Archive for category Design
Google Tasks standalone Adobe AIR app in 30 minutes
Posted by hollowmyth in Design, Technology on April 7, 2010
OK, this is kind of amazing. I’ve been using the underrated Google Tasks to keep track of small things across work and home life. Over the past year or so, they’ve made some really nice improvements. One thing they haven’t created (or at least made public) is an API to allow the use of your task information in other websites/applications. There is a bug logged with this request, but still no word on if or when it may be implemented.
Needless to say, I was pretty bummed when I found this out. But, I also remembered that Adobe’s new Flash Builder was recently out of beta and I had been meaning to give it a look. So, after downloading and installing, I popped it open. It looked pretty similar, so I created a new project:
I chose to create an AIR project, told it where to save and chose the default packages to include.
After that, it was a simple matter to look through the documentation and find the mx:HTML object which will load a remote page for viewing. So, since Google has been kind enough to create a canvas view of Tasks already, this is literally all the code I had to write to have it show up in the debug AIR player:
That’s it. I packaged up the application with a self-signed certificate and away we go, Tasks on the Desktop:
Download and install TaskMaestro here, if you like.
All in all, not a bad way to spend a half hour.
Posting from the Adobe AIR Bee app
OK, so Adobe has just released the 3rd beta of its desktop/connected platform, AIR (stupid name, Apollo was much better.) One of the sample applications is Bee, a blog editor. On first load, it asks you if you have an existing blog, of if you want to create a free one on wordpress.com. I put in my user and pass and was greeted by the “quick start” menu. It’s a pretty nice way to jump into posting a blog entry. I don’t know if I’d use it all the time, though, since I just don’t blog that much.Â
 anyway, intereting turn of events how AIR is shaping up. This is going to be a wild year with Silverlight and AIR/Flex duking it out while Google, Yahoo and others hone their AJAX-fu. I wonder what Christmas will bring a year from now. Hopefully fatter paychecks for all of us in this crazy online world.Â
10 letters. 10 measly letters.
Posted by hollowmyth in Design on June 13, 2006
Ok, I registered hollowmyth.com a few years ago. I had great plans. I had a vision. I was finally going to have a place to let my creativity run wild…
Well, my spare time didn’t match up with my ideas and it lay fallow with only a lowly splash page to mark its existence. Well, this year, I decided to take up the charge and try it again. I was on fire! I wasn’t going to let anything stop me! Except the “server not found” error when I typed in the URL.
“What?!” I cried. How could it have expired? I had it set to auto-renew. Well, after chasing down the registrars info and loggin in, I found all the alerts were sent to an old email address. The domain was circling the drain, about to be flushed into the waiting hands of the highest bidder.
Ok, fine, I accept I lost it due to user error. So, how much will it be get my domain back? $80 bucks! $80 bucks for 10 letters. $80 bucks for 10 imaginary letters made up of a few bits of information sitting in a database somewhere. “If you’d renewed it within 12 days, it would have been fine,” the service rep tries to help.
So why does it cost so much? “Well, we get charged for blah and blah and blah so we feel the need to bend over our customers just like we get it from verisign and ICANN,” I can almost hear him shrug. “That’s business.”
So, I’m forced to either purchase a less optimal domain, pony up the dough for the renewal, or sign up to watch for it when it gets put on auction.
I know it’s a weak rant, given the state of the world, but c’mon…it’s just 10 measly letters…