of a new application development “standard” comig into being.

Comments (0)


Flash is un-webby?
by Neil Middleton 12:33 am Tuesday, 1 July 2008.

On my way home today I was listening, as always, to one of the many podcasts that I subscribe to.  In this particular instance, I was listening to podcast #11 of the stackoverflow.com podcast hosted by Jeff Attwood and Joel Spolsky.  The podcast follows the development of stackoverflow.com, but turns largely into a general chat about web technologies and their use.

What I was listening to specifically was a chat between the two answering a question from a listener asking about what they thought of Silverlight.  Generally what they were saying was correct (as I see it) except for one point.  Joel pointed out that he thought flash and silverlight weren’t great for apps online due to factors such as the inability to bookmark pages, copy and paste text etc etc.  He was advocating that web applications were best based in an AJAX interface, it any interaction was required.

Joel then went on to say that he did not believe that Flash or Silverlight would be adopted for online applications as they were distinctly “un-webby”, giving you more of a rectangle in a browser window that tried to be a desktop instead.  Both Joel and Jeff agreed that this would prevent mainstream adoption of Flash and Silverlight for online apps.

However, as you may have predicted,  I disagree with this.  The reason for this is down to one fundamental part of their argument.  For me, the web is a connected set of applications: browsers, email clients, ftp clients etc etc; all providing different services in different ways.  One new element to the party is that of internet-connected applications, which is exactly where I see flash and silverlight winning over anything else.  The problem isn’t the un-webbiness of the rectangle in the browser, the problem is that the browser is built to suit paradigms that are now several years old, and a bit behind the times.  For instance, when was the last time you wanted to create a bookmark in an application other than your browser?

I see tools such as Adobe’s AIR changing the web by quite a margin, dropping the browser back to a pure surfing device.  OK, you might have a very website orientated app (such as Google) which will always be best suited to AJAX and the browser, but others such as eBay make make more sense as a proper standalone internet-connected application (as the San Dimas development is trying to show).

For now though, we are definitely caught in a tricky place where technologies like AIR and WPF are very new and everyone is figuring out exactly what you can do with these new tools.  As experience from the development community increases, as well as interest from prospective clients, I believe the internet will start to change into something very different to the one you are familiar with today.

Comments (5)