this is a quick write up of the first part of the onair tour, I will clean this up later...

keynote Ryan stewart

Ryan Stewart, a Platform Evangelist at Adobe, provides an introduction to Adobe AIR and how it fits into the Adobe technology platform, and the larger RIA landscape.

marketing talk, adobe rules and stuff

focuses on the cross platform strength of air
talks about 'cocomo' and 'pacifica' server side stuff. nice, but still closed source...
air wants to bring the web developers to the desktop, by bringing the good parts of the web there.

shows a air app called uvlayer. Looks nice but still too much eye candy to me.
google analytics app is cool, adds animation in a nice unobtrusive way...
uses flash with html on one screen. pdf is used well, to render a print view.
mapcache is a cool app

why ria on the desktop?
branding, extended functionality. data access. you can use the flash player to access the same information on different platforms (web mobile desktop wii).

how
using existing tools like textmate or aptana.

new
1.1 more languages
post 1.1 three platforms the same...
max 2008 dec 1-4 2008 milan italy

Building your first Adobe AIR application with Adobe Flex (Mike Chambers)

Learn how to setup your development environment and build your first AIR application using Flex 3 and Flex Builder 3.

flexbuilder based on eclipse

configuration in xml looks easy.

flex looks nasty, absolute positioning and stuff

good warning on certification, get a good one if you go commercial

Building your first AIR application with HTML and JavaScript (Kevin Hoyt)

After this session you will know how to setup the Adobe AIR SDK to allow you to develop and package AIR applications from the command line. You will also be able to leverage the Adobe AIR command line tools to enable development of HTML and JavaScript based applications. Finally, the session will demonstrate built in support for AIR development from Adobe Dreamweaver and the Eclipse based Aptana.

shows how to build air apps with textmate and terminal. explains how app development is different than web development. app development has many things in common with java development

application sandbox? javascript is more insecure on the desktop, there is where the sandbox comes in. script injection and eval should be in the non-application sandbox and the application sandbox has the more advanced air js stuff.
html rules

Leveraging HTML and JavaScript within Adobe AIR (Kevin Hoyt)

Gain a better understanding of the HTML and JavaScript environments within Adobe AIR, and explore how these technologies can be leveraged in both Flash / Flex and HTML / JavaScript-based applications. JavaScript and ActionScript script bridging will be covered, as well as how to use AIR, Flash Player and ActionScript Library APIs directly from JavaScript.

even flex developers have the java bug, putting presentation in the structure, boe..
maybe it is for demo purposes, but the stupid thing is that tons of people will copy/paste this. so that is why it is important to build your demo's as clean as possible.

Kevin's site

To bad that I sold my commodore 64 a couple of years ago (in 1986). But still this is funny, see this article on techworld...
Am I glad that my macs (a powerbook g4 and a macbook pro c2d 17") only get faster with each update, I can't wait to get leopard. That will give me another speed boost, if it is the same as when I went from panther to tiger...

Quite a while back I wrote about the unobtrusive dynamic select boxes, a wonderfull technique by Bobby van der Sluis (a fellow dutchman and happy clog). I said that I wanted to use them and I have. But after a while I came upon some limitations for use in the real world.
In this post I will describe those limitations and how I changed the code to suit my needs.The original code made use of Id's to identify the dropdowns and placed those Id's in the javascript code. When implementing them, I did so in web applications where the Id is owned by the back end guys. These guys often (think) that they absolutely need them and can not life without the sole ownership of the Id.
Further more, the dependancy of the id's that are hard coded in the javascript set limitations on the html code that I have to produce. And it limits the amount of dynamic selects that I can use on a page to one set. Not that it is necessaryly smart to use a lot of dynamic select boxes in a user interface kinda way.
But if you see the trend of the web these days, with one page applications. The need to include more than one set on a single page is getting more real each day.
So to come to the point, I changed the code to depend not on Id's but on certain classnames. That sets me free to include as much sets as I want in a application.
See the code here

. I did my best to describe what I did in the comments, so read those and try to improve on it. Please let me know what you think...
There are two functions that are needed to make this work, first getElementsByTagName by Jonathan Snook and Robert Nyman and a addition of my own (together with tino loos), GetElementValueFromClassName.
Get the code here

See if you can use it, but believe me, you can use it in more ways than you can think of now.
For instance, use Ajax to fill the dropdowns, to easily drill down into loads of data, without letting your user wait.

technorati tags:javascript, unobtrusive, css, html, internet, ajax

When I was just surfing the web ( can you still say that? ), I came across the Great firewall of china. And to my surprise, this site is blocked!.

really funny, I was laughing and being very scared at the same time...

Steve Balmer - the Remix

If you have to choose to watch a presentation of this man and Steve Jobs, who would you choose...
I know where I will be.