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Short History

Adobe Flex (version 1.0) was first released by Adobe back in March 2004 and created quite a stir in the web industry. It was now possible to create real applications that ran in the browser using the Flash Player. The minus side of this new technology was the cost. Flex was first released as a commercial application server with a heavy price tag well over $10,000 USD!

This pretty much priced the new technology out of reach for most companies and individuals, resulting in slow uptake of Adobe Flex.

As with any new technology Adobe Flex had a few teething problems, but on the 25h April 2007, Adobe made an announcement to the developer community, that they were going to release Adobe Flex 3.0 as an open source project. By going open source, this would really increase the uptake of the new technology, but as with other open source technologies (such as PHP and Java), the Flex community could contribute ans shape the future direction of Adobe Flex.

MXML & Action Script

Adobe Flex applications are built using a programming language called Actionscript and MXML. The current version of Actionscript utilised in the industry is Actionscript 3.0.

See what you can develop using flex

Here are some useful examples of the type of application that can be developed using Adobe Flex

• Adobe Dashboard
• Adobe FlexStore
• eBay Desktop Version – Built using Adobe Flex
• Fidelity Investments – Trading Knowledge centre, built using Adobe Flex
• Trenitalia – Real Time train information
• Yahoo Web Messenger

Flash has now become a ‘house hold’ name, but in the past, has always been focused around design and designers.

Then came the next ‘house hold’ name Web 2.0 (although not quite as well known). This was essentially not a new technology but rather driven by a need for a better experience. The major improvement was pages that acted more like desktop applications, in that the page did not update or refresh every time you clicked a link or entered some data in a form field. I think Google’s ‘Gmail’ were one of the more noticeable pioneers in using this technique.

The technology behind this was termed AJAX (Asynchronous JavaScript and XML), and leveraged extra functionality derived from a much older but very standardised language called JavaScript. This is actually very similar in its structure to Actionscript, which is the language behind Flash. AJAX won favours because it allowed efficient data transfer to servers without page refresh and also allowed a certain amount of ‘cool’ interactivity, creating more movement within a web page without even using Flash.

In the background, Adobe were listening to their users and were working on an overall framework of technologies that allowed the existing community of developers and designers the freedom to utilize their skills and allow them to build not only the usual applications they were used to but also to be empowered to build new types of application not easily possible before.

Drawing from some of the most pivotal points in his life, Steve Jobs, chief executive officer and co-founder of Apple Computer and of Pixar Animation Studios, urged graduates to pursue their dreams…To gear up.To get motivated read on..

I am honored to be with you today at your commencement from one of the finest universities in the world. I never graduated from college. Truth be told, this is the closest I’ve ever gotten to a college graduation. Today I want to tell you three stories from my life. That’s it. No big deal. Just three stories.

The first story is about connecting the dots.

I dropped out of Reed College after the first 6 months, but then stayed around as a drop-in for another 18 months or so before I really quit. So why did I drop out?

It started before I was born. My biological mother was a young, unwed college graduate student, and she decided to put me up for adoption. She felt very strongly that I should be adopted by college graduates, so everything was all set for me to be adopted at birth by a lawyer and his wife. Except that when I popped out they decided at the last minute that they really wanted a girl. So my parents, who were on a waiting list, got a call in the middle of the night asking: “We have an unexpected baby boy; do you want him?” They said: “Of course.” My biological mother later found out that my mother had never graduated from college and that my father had never graduated from high school. She refused to sign the final adoption papers. She only relented a few months later when my parents promised that I would someday go to college.

And 17 years later I did go to college. But I naively chose a college that was almost as expensive as Stanford, and all of my working-class parents’ savings were being spent on my college tuition. After six months, I couldn’t see the value in it. I had no idea what I wanted to do with my life and no idea how college was going to help me figure it out. And here I was spending all of the money my parents had saved their entire life. So I decided to drop out and trust that it would all work out OK. It was pretty scary at the time, but looking back it was one of the best decisions I ever made. The minute I dropped out I could stop taking the required classes that didn’t interest me, and begin dropping in on the ones that looked interesting.

It wasn’t all romantic. I didn’t have a dorm room, so I slept on the floor in friends’ rooms, I returned coke bottles for the 5¢ deposits to buy food with, and I would walk the 7 miles across town every Sunday night to get one good meal a week at the Hare Krishna temple. I loved it. And much of what I stumbled into by following my curiosity and intuition turned out to be priceless later on. Let me give you one example:

Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country. Throughout the campus every poster, every label on every drawer, was beautifully hand calligraphed. Because I had dropped out and didn’t have to take the normal classes, I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this. I learned about serif and san serif typefaces, about varying the amount of space between different letter combinations, about what makes great typography great. It was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating.

None of this had even a hope of any practical application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me. And we designed it all into the Mac. It was the first computer with beautiful typography. If I had never dropped in on that single course in college, the Mac would have never had multiple typefaces or proportionally spaced fonts. And since Windows just copied the Mac, its likely that no personal computer would have them. If I had never dropped out, I would have never dropped in on this calligraphy class, and personal computers might not have the wonderful typography that they do. Of course it was impossible to connect the dots looking forward when I was in college. But it was very, very clear looking backwards ten years later.

Again, you can’t connect the dots looking forward; you can only connect them looking backwards. So you have to trust that the dots will somehow connect in your future. You have to trust in something — your gut, destiny, life, karma, whatever. This approach has never let me down, and it has made all the difference in my life.

My second story is about love and loss.

I was lucky — I found what I loved to do early in life. Woz and I started Apple in my parents garage when I was 20. We worked hard, and in 10 years Apple had grown from just the two of us in a garage into a $2 billion company with over 4000 employees. We had just released our finest creation — the Macintosh — a year earlier, and I had just turned 30. And then I got fired. How can you get fired from a company you started? Well, as Apple grew we hired someone who I thought was very talented to run the company with me, and for the first year or so things went well. But then our visions of the future began to diverge and eventually we had a falling out. When we did, our Board of Directors sided with him. So at 30 I was out. And very publicly out. What had been the focus of my entire adult life was gone, and it was devastating.

I really didn’t know what to do for a few months. I felt that I had let the previous generation of entrepreneurs down – that I had dropped the baton as it was being passed to me. I met with David Packard and Bob Noyce and tried to apologize for screwing up so badly. I was a very public failure, and I even thought about running away from the valley. But something slowly began to dawn on me — I still loved what I did. The turn of events at Apple had not changed that one bit. I had been rejected, but I was still in love. And so I decided to start over.

I didn’t see it then, but it turned out that getting fired from Apple was the best thing that could have ever happened to me. The heaviness of being successful was replaced by the lightness of being a beginner again, less sure about everything. It freed me to enter one of the most creative periods of my life.

During the next five years, I started a company named NeXT, another company named Pixar, and fell in love with an amazing woman who would become my wife. Pixar went on to create the worlds first computer animated feature film, Toy Story, and is now the most successful animation studio in the world. In a remarkable turn of events, Apple bought NeXT, I returned to Apple, and the technology we developed at NeXT is at the heart of Apple’s current renaissance. And Laurene and I have a wonderful family together.

I’m pretty sure none of this would have happened if I hadn’t been fired from Apple. It was awful tasting medicine, but I guess the patient needed it. Sometimes life hits you in the head with a brick. Don’t lose faith. I’m convinced that the only thing that kept me going was that I loved what I did. You’ve got to find what you love. And that is as true for your work as it is for your lovers. Your work is going to fill a large part of your life, and the only way to be truly satisfied is to do what you believe is great work. And the only way to do great work is to love what you do. If you haven’t found it yet, keep looking. Don’t settle. As with all matters of the heart, you’ll know when you find it. And, like any great relationship, it just gets better and better as the years roll on. So keep looking until you find it. Don’t settle.

My third story is about death.

When I was 17, I read a quote that went something like: “If you live each day as if it was your last, someday you’ll most certainly be right.” It made an impression on me, and since then, for the past 33 years, I have looked in the mirror every morning and asked myself: “If today were the last day of my life, would I want to do what I am about to do today?” And whenever the answer has been “No” for too many days in a row, I know I need to change something.

Remembering that I’ll be dead soon is the most important tool I’ve ever encountered to help me make the big choices in life. Because almost everything — all external expectations, all pride, all fear of embarrassment or failure – these things just fall away in the face of death, leaving only what is truly important. Remembering that you are going to die is the best way I know to avoid the trap of thinking you have something to lose. You are already naked. There is no reason not to follow your heart.

About a year ago I was diagnosed with cancer. I had a scan at 7:30 in the morning, and it clearly showed a tumor on my pancreas. I didn’t even know what a pancreas was. The doctors told me this was almost certainly a type of cancer that is incurable, and that I should expect to live no longer than three to six months. My doctor advised me to go home and get my affairs in order, which is doctor’s code for prepare to die. It means to try to tell your kids everything you thought you’d have the next 10 years to tell them in just a few months. It means to make sure everything is buttoned up so that it will be as easy as possible for your family. It means to say your goodbyes.

I lived with that diagnosis all day. Later that evening I had a biopsy, where they stuck an endoscope down my throat, through my stomach and into my intestines, put a needle into my pancreas and got a few cells from the tumor. I was sedated, but my wife, who was there, told me that when they viewed the cells under a microscope the doctors started crying because it turned out to be a very rare form of pancreatic cancer that is curable with surgery. I had the surgery and I’m fine now.

This was the closest I’ve been to facing death, and I hope its the closest I get for a few more decades. Having lived through it, I can now say this to you with a bit more certainty than when death was a useful but purely intellectual concept:

No one wants to die. Even people who want to go to heaven don’t want to die to get there. And yet death is the destination we all share. No one has ever escaped it. And that is as it should be, because Death is very likely the single best invention of Life. It is Life’s change agent. It clears out the old to make way for the new. Right now the new is you, but someday not too long from now, you will gradually become the old and be cleared away. Sorry to be so dramatic, but it is quite true.

Your time is limited, so don’t waste it living someone else’s life. Don’t be trapped by dogma — which is living with the results of other people’s thinking. Don’t let the noise of others’ opinions drown out your own inner voice. And most important, have the courage to follow your heart and intuition. They somehow already know what you truly want to become. Everything else is secondary.

When I was young, there was an amazing publication called The Whole Earth Catalog, which was one of the bibles of my generation. It was created by a fellow named Stewart Brand not far from here in Menlo Park, and he brought it to life with his poetic touch. This was in the late 1960’s, before personal computers and desktop publishing, so it was all made with typewriters, scissors, and polaroid cameras. It was sort of like Google in paperback form, 35 years before Google came along: it was idealistic, and overflowing with neat tools and great notions.

Stewart and his team put out several issues of The Whole Earth Catalog, and then when it had run its course, they put out a final issue. It was the mid-1970s, and I was your age. On the back cover of their final issue was a photograph of an early morning country road, the kind you might find yourself hitchhiking on if you were so adventurous. Beneath it were the words: “Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.” It was their farewell message as they signed off. Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish. And I have always wished that for myself. And now, as you graduate to begin anew, I wish that for you.

Stay Hungry. Stay Foolish.

Thank you all very much.

What exactly are tags?

“A simple definition would be to say that tags are keywords, category names, or metadata. In essence, a tag is simply a freely chosen set of textual keywords”

However, because tags are not created by information specialists, they do not at present follow any ubiquitous formal guidelines. This means that items can be categorised with any word that defines a relationship between the online resource and a concept in the user’s mind. Any number of words might be chosen, some of which are obvious representations, others making less sense outside the tag author’s context.

Two well-known examples of folksonomy systems, to which we will refer extensively in this article,are del.icio.us™  and flickr™ , both services owned by Yahoo.

Del.icio.us

Del.icio.us is a tagging system for URLs that integrates with the Firefox browser by means of bookmarklets (JavaScript interface elements) and offers the user the ability to store and retrieve their bookmarks on the del.icio.us website and to identify each bookmarked URL by tagging with appropriate metadata.

Flickr

Flickr is an online photo storage system that allows users to identify their photographs by means of a set of tags. Each site can be browsed or searched for resources that match a given tag.

Definition from wikipedia

Folksonomy is a type of distributed classification system. It is usually created by a group of individuals, typically the resource users. Users add tags to online items, such as images, videos, bookmarks and text. These tags are then shared and sometimes refined.

Origin

Folksonomies became popular on the Web around 2004 as part of social software applications such as social bookmarking and annotating photographs. Tagging, which is characteristic of Web 2.0 services,allows users to collectively classify and find information. Some websites include tag clouds as a way to visualize tags in a folksonomy.

Where v can c folksonomy

Folksonomies arise in Web-based communities where provisions are made at the site level for creating and using tags. These communities are established to enable Web users to label and share user-generated content, such as photographs, or to collaboratively label existing content, such as Web sites, books, works in the scientific and scholarly literatures, and blog entries.

For example….

A folksonomy begins with tagging. On the Website Flickr.com, for example, users post their photos and label them with descriptive words. You might tag the picture of your cat, “cat,” “Sparky” and “living room.” Then you’ll be able to retrieve that photo when you’re searching for the cute shot of Sparky lounging on the couch. If you open your photos and tags to others, as many Flickr devotees do, other people can examine and label your photos.

The ƒütürë?

Folksonomy may hold the key to developing a Semantic Web – web 3.0, in which every Web page contains machine-readable metadata that describes its content. Such metadata would dramatically improve the precision (the percentage of relevant documents) in search engine retrieval lists.

Another widget site to use is www.widgenie.com

Try www.plumbb.com they have some really cool widgets

Don forget to checkout www.podipodi.com

Top 10 MUST HAVE Web Widgets for your online page.
(sorted alphabetically)

1. Bookmark This – http://Addthis.com
2. Email Subscription – Widget http://Feedburner.com
3. Picture Badge – http://flickr.com/badge.gne
4. Recent Visitor – http://MyBlogLog.com
5. Search Blog – http://search.msn.com/siteowner
6. Snapshot widget – http://Snap.com
7. Twitter Update – http://Twitter.com
8. Playlist Video Widget – http://Youtube.com
9. Web Poll Widget – http://PollDaddy.com
10. What I am Listening – http://iLike.com

1. Bookmark This

- http://Addthis.com

2. Email Subscription

- http://Feedburner.com

3. Picture Badge

- http://flickr.com/badge.gne

4. Recent Visitor

- http://MyBlogLog.com

5. Search Blog

- http://search.msn.com/siteowner

6. Snapshot widget

- http://Snap.com

7. Twitter Update

- http://Twitter.com

8. Video Playlist Widget

- Login to http://Youtube.com and then goto http://www.youtube.com/my_playlists to select the embed codefor the playlist

9. Web Poll Widget

- http://PollDaddy.com

10. What I am Listening

- http://iLike.com

A widget is available in a ready-to-use formats and are visually attractive and customizable by the user. It takes the form of pictures, graphs, statistics, summary, or just numbers.

Its a snippet of HTML code which is available from the the website which hosts the widget. you can “copy” that code and “embed” in your web page.

Overview of a Web Widget

The snippet of code which makes a Widget can be a JavaScript code, Adobe Flash plugin, code for embedding Windows Media player or even SilverLight plugin, and is hosted in the website which provides the Widget.