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 I wanted to announce the birth of my second child, this time a daughter - Delaney Ann Hall was born on April 27th at 6:38am. She weighed 8lbs 14oz and was 21.5 inches long. She is amazing and joins her big brother Owen, who will be two in just a few weeks on May 14th. We are all doing great, just very tired at the moment.
I have put together a special page with a bunch of links to photos on my wife Melissa's Flickr account, as well as a bunch of videos I uploaded to my Viddler account which can be found here:
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   Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0 have been officially launched (see a ton of related links down below), so please join the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group, the Philadelphia Flex User Group, and the Philadelphia ColdFusion User Group for a joint "can't miss" meeting Monday, February 25th, 7PM at Independents Hall to celebrate the launch of Adobe Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0!
Adobe's RIA technologies enable you to rapidly build and deploy the most engaging applications across browsers and on the desktop. The local Philadelphia Adobe User Groups...
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I just had to post this as I had been waiting and waiting to get a new desktop machine for some time. I've relied primarily on laptops for the last several years, but I've tried to cut back my travel time as much as possible to spend more time with my family. I've got another child due, (this time a girl!) in April, so I'll be home even more for the next few months. Given that and other reasons, I felt it was time to invest in a nicer desktop machine to boost my productivity. It was even clearer to me since I am doing a ton of video related work lately, and the...
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  A reminder that December 6th, this coming Thursday evening at 6pm at the North Bowl Lounge N' Lanes The Philly Creative Guides Second Annual Mega Social will be taking place.
More info here:
http://www.phillycreativeguide.com/news/2007/11_november/event/index.htm
And if you use upcoming.org - the event detail is there as well:
http://upcoming.yahoo.com/event/335308/
Join your compatriots in the Philly creative industry for an evening of socializing, networking and fun at Northern Liberties' hot spot - North Bowl Lounge n' Lanes. The cost? Once again, absolutely free with a donation to...
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I arrived in Chicago saturday morning after a quick flight from Philadelphia to O'Hare Airport. I grabbed a train from the airport to downtown and then hoofed it a few blocks on over to the Chicago Hilton and have been having a great time so far. I went to the final stop of the AIR Bus Tour here in Chicago saturday evening and had a great time - great sessions and food - nothing beats a real Chicago style hot dog! I tossed some photos from the stop up on Flickr here. It was fun to get to meet new faces and hang out. I was so rushed and running around at the AIR Bus tour...
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The winners of the Adobe AIR Derby Contest have been announced and are listed in an article posted to Adobe's latest revision of its Developer Connection site here: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/air/articles/air_derby_winners.html. I was really excited to be asked to be one of the judges for the contest, along with Grant Skinner, Andre Charland and Chafic Kazoun - some really outstanding developers. It was quite an honor and privilege to help judge the entries. There were some pretty tough decisions in judging the entries but it was exciting to see all the amazingly cool stuff people are working on out there with AIR...
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 According to an official press release from Adobe, blog entries from RIA Platform Evangelist Ryan Stewart, Flash Player Engineer Tinic Uro, Flash Player Product Manager Emmy Huang, blogger Richard McManus and others, later today Adobe will be posting an updated beta of Flash Player 9 on http://labs.adobe.com that adds support for several of the profiles of industry standard H.264 video and HE-AAC audio CODECs along with some other great enhancements! The final version is scheduled to ship later this fall. The new formats are also going to be...
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Prior to today there had been a handful of unofficial ways to create AIR apps directly from Flash CS3: Guy Watson had put together a nice JSFL solution, which Grant Skinner and his team then built upon. Now there is an official release from Adobe to add in support for creating, testing and packaging up AIR applications right from within Adobe Flash CS3 Professional. It actually adds two "commands" for working with AIR, including an "AIR 1.0" publishing profile. It makes the process dead simple. For those of you out there who haven't had much time, or have felt a bit intimidated by Flex or even just the Eclipse environment, you should...
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I'm sitting in my hotel room in San Jose, CA for Adobe Community Summit week, watching all the RSS feeds, blog posts, twitters, etc. about a ton of exciting news coming from Adobe this evening, not even sure where to start, but here goes:
 First off several betas just hit labs.adobe.com: Flex 3 beta , Flash Player 9 Update 3 , and Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) B1 M4 (aka Adobe Apollo), Adobe AIR Extension for Dreamweaver. There is a lot more to it than just the betas. There is a huge...
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Just a quick reminder that tomorrow May 31st at 6:30pm will be the next Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group meeting.
You do not want to miss this meeting, thanks to Comcast Interactive Media, we are giving away 4 iPods, and courtesy of Adobe, a copy of one of the Adobe CS3 Premium Software bundles (your choice if you win), along with some other goodies! Comcast Interactive Media is also sponsoring the event and providing pizza/salad/sodas so you wont go hungry.
More importantly you do not want to miss our speaker for this event:
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UPDATED: April 16, 2007See the update below for more information, but the Adobe Creative Suite 3 Video Workshop is now available online!
 In all the excitement of the CS3 launch event yesterday (March 27th), there was a bit of info that I didn't see covered anywhere. From what I understand, all copies of the individual point products and the various bundle suites will include a special DVD. This DVD is the "Adobe Video Workshop". It's a pretty unique set of training and overview videos covering the gamut of CS3 products as presented by various members of the...
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Just a quick reminder that tonight at 7pmEST in Center City Philadelphia, the Philadelphia Flash Platform Adobe User Group will be hosting an Adobe CS3 Launch Event meeting. More details on the meeting, time, location, parking, etc. is available here. Hope to see you there!
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 That's right, you can now get the first public Alpha release of Adobe Apollo. The runtime, SDK, developer downloads, showcase gallery, the whole shebang. It's available here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/
Also of note, the official press release from Adobe available here: http://www.adobe.com/aboutadobe/pressroom/pressreleases/200703/031907ApolloLabs.html
There should be tons of chatter and posts over the next few hours and days, so keep an eye on the MXNA agregator, especially the Apollo Smart Category
Apollo Documentation available here: http://labs.adobe.com/wiki/index.php/Apollo:Documentation
You can also grab a PDF version of the...
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 Last month I wrote an entry about the LEGO Mindstorms NXT Mobile Application that allows a great deal of control over your NXT kit via Bluetooth. It's a really great little application. I actually demonstrated it briefly at the local Make:Philly meeting last night as follow up to a previous presentation I had given on robotics, Flash and Legos. Well, there is one totally annoying aspect of the application that tarnishes an otherwise perfect implementation, which I noted in my previous entry. Whenever you launch the application, it has an animated intro screen that plays a really annoying 13 second long bit of techno-like audio. It wouldn't be...
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Ever since Colin Moock pointed out a few months ago that in August of 2006 Jonathan Gay and Robert Tatsumi (the original team responsible for SmartSketch, which evolved into FutureSplash Animator which became Flash) had headed off with Gary Grossman (creator of ActionScript) and Peter Santangeli (former vice president of engineering at Macromedia) to create a new startup called Software As Art, I was instantly curious. Actually, the moment I heard about it, I was actually a bit shocked to hear they had all left given the integral roles they have played in the development and success of Flash over the years. However, that shock was quickly replaced with curiosity and excitement...
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 I just finished playing with very cool VoIP application that uses Flash/Flex to allow you make calls to any phone right from within your browser: GizmoCall. The app appears to be built on the Flex framework, requires Flash 9 for the interface and audio in and out. You dial, speak and talk right through the application. You get five minutes a day of free calls to any phone line, along with unlimited free calls to users Google Talk, Windows Live, Gizmo Project and any other SIP service. You can also of course register and buy credits for more time for outgoing calls that don't qualify as free. THey also provide control over...
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 Adobe has made available a great new application for delivering realtime audio and video through the Flash Media Server -the Flash Media Encoder and it is available now in beta form from http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/fme/. It supports the On2 VP6 CODEC for high quality video streams of live audio/video events. Best of all its targeted to be free for those with valid FMS licenses.
I've been working on a lot of Flash Media Server applications recently, and undertaking a new big project next week and this application holds a great deal of potential for what I'll be doing.
Once again I find it really...
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 I'm watching notes from Steve Jobs Macworld keynote right now via Engadget's live coverage and the iPhone looks really amazing. He was just showing Safari and browsing the New York Times site right on the iPhone. That's when I noticed something that disappointed me a bit - it doesn't appear that the iPhone supports Flash content in the browser (at least not yet, and I could be wrong) but look at this image. I've highlighted the area in question. The image on the left shows a photo of Jobs browsing the New York Times in Safari on the iPhone.
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Anyone who purchased a LEGO Mindstorms NXT Kit earlier this year may have been disappointed when they got it home and opened the box up. One of the advertised features right on the outside of the box was support for controlling it over Bluetooth from your mobile phone. Well in reality, it wasn't ready until very recently, and instead there was a note to keep checking a special page about Bluetooth information on the LEGO Mindstorms NXT site.
I got my kit back in late August, and this was also a disappointment to me, although to LEGO's credit, they did offer (and continue to updated)...
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