Beer at Goose = good!

Originally uploaded by visualrinse

Sent from my iPhone

And so it begins.

Originally uploaded by visualrinse

Sent from my iPhone

Liam on his swing!

Originally uploaded by visualrinse

Sent from my iPhone

I’ll be mobloggin’ via my iPhone and posting pics as the conference happens. Here’s to hoping my testing of the system works. I haven’t done something like this with this blog or this phone before so, it might fail miserably. This is what makes technology so fun, right?

I have added a sweet little plug-in called iWPhone that themes this blog so that if you have an iPod Touch or iPhone, you get an iPhone friendly design. Sweet huh? I did a bit of skinning so it matches the overall look of the non-iPhone site (it looks pretty close with only about 5-10 minutes of work, nice!) I’m sure that my friend Brian is puking over the fact that the “non-watered” down internet of the iPhone (he is a firm believer in the media type=”handheld” CSS directive - which I do wish that the iPhone would use) needs an optimized version, but what the hell, it’s my blog.

Thanks Adobe for resurrecting the DevNet name. As a Macromedia DevNet subscriber back with MX, I was sad to see the aproach to an integrated tool suite and community go away as Flash 8 came out. Really gald to see it come back, and in a big way. I’ll have to dig into it this week. I’m sure that it will be a topic on the Adobe Corporate presenter’s lips at Max. The Flex Developer center looks pretty deep. I like the Flex Interface Guide! I’d love to see some best practices based advice on component choice (when to use certain components vs. others.)

This picture pretty much says it all… A chart on the differences between 1.0.2 and 1.1.1. I’d also like to add “Five Dice (Yahtzee)”, “Theme Customization” and “Easy, Free Ringtones” to the list… honestly, Apple, this 1.1.1 update is seriously lame. How very Sony of you.

I know that with Max North America just days away, and everyone at work psyched to see the new Adobe goodies, it seems like a perfect time to put down some of the things I am most interested in learning/hearing about. This includes both the hands on inspire sessions as well as sneak peeks and other sorts of anxiously awaited announcements.

Inspire and Hands-on…

I’m signed up for a couple cool sessions about Publsihing Workflow and Why Actionscript 3.0 rocks, so I am indeed looking forward to that, I also signed up for a Flex hands-on session on creating an RIA with Flex and PHP. The AJAX for web designes session should be cool, too.

Sneek Peeks and other announcements…

Hmm, where to begin? Flash player 10, Thermo, AIR updates, new supported media formats in the flash player, new Flex Framework updates, Flex 3 release dates? Director 11? Cool new Papervision stuff? Man, oh man! Can’t wait!

Personal and fun…

Having lived in Chicago for a handful of years, and now exiled to downstate IL, it’ll be great to be back. See some old friends, head to Goose Island for a fresh honkers ale… and if the Cubs don’t mess up… a very happy town with a division winner!

What sort of things are you most looking forward to about Max 207 North America?

I have given my students an assignment to recreate/emulate the look of a website using only their own custom CSS, necessary image files, and the pre-existing HTML template at CSSZenGarden.com. In order to help illustrate the assignment’s goals, take a look at this remake of my visualrinse.com site template in CSSZenGarden form. Enjoy.

If time allows this week, I may do another CSS remake. I have a couple sites in mind that could use a ZenGarden version.

I decided to take my del.icio.us tags and do something a little useful with em… I’m crossing them with a variety of search engines (technorati, google blogs, etc.) to pull results for possible further del.icio.us-ing… why not. If you havn’t used Yahoo pipes by now… I highly recommend it. Super easy to use and they even have  anice wide open crossdomain policy or easy Flash digestion.

Check it out here.

I think I’ll add charting, etc after I get a couple kinks out, but it’s a good start. Right now, it’s only using my delicious tags… but i suppose it could be possible to setup a login to get anyone’s tags… need to think some more on that one. It’s nights like this that cause me not to have finished Metroid Prime 3 by now.