Just another Nodetraveller

Hey.

It’s been a while.

Been busy with work, life and stuff.

But feel like posting again so I’ve changed servers and got a temp design up, which will change soon.

So let’s see what happens.

I’ve moved my blog from Mambo to Wordpress. Mambo is a great CMS but as a blogging tool, its not quite so mature. I wanted something simple and web standards friendly and wordpress seems to be it. The casualties in this move are the comments and the uk tv guide. I’m no longer publishing the component as its a Mambo component. but head on over to SynTV for the listings. Fortunately I haven’t blogged too much over and I was able to transfer over by good old cut n paste.

Well, there you go… expect some weird stuff as I play around and hopefully I’ll post new content soon…

My latest project www.syntv.com is just about finished and is now out on a public beta.

SynTV provides UK TV listings in syndication formats (RSS 2.0 and ATOM) for use with desktop feed aggregators. Users can generate their own specific categories and searches and site developers are also provided for with support for HTML and Javascript. In a couple of weeks, I’ll also publish the XMLRPC web service.

If you’re interested, please check it out and give me some feedback…

I knew I hadn’t posted in a while but I didn’t realise it’s been almost 3 months! What have I been up to?!

I’ve been doing a lot of work with Mambo recently and I like the thing so much I think I’m going to be moving the backend of this blog form Movable Type to Mambo. The main reason for this is that I’ll need to put up a version of Mambo up anyway to demo the things I’ve been working on, so I might as well use it to blog as well. Also any features that Mambo doesn’t have or I don’t like, I can add it myself, someting I couldn’t do quickly with MT as I don’t know much perl.

So quite soon, hopefully within two weeks, this site will change quite a bit. After that I should have more time to blog about what I’m up to….

..since I’ve posted. I’ve been busy with a couple of projects and haven’t had much time. These projects were Java and PHP based with pure HTML frontends but could probably be enhanced quite nicely if using Flash. I’ll probably add this to my list of things to do with Flash. Lately this list of mine is getting longer; either my creative think tank juices are overflowing or there’s never enough time.

Having said, things have eased up somewhat though and I’m hoping to squeeze some time in to look at Central. It’s been near the top of my list for a while and it looks like fun….If I get the time to really get into it, I’ll let you know how I get on…

This may be a few months old but I only just discovered it. This article discusses Jakobs Nielsen 1994 usability heuristics for desktop applications with respect to Rich Internet Applications. Most of us might be used to website heuristics but RIAs are more like desktop applications and should be treated similarly and the article explains how.

I’ve been a bit busy over the last week or so and haven’t had time to do post anything or even read ppls blogs. But I had a rather pleasant surprise when I caught up on my reading and found Mario Klingmann at Quasimondo had mentioned this site on his blog! Very nice indeed! Thanks Mario…

I’ve got a few flash projects in the pipeline that I’m hoping to find the time to work on. When I do, I’ll expect to post a bit more frequently…..

It’s here! well, almost anyway…

Flash 2004 will be released next month. I know, I’m a few days behind but I’ve been too busy to post and besides this blog didn’t exist when the word came out so I have probably the best excuse in the world for a late blog about F2004.

Anyway though I’ve been busy, I have been able to read up on the new features of flash.

Heres the things I’ve seen that excite me the most so far:

CSS in textfields - anyone who’s used text in flash will breathe a sigh of relief about this..

Context Menu - Great for RIAs..

Project Control - very Nice!

History panel - at least superficially, this reminds me of Photoshop (hope there won’t be any court action over this again!)

Actionscript 2.0 - proper OO with strong typing. One thing I don’t like is the use of the colon to denote the type of the variable. For exampe if you’re declaring a movieclip variable you’d do it like this:

aclip_mc : MovieClip

but theres loads more…

Here’s a link from MM about the information about the new features:

MM Devnet Article

and finally a review of Studio 2004 at webmonkey

Personally, I’m looking forward to the new css support. This, along with the context menu will give users of flash apps richer experiences while the rest of the new features will allow developers to develop better apps in less time. Which has gotta be a good thing, right?

and you’re reading its first blog. Which is nice, for me at least.

Why have I got a blog? Well, it allows me to put up anything I’ve been working on and to comment on anything I feel like commenting on… I don’t have a great big message or anything like that for people. It’s just another blog from just another bloke..