Mike Chambers

Just a quick note, but I am taking all of next week off. So if you send me an email, it might take a little time for me to get back to you.

I have (finally) posted the Apollo Developer FAQ online. Thanks for everyone who submitted questions.

Apollo Developer FAQ

If something isnt clear in the FAQ, or if you want to have an item added, just make a note in the FAQ’s Discussion page. I plan to update this frequently.

Just a quick reminder, but I posted a new Podcast on Friday afternoon. This podcast includes a discussion around Apollo as a Runtime with some members of the Apollo engineering team.

You can find more info as well as grab the podcast from here.

Btw, I don’t normally re-link articles like this, but wanted to since the podcast was posted late on Friday.

I just posted this week’s podcast

Download Podcast for July 14, 2006

fyi, I am going to try to start releasing the podcasts earlier in the week (around Tuesday or Wednesday).

Update : Fixed issue with podcast enclosure in RSS feed.

This weeks podcast discusses:

Continue reading…

Just a quick update, but as I posted last week I am working on an Apollo FAQ. It is currently up to around 40 questions (!), so it is taking me a little longer than I expected. I should have it posted by tomorrow afternoon or Friday morning.

I just uploaded new versions of the open source ActionScript 3 libraries to labs. The new versions work with the release versions of Flex 2 and Flex Builder 2.

This includes updates to corelib (JSON, etc..), flexunit, and the XMLSyndication (Atom / RSS) libraries.

You can find more information on the libraries, as well as download them from here.

We have been having some internal discussions (and disagreements) over the past couple of weeks on when was the best time to add an Apollo section to labs.adobe.com, and start populating it with information.

Well, while we were discussing it, Ryan Stewart took matters into his own hands. Leveraging the fact that labs is a wiki, he went ahead and created an Apollo section on labs and began to populate it with some links to articles / information on Apollo.

You can view the Apollo labs section here.

You can see Ryan’s post talking about this here.

Ted Patrick has posted a TON of slides from a component developer summit held at Adobe a couple of weeks ago. One (of the many) that caught my eye was this presentation by Gary Grossman (one of main engineers who worked on the new AVM in the player):

ActionScript 3 and AVM 2.0 Performance Tuning (pdf)

This goes into some depth on how the AVM works, and some performance tricks (i.e. casting array indexes to INT).

Make sure to check out the other slides, including presentations on Flex internals, components, and architecture. You can view them all here.

You can view the slides for the Apollo presentation that I did, here.

Earlier this week, Robert Scoble wrote up why he thinks that the use of Flash is a bad idea. I thought I would provide my thoughts on that post.

Why don’t I use Windows Media Video for my Web sites? Here’s a good reason.

I have a brand new OS X Mac Book Pro machine. Loaded Safari on it. And visited Scoble’s site to watch an interview with him.

This is what it looked like. Now, if a “normal” person (non geek) hit this site, what would they do? I’ll tell you what they’ll do. They’ll hit back and get out of there. Note the title tag. Failed to open page? I click that little green back button and leave before I get hurt. Thank you very much. Have a nice day.

Lesson: always recognize poor implementations of technology, before you make sweeping generalizations about a technology based on that implementation.

(This applies to pretty much any technology).

(btw, I agree with Scoble that that particular use and implementation was poor. I do not agree with his assumption that that thus means all use of Flash is bad).

I have been cleaning out a bunch of stuff in my office, and came across a bunch of old Macromedia stuff. Before I parted with it, I decided to take pictures of everything and upload them to flickr.

You can view the entire photoset here.

I have not added titles, but feel free to add descriptions in the comments. I tagged everything as mm_stuff. Ill upload more images as I come across stuff.