Very Cool AIR App! Snippage

By scott

This has to be one of the coolest AIR apps I have seen to date. The simplicity of it is what makes it so appealing. Imagine turning anything you see on the web into a desktop widget.

  That is what Snippage does, you can crop a web site and keep the cropped “snippet” on your desktop. Once it is cropped you can set a refresh increment and visually watch for changes. When you want to view the whole site again just click on it and the rest of the site is exposed. It’s missing a few features like custom refresh increments, the crop marquee doesn’t scroll with the page when you scroll and no force reload. But hey, it’s only a beta, it will only get better.

Snippet is created by one of the true pioneers of Flash work Gabocorp. Check out the snippet video and download the beta for yourself over at their site.

ApolloCamp more than just a free copy of FlexBuilder

By scott

Just when we thought the Flash Platform arena was starting to dry up (YA RIGHT!) Adobe throws a new tool into our arsenal, Apollo. Apollo isn’t that new, but it is, isn’t it? It’s been around for a bit now, and already has become very popular. All this popularity and Apollo is still only a code name. That alone tells me it is going to be a huge release.I have to admit, I knew Apollo was out there, I knew what it was all about, but I really wasn’t paying a whole lot of attention to it. Not sure if it was because I had enough on my plate, or because it wasn’t released yet, or because I have done a lot of flash to desktop work with other third party swf wrappers (zinc, mProjector, ScreenWeaver). I’m not sure.

That all changed on Friday night. I was one of the lucky few who got to attend ApolloCamp. And after seeing some of the sample apps, seeing the excitement in the crowd, and personally seeing the potential of this app., I was pumped. Just check out my intensity in this pic taken of me at Apollo Camp.

I think my holy $@&t moment came during Christian Cantrell’s presentation. He presented script bridging between AS and JS. That one presentation proved to me that no other swf to desktop application can compete. He was injecting JS and AS events into existing sites, injecting and altering css in existing sites, and mashing up some of the biggest properties on the web today with only a few lines of code. His address book and google maps mash up was quite impressive. And his Scout application was every web developers dream app.

Adobe was very generous, amazing schwag (can you say free full version of Flex Builder), great food, lots of beer (and more beer when “people” started to “twitter” on low quantities of beer - I have to admit, I started the more beer twiter rally - not a surprise to anyone who knows me).

So what were some of the other highlights? I’m a little late posting this and I’m sure most of you have already read all about ApolloCamp so I’ll be quick. Kevin Lynch asking what “Moxie” was (for those that don’t know Moxie is the codename for Flex 3), Sean Christmann + project artemis + apollo = light saber == WOW!, Yahoo APIs + Apollo = Endless possibilities (sorry couldn’t resist plugging my peeps). The list is endless. Check out other blogs if you want to read more about the presentations. I don’t have time to type up a transcript of the entire conference, I’d much rather play with Apollo.

To all of you who were not lucky enough to attend. Ahhh hahahahaha, just kidding. The alpha build, documentation, ApolloCamp videos, O’Reilly pocket guide, sample code will all be available on labs.adobe.com sometime this week.

I have to say this was probably one of the best conference I’ve ever been to, very well organized, and very informative. I can’t wait to see what’s next, stay tuned here to see what I build in Apollo, I have a few big ideas, now I just have to find the time to actually dev them.