See our new blog at http://plangarden.wordpress.com/
By roystahl | January 3, 2009
http://plangarden.wordpress.com/
Topics: Vegetable Software News | No Comments »
Preparing for Adobe Max
By roystahl | November 14, 2008
Spent the morning preparing for next weeks Adobe MAX conference.
Tradeshows and conferences aren’t what they used to be.
There was nearly a gig worth of software, labs and presentations that I had to load before hand. Barcode emails and get a badge with an RFID. Required to have a laptop with pretty decent specs and wireless internet AND a built in camera.
As with any tradeshow or conference one of the most important elements that hasn’t changed over time is good shoes. They must be comfortable and good for walking around in. Nothing will ruin a conference experience faster than buying a cool pair of new shoes and breaking them in with all the walking you do at these events.
Having been to several shows, I am ready for the long days and nights, getting tons of information and sorting marketing hype for real results and sitting down at the end of it all and assimilating all the data.
I think I am most excited about AIR and Flex 3 as this is the wave of future RIA. It will also be a chance to ask tough questions and interact with some bright people on Actionscript 3 and advanced web applicaitons.
Next week I will try to get little summaries of likes and dislikes. Hits and misses from the conference.
Until then … rest those feet.
Topics: ActionScript 3 | No Comments »
Google Chrome Beta with Bugs - First Impressions
By roystahl | September 2, 2008
Google released Chrome on September 2nd 2008. A new browser to add to the browser war (honestly a two horse race if ever there was one)
Can Google add a third competent browser to this list? Answer: Not if it thinks this beta is close to being ready for Prime time.
First impressions:
- Fast download (not a mega file like IE8 is suppose to be. (No I am not interested in IE8 until it is released. Too many MS betas crash machines.))
- Fast rendering first pages.
- Handle some applications that are VERY Javascript heavy that can bring IE or Firefox to a crawl. It did well with a real live application that I wrote that lives inside a firewall.
Second Impressions:
- Had the same bug as Safari for passing information to a Flash application for my vegetable garden software
- During the install process it seemed to have created a bug where I couldn’t resize ANY application window until I rebooted. (That was strange, but hard to confirm 100% that is was Chrome that did it.)
- A page that correctly dynamically adds a table ROW in IE and Firefox didn’t work right. It added a new COLUMN and a new ROW to the middle of the table. Again, this has been working with IE6, IE7 and multiple versions of Firefox. (never tested with Safari - remember that I consider the world to be a two horse race for browsers)
- Finally a page that has worked on ALL browsers it was ever tested with displayed RAW HTML instead of the page layout. At first I thought I accidently clicked on view source, but I double checked and Google’s Chrome displayed HTML as HTML code. This has been tested with IE, Firefox, Safari and others as it is an appliation that lives outside a firewall on the web.
- Favicons don’t seem to work. Kind of sad it has a problem with them. Not a show stopper, but embarrasing for modern browsers
I have had Chrome only since 11:50 am September 2, 2008 and even with an hour meeting and an hour lunch I found all these problems before 3pm.
Good luck Google, you have your work cut out for you!!!
Topics: Misc Technology | No Comments »
AS2 looks silly compared to AS3
By roystahl | August 26, 2008
First, lets get clear what this rant is and what it is not.
I have written an entire RIA application in AS2 and then re-written the same application in AS3, so I have seen the good the bad and ugly of both.
When I look at style and performance, I am not interested in getting into benchmarking the two against each other. There are enough differences in my code and dependancies on the web fetches to make such comparisons worthless.
I don’t have time to be be exhaustive. This is just my rant.
From the very start I could see the AS3 had matured and was much more robust than AS2 was. To make AS2 work the way I wanted I had several ugly hacks. I started writting in AS3 wait for some deficiancy or bug to cause me to create the same ugly hacks. As of this point of being 90% done there is only one that really stands out and this is when looking for the parent of text object you need to go up two levels instead of one. There is some invisible object that may need to be there, but it is not documented and doesn’t really make any sense.
The next thing I notices is how much more compact the applicaiton was. Part of this is because Adobe left out components that I needed so I had to write my own windowing and DateChooser (which I now offer for free to anyone that emails me) These are definately smaller than the old Adobe AS2 components, but still I have added more features and code to this version and it is still over 30% smaller.
Speed. Everything is faster!! Drawing on the screen, interacting with the database and saving data are all faster. Adobe claims 4-10x faster code and I think my application is in the 6-8 range. Just a feeling, but it is more than 4x and doesn’t feel like a magnitude overall (although some individual things feel 10x faster.)
And as I put in my last post Browser Wars most people have migrated to Flash 9+. This makes me feel much better about releasing this new software on the world.
Of course all this has meant that I needed to rethink the application and not just recompile it was a serious rethink of the code and structure to make AS3 work, but it is so much cleaner that I can not go back to AS2.
Topics: ActionScript 3 | No Comments »
Plangarden looks at browser wars
By roystahl | August 20, 2008
It is always interesting to see how an advanced technology website designed for vegetable gardening, a low technology hobby does in the browser wars.
Plangarden.com is a website to help vegetable gardeners plan and manage a vegetable garden. But behind this is the most advanced web site and application.
First the browsers:
Just two short years ago IE had the lead with 82% of the web viewers while Firefox was just under 14%. Today that has changed to 66% for IE and 28% for Firefox and Safari has posted real numbers at 5%. Apparently IE7 which was released in late 2006 only showed the world what browsing ‘could be’ as it was implementing features that Firefox already. While I am not an advocate of one over the other, it has been interesting to watch the trends over the year. It has gone from “Nothing can stop Netscape” to “Netscape is dead” to “Wow, I didn’t think Firefox would make a dent in market share any more”. Not only has Firefox made a dent, but Safari is posting some pretty impressive numbers for Plangarden considering what Apple’s overall market share is.
Flash:
Back in 2006 Flash 9 was only 9% of the Plangarden users. At the time over 14% of the vegetable gardeners where clinging to version 7. In the course of just one year that all changed. By August 2007 the numbers had changed to only 10% of the people using 8 or below. Still as I started working on a version that would only work on Flash 9 players I was a bit concerned that 10% of the people would have to upgrade or not be able to use the application. But since it has taken a year to get the whole application migrated the number are now tipped so that only a percent or two are on a version below Flash 9.
Finally OS:
All you have to do is watch the silly Apple commercials to know what is going on in the PC vs Apple war. While Apple is still a LONG ways from being a serious threat to Microsoft’s dominance, they have taken a considerable amount of market share as Vista deals with many hiccups in the new OS. Plangarden has seen a huge up tick on Macs as well. In 2006 only 3% of the gardeners where using Mac now it is up to 9%. A sizable jump for a two year period. I am now looking at getting my first Mac just to make sure everything runs smoothly.
Again, I am not here to pass judgment on IE vs Firefox or PC vs Mac. I am simply reporting on trends of vegetable gardeners. And while vegetable gardening may be a low technology activity, the vegetable gardeners themselves are fairly high tech and seem to follow trends of high tech and are more on the leading edge then the trailing edge of technology.
Go Veggy Gardeners!!!!
Topics: Vegetable Software News | 1 Comment »
