Posts Tagged ‘internet’
My Schedule for Adobe MAX 2007 Chicago
The Adobe MAX conference is in my backyard this year. The lack of travel expenses and the steep discount provided to attendees of 360|Flex made it possible for me to attend.
After registering, I chatted with other developers in my company to determine what sessions would be of greatest benefit to the teams using or investigating Flex. I shuffled those in with some sessions I really wanted to attend and the resulting schedule is below.
Customizing the Flex Framework
Continuous Integration with Flex, FlexUnit, and Ant
Optimizing ActionScript 3.0 Performance
Inspire Session: The Dawning of the Age of Experience
What Makes a Design Seem Intuitive?
XD: Prototyping Rich Internet Applications with Fireworks CS3
XD: Adobe’s Approach to Application Design
Designers and Developers CAN Love Each Other
I look forward to seeing some of you there!
OSX, Quicktime, iLife, iWork
I cautiously upgraded to MacOSX 10.4.4 the day after Steve’s keynote address at MacWorld. I can’t say that it’s much different than OSX 10.4.3 for me. No stability issues or other problems to report. Still no support for Pentax‘s RAW camera format and the linear-ized Adobe DNG format, though. For those interested, iScroll seems to work fine with 10.4.4.
I upgraded to Quicktime 7.0.4 as well. That hasn’t given me problems, but apparently it doesn’t like Flip4Mac — the Quicktime plug-in to play Windows Media formats that has just been bless by Microsoft.
I also ordered family packs of iWork and iLife to upgrade the two Mac laptops in the house. When those arrived at the end of last week, I eagerly installed them.
iPhoto ’06 seems to resolve the constant iPhoto instability I suffered. The firwst time I launched it, it upgraded my 3,000+ image photo library to its new format without incident. iPhoto ’06 is much more responsive and has not yet crashed on me. Thanks, Apple — although I don’t think I should have to pay for such a critical a bug fix. One of the new iPhoto’s much-touted features is actually turning into a curse — iPhoto scrolls too quickly now — it is very difficult to stop in the general vicinity of the photos I desired using the touch pad two-finger scrolling. Finally, photocasts — despite being poorly named — are just as easy as Steve made them look on stage. I haven’t trying opening one on a non-Mac yet, but the couple I tested with my wife were sucked right into her iPhoto like magic. I can see this being an excellent way to share photos of the kids, family vacations, etc. once the entire family is Mac-enabled.
iWeb is a very nice personal Web site generator. It is easy and fun to use — in fact, it may inspire my wife to create her own little corner of the Internet. I’m playing with it now to determine if I want to migrate my aviation blog over to iWeb. It would certainly be prettier in iWeb.
I don’t use Keynote much, so I can’t really espouse the value of Keynote 3′s upgrades in iWork. However, I’ve just taken over work on a newsletter for one of my organizations and appreciate the new Pages themes. The embedded image manipulation is nice, but otherwise Pages is pretty much the same — a simple page layout engine for the rest of us.
That’s all for now.
Tivo Series2 First Setup Without Phone Line
I just purchased a second Tivo Series2 and am happy to report that it is possible to perform the initial Guided Setup without a phone line!
My configuration:
Tivo unit’s service number: starts with 540
USB to Ethernet adapter: NetGear FA120
I have SpeakEasy VoIP for my phone service. Since I use VoIP, computer modems will not work for me. This could have presented a major hurdle since Tivo’s site is adamant that the first connection must be performed by phone. However, Tivo’s customer service site has this excellent advice for repeating the Guided Setup using an Internet connection.
First I setup the Tivo’s cabling to the cable box, television, home network, and power. Then I proceeded through the initial Guided Setup. When I got to the “Welcome!” screen (“You are about to begin Guided Setup…”), I picked up on Step 3 of the instructions from Tivo’s Customer Service site. The short of it is to go into Dialing Options > Set Dial Prefix and enter the value ,#401 (comma-pound-four-zero-one). Then proceed normally and when the Tivo attempts to connect, it will use the Internet instead of the phone line (which I never bothered to plug in anyway).
