Algorizms

Algorizms moving to Tumblr

2011-02-28T13:07:00.000-08:00

Hey folks, I don't update this blog at all, so I thought I'd move the party over to Tumblr, where I can easily post a variety of stuff more easily.

Head on over to Algorizm's new spot in Tumblr

Why AIM with Facebook is important

2010-02-10T08:36:00.000-08:00

Today, we release the first beta of a bunch of our AIM products which adds official support for Facebook chat! I'm personally very excited about this, as my team works on AIM Express, and we had a blast adding Facebook chat support!

"Official" is the big keyword here. Up until now chat programs that have had "Facebook chat" support have often accomplished this by reverse engineering how the Facebook chat website works. It's really important for us to do this via official means, so that AIM and Facebook can work together to deliver a great experience.

One of the great things about official Facebook chat support in AIM is that we are helping make Facebook Chat available outside of Facebook's site and mobile apps!. If you use AIM for iPhone, for example, your Facebook friends will see you online more often and be able to IM you wherever you are!

Add to that the fact that we show your Facebook news feed and it ends up being pretty awesome way to experience Facebook:

I'd love to hear your feedback on AIM Express. You don't have to install anything. Just visit the beta site and click the green button!

Throwing the baby out with the bath water

2010-01-04T16:05:00.000-08:00

Pro tip for Adobe AIR developers: Don't pick 'bin-release' as the folder to export your .air files!

I just spent a full day trying to figure out what was wrong. I'm so used to other Flash Builder app where when you export a release build, it puts it in a 'bin-release' folder under your project folder.

So when I was building an Adobe AIR app, I was ready to build an .air file, so I did an export release build, and for my destination, I put "bin-release/MyApp.air". And then I couldn't figure out why, but everytime I'd build, I'd see the 'bin-release' folder get created, and then immediately get deleted again when the build was over! I had no .air file!

Uploaded with plasq's Skitch!

Apparently for AIR projects, the bin-release folder is special; it is only created when doing a release build and then deleted as if it were a temp build folder. Placing my .air file in there meant that it, too, got deleted along with the trash.

Lightroom 2.5 erases JPG files from RAW+JPEG in DNG conversion

2009-10-26T21:44:00.000-07:00

Sort of an unexpected behavior I noticed this evening. I'm trying out Adobe Lightroom 2.5 to organize / process photos from my Canon 5D Mark II.

If you go from within Lightroom and choose "Convert to DNG..." one of the options is to 'Delete originals after successful conversion', right after "Only Convert Raw Files".

I've been shooting RAW + JPEG lately, because I keep finding the need to share my photos instantly with some family members, and what I wanted was to end up with a folder of DNG + JPEGs.

Unfortunately, even though "Only Convert Raw Files" is selected, Lightroom deleted all the CR2 files AND the JPG files, leaving only a DNG File! I would have thought that since "Only Convert Raw Files" was checked, it would only remove the processed RAW file, but it took the JPG along with it.

Luckily, it only moved the deleted CR2 and JPEG files to the Trash, so I was able to recover my JPGs and put them back in the folder. From now on though, I'm going to stick with using Adobe's free, standalone DNG converter tool [Windows Link] (Remember to select Camera Raw version 4.6 or later, if you want to someday support Aperture)

Game Mechanics in Social Media

2009-02-02T10:47:00.001-08:00

I just watched this Google Tech Talk video, Putting the Fun in Functional: Applying Game Mechanics to Functional Software. Anyone in the social media industry would probably benefit from watching this video, because it brings up some great points.

Pale Blue Dot (revisited)

2009-01-31T15:41:00.000-08:00

EARTH: The Pale Blue Dot from The Loft Productions on Vimeo.

The Loft Productions created a "re-imagining" of Carl Sagan's famous Pale Blue Dot, and it includes some amazing time lapse photography, as well as an original piano piece. Very moving, and the last time lapse (shifting from day to night) is simply stunning.

My Blu-ray Review of The Final Countdown (1980)

2009-01-30T19:44:00.000-08:00

My Netflix queue is, shall we say, "diverse".

I recently received The Final Countdown on Blu-ray through my queue. I added this movie a while back while in a nostalgic mood, and had sort of forgotten about it until now. The basic premise of the 1980 movie is that a US carrier goes through some storm and travels through time back to the day before Pearl Harbor. The only two things I remember from my childhood about this movie was 1) Some really lame effect of travelling through time, and 2) A scene where friggin' F-14's take on Japanese Zero's!!!!

If there's two things I love, it's Sci-Fi and F-14's. Top Gun is one of my favorite movies (though, technically speaking, the movie's action scenes don't really hold up to modern standards). Clearly I had to watch this movie!

I had both good and bad reactions to this movie. The Final Countdown, according to RottenTomatoes is only half-good, and I definitely had the same feelings. The acting is pretty mediocre, and the ending is anti-climactic. It's funny watching a pre-Terminator movie discussing notions like "time paradox" and "changing the future."

On the other hand, what I wasn't expecting is just *how* well this movie captures life aboard the U.S.S. Nimitz, and it's all captured in fantastic detail on the Blu-ray transfer. Some of the shots of the F-14s flying and the "carrier" at work are awe-inspiring, and you really get a sense of the sheer effort involved in keeping an aircraft carrier fully operational. I do have to say, that the first scene when a Tomcat takes off, I was expecting Danger Zone to be playing in the background!

I'd say if you enjoy Sci-Fi and enjoy military themes, this is definitely a good rental. What makes it particularly entertaining are the 2 "extras" in the Blu-ray. One of them deals with the general production of the movie and some of the challenges, and it's one of the first DVD extra I've seen that actually "talks some smack" about the director and some of the people involved, so that was refreshing!

The second extra is worth a big mention, it deals with the Jolly Roger squadron pilots that were hired to film the aviation scenes (the 5 weeks they spent filming used up their "vacation leave"), and they had some really interesting anecdotes about the production:

There's an infamous scene when an F-14 is dogfighting a Zero where the Tomcat pitches up, rolls to one side and dives toward the ocean, only to pull up with what appears to be mere feet from the surface. Apparently the plane did bottom out with about a 100ft above the deck, and it was so dangerous that they didn't show it to their commanding officers until the movie was in theaters
After shooting one day, the pilots and director were in the hotel bar when Katherine Ross, the female lead showed up. The pilots asked the director to introduce them to her, but she refused to meet them for no reason. So, the next day, one of the pilots took a sign up that read "F*** You, Katherine Ross!" onboard a Tomcat, and while filming a refuelling scene they held it up so the camera got a shot of it. Two days later (it took that long to process the film), in their "dailies" meeting, the brought up the film to review, and, with Katherine Ross present at the table, the first shot of the film was the pilots holding up this sign :)

Watching the extra featurettes made this movie worth the rental, so I'd recommend you give it a look-see, and tell me what you think!

AIM App review by a user

2008-09-15T18:14:00.000-07:00

So, I've been sort of MIA - I've been mainly working on AIM Express, which you can check out from here.

I was just looking around YouTube today and found this review of the app. It's a little blurry, but it was cool to see someone else take the time to review the app that Todd and I wrote. He's been doing a lot of the heavy-lifting lately. Hopefully I'll get some free time to help him out soon!

The App Store is open! Check out AIM for iPhone!

2008-07-10T15:46:00.001-07:00

Woke up this morning to a text from Todd, saying our app was up in iTunes, a day early! I've been reading the reviews and comments, so far some bugs but generally positive! Go get AIM for your iPhone (your current iPhone will work too!), and tell me what you think:

Or click here

Tip: Load the new AIM Express in your Firefox sidebar

2008-07-03T10:51:00.000-07:00

Firefox only: By default, AIM Express runs in a new browser window. I prefer to run AIM Express on my Firefox sidebar, and so I thought I'd share how to do that!

First go to this link:

http://o.aolcdn.com/aim/gromit/beta_3_aim_express/WidgetMain.html

Then add this as a bookmark, make sure to check "Load this bookmark in the sidebar"

And there we go!

An AIM Express low down

2008-06-27T15:58:00.000-07:00

My how time flies! The last time I posted, it was pretty much right after the iPhone SDK announcement by Apple. Since then a lot has happened, and I haven't posted about any of it! I will try to post with more detail on each thing as the summer rolls on.

First off, after the announcement I went back to my day job, which is working on the new version of AIM Express. Which, by the way, is in public beta! Check it out here:
We were given the task of rewriting AIM Express from scratch. AOL hadn't been showing AIM Express any lovin' lately, so we wanted to restart the project for all the folks that still use AIM Express. Since it was a complete rewrite, a lot of features are still being brought in, and we'd love your feedback on what to do! Leave us your feedback once you try it out!

AIM Express 7 is written in Flash, which provided us a great platform to try and build something with a lot of dynamics, while still being cross-browser compatible (for the most part, we're workin on that (thanks IE!)).

So, how do you build an AIM client from scratch in ActionScript? We decided to use the WIM API, which is our new web-based interface for writing your very own AIM app.

Some developer notes on AE7:

It's using pure ActionScript 3.0 - none of the mess of AS2 - which proved to be an excellent development environment along with Adobe Flex Builder. We use Flex builder as our IDE, but it doesn't use any Flex code, just pure low-level flash rendering. On top of that we built our own lightweight UI framework to suit our needs for this project. This allowed us to complete access to the dev pipeline, making things like (simple) skinning and quick layout optimization.

Some of you know that AOL also runs ICQ, and ICQ has a web client as well called ICQ2Go! Well, our team at AOL was given the task of building 1 application that can run as both ICQ and AIM. This was a daunting task, as both apps run basically the same, but have some significant differences. All in all, I think we've been able to build an app that can make both AIM and ICQ users happy. Here's a screenshot of ICQ2Go:

We're still working hard to make this app be great - between Beta 1 and Beta 2, we added custom status messages, tooltips and IM sounds. We are working on some other great features, also keeping in mind that we have some ways to go in making AIM Express 7 a client you'd want to use even if you had a chat client installed on your desktop!

One last thing: The WIM api is free to use for anyone who wants to try writing an app that uses the AIM network (all the way from your own AIM wimzi app, to building a full-featured desktop replacement!). And, if you're using Flash, you'll be glad to know that we decided to open-source the library we wrote for AIM Express 7 that handles talking to WIM for you! I'll be talking more about that in the future, but check out the code at:

wimas3.googlecode.com

iPhone-ay DK-Say ?

2008-03-26T09:16:00.001-07:00

Last month, Todd and I presented AIM for iPhone. In about 2 weeks of development, we had a working prototype of the application that we got the opportunity to present at the Apple SDK announcement. It was great fun being there and working with the Apple folks!

I can't say much more about it - but the end result is that we managed to pull off a prototype in 2 weeks of development using a platform that we had never seen before! The project would not have happened without Todd. As I'd mentioned in our presentation, I'd never done Mac development before, and Todd hadn't used the WIM api heavily before, so our combined skill-sets complemented each other beautifully.

Being up on stage was extremely exciting for us - we got to briefly meet Steve Jobs after the announcement was over, which was the topper for the whole experience!

So what now? Well, Todd and I love working on the iPhone, but we have day jobs as well, so it will be interesting to balance the two and get AIM out in time for the opening of the App Store!

AOL shows awesome mail app written in Silverlight at Mix '08

2008-03-09T23:41:00.001-07:00

The first team I joined at AOL was the client mail team. That team and the awesomely talented engineers there have been working with Microsoft to build an extremely powerful version of AOL's webmail product that uses a lot of intelligent caching and rich UI dynamics to bring a fresh new look to what is traditionally a very boring experience (mail in general).

Here's an interview with Roy Ben-Yoseph and Eric Hoffman about their experience in building the app. Eric was my manager on the client mail team, it's awesome to see what they were able to create in just a few months!

Blazing Fast AOL Mail with Silverlight

Congratulations Eric and Roy!

(AHA! And you were surreptitiously asked to install Silverlight on your machine too!)

I presented AIM for iPhone at the Apple SDK launch!

2008-03-08T13:55:00.000-08:00

Check out the video of the Apple iPhone Enterprise + SDK announcement.

http://events.apple.com.edgesuite.net/rtp20e92/event/index.html?internal=fj2l3s9dm

Lots of great teams presented at the iPhone launch, and it's too much to talk about here, but AOL/AIM/yours truly is about 53 minutes into the preso. Check it out!

Crystal Meth(odology)

2008-01-30T10:30:00.001-08:00

I recently discovered Chet Haase's awesome blog (and comedy blog). In it is a satirical look at the software processes at large:

Crystal Methodology

3 Things that made 2007 great for the tech industry

2007-12-29T11:08:00.000-08:00

It's hard to believe that 2007 is almost over! We've had quite a year, from the increasing heated battle in HD-DVD vs Blu-Ray to Vista & Leopard being released to Adobe's Flex and AIR platform begin to take mindshare in the RIA landscape.

However these are 3 things which I think we will thank 2007 for:

iPhone
The iPhone was the kick-in-the-ass that the mobile industry needed for cell phone manufacturers to realize what can and should be expected of a mobile device. Begun, the clone wars has, but at least someone has set a high bar for usability.

More importantly though, the iPhone has showed to the world what happens when a wireless carrier gives complete control of a phone's feature-set to those who actually know something about usability. Typically wireless carriers make the decisions on what gets supported on a phone, and even what features get crippled (*ahem* Verizon).

Now, Verizon has even announced that in 2008 that they will "open" up their cell phone network to any compatible device. Basically, this means B.Y.O.Phone, but this is an important landmark that hopefully starts a trend in the mobile industry - that consumers should have the choice in their phone and not be told by their phone server which phone they can use. Yeah, there's the GSM/CDMA compatibility issue, but that's a technical limitation, not a policy.

Even AT&T is rumored to be adopting a similar policy on their network. This is huge, folks, this is huge...

DRM Death Tolls
Finally, Digital Rights Management has started to erode. What was once something we could never see happening, is happening. EMI, iTunes, Amazon, Walmart all now offer DRM-free music on their service. This means that you can get your music in typically MP3 and that file is free to be placed where you want to listen to it - in your car, in your iPod and on your computer.

Finally, the music studios realized that DRM only hurts your honest customers and does little to actually stop the ones worth stopping. (I'm not saying they're going with win that battle, but at least music that is not crippled with DRM is now readily and easily available to the general public).

Microsoft learns a valuable lesson
2007 was the year that Vista painfully birthed itself in the world. It brought with it tons of complaints, software incompatibilities and a poorly executed User Account Control scheme. But is it all Microsoft's fault? Not really...

A large portion of complaints in Vista were software incompatibilities. Heck, my iTunes doesn't work right, which is worthy of another separate post. See the thing is, Microsoft's made their beta version available for years before Vista came out! It's not Microsoft's fault if all the software companies languished and didn't bother until after to release new drivers (nVidia) or new software updates (Apple, though could be on purpose).

Vista laptops were so horribly crippled by the deluge of 3rd party shareware crap that gets added on by the likes of Dell, HP, et. al., that it ruined the Vista experience for many people. Again, this is not Microsoft's fault, because they only sell Vista to the manufacturer, then the manufacturer puts crap like Free Trial Quicken! Real Player! on their machines.

Vista, installed clean, is actually quite nice to use, once you get User Account Control under control. That blame is squarely on MS for not doing it the right way (like in Linux or OS X). But, at the end of the day, Microsoft learned a valuable lesson: It may not be your fault that 3rd parties have tarnished your image, but they damn well better be doing something about it!

Hopefully in 2008 and beyond, Microsoft will try to maintain some control in the end-user experience of its software. Take a page out of Apple's book. Those guys control everything.

Custom CSS properties in Flex

2007-11-08T15:36:00.001-08:00

So as some of you know, I've been knee-deep in Adobe-land lately. I've been working concurrently in Flash CS3 and Flex/AS3 projects. One of the aspects of the Flex framework which I still need to wrap my head around is themes / skins / states / css for Flex. All the samples online usually show sample code, but only for styling/theming built-in Flex Components.

In my case I'm building a custom "Buddy List" item renderer, which extends the TreeItemRenderer class in Flex. Out of the box, Flex UI components support CSS Styles (the base class UIComponent does). Since my BuddyListTreeItemRenderer extends UIComponent, I can assign it a style. However, since if you're writing a custom component, I have to manually load my style values and assign them to my UI children.

Not having wrapped my head around how to define a simple "state" for my component, I decided to try and just create some CSS properties and hope that I can read them as a key-value pair. I know, I know, you l337 CSS and Flex masters might be getting flustered right now, but what I found is that I can pass custom properties in CSS, as long as the 'value' is a String.

So, for example:

BuddyListItem {

myFooTextColor : 0xFF0000;

}

doesn't work, But this does:

BuddyListItem {

myFooTextColor : "0xFF0000";

}

All that's left is to pick up the style in my code:

var fooValue:Number = this.getStyle("myFooTextColor");

In most cases, AS3 will cast the value correctly for you.

So I know this is not the ideal solution, and if anyone can provide me a better alternative (please!), I'd really appreciate it!

Why I Love Formula 1 racing

2007-11-06T09:59:00.001-08:00

These guys are masters driving in the rain...

This is Brazilian Felipe Massa of the Ferrari team racing against Polish Robert Kubica of the BMW Sauber team in the last lap of 2007's rain-soaked Japanese Grand Prix. Massa finished 4th and Kubica 5th.

Mossberg on Cellphone Networks

2007-10-23T09:56:00.000-07:00

Walt Mossberg has a great article up on the Wall Street Journal about the archaic business model that our cell phone networks have used for all these years.

I've always thought that the cellphone providers all around the world have always made everyone suffer by controlling exactly what types of phones can be used on their networks, and in many cases, controlling what software/services are even available on your phone!

It's no surprise that companies like Verizon intentionally cripple their cellphones in order to make a quick buck. Bluetooth-capable phones have their wireless file transfer capability turned off, so that owners have to go through Verizon's expensive ringtone service.

Still if you've ever wondering about what you can do with your cell phone, head on over to Howard Forums. These are the people fighting the good fight. You'll be happy you did :)

Dying CMU Professor gives his last lecture

2007-09-20T23:57:00.001-07:00

Saw this through digg today, excerpts from a bittersweet but inspiring lecture by a Computer Science professor at Carnegie Mellon University:

I watched the entire lecture, which is available in a few places. It is worth it if you have the time (about an hour and a half):

Download (250 MB)

Streaming Version

Fix for long iPhone sync times in XP/Vista

2007-09-16T08:29:00.000-07:00

Update: This problem exists in XP as well, so I've updated the post title.

So I've been having some ridiculously long sync times and I couldn't figure out why. I have a pretty fast dual-core machine with 2GB of RAM running Vista Ultimate and iTunes 7.4.1

Ok, here are the relevant sync items:

Lots of contacts
Lots of calendar events (dating back a LONG time)
No ringtones
1GB of music (all mp3s, none from Apple Store)
6 pictures in 2 folders (4 and 2) in 50GB user "Pictures" folder
No Podcasts
No Videos

I went and systematically unchecked everything to sync and added everything back one by one, and the one that causes the long delay for me is syncing photos.

If i have photos unchecked, everything syncs and it's fast (7 seconds). It turns out that even iTunes will search the entire folder for sync-able items, even though you have only certain sub-folders selected.

In particular, I have about 50GB of photos in "E:\Digital Pictures" which Vista considers as "Pictures" (I moved my "Data" folders to a separate drive a while ago, like so: http://www.edbott.com/weblog/?p=1371 )

Even though I'm *only* syncing with 2 sub-folders with a total of 7 pics (435K total!), it seems that all the other folders in Pictures also get searched in the sync, even though I don't have them selected. The delay is caused if at least 1 photo is to be synced.

Example:
Solution: Don't have your iPhone Pictures sync folder in your My Pictures folder (or, I guess any folder with LOTS of pics)
I hope that helps someone else, because it is now a huge relief that I can now sync my iPhone without having to go get a cup of coffee :-D

Narrowing it down farther...
Since I don't want to to move my pictures around or mess with user data folders, these are some questions I hope people can help answer by talking about their own sync experience. Is it because...

there are 50GB of photos in that folder (even though we're sync 7 of them)?
it's the *special* Pictures folder for a user (My Pictures in XP)
the user data has been moved to a separate drive than the Vista install (e: instead of c:)
there's something in my 50GB Pictures folder that iTunes doesn't like?

(I also posted this on the excellent HowardForums)

iPhoney

2007-09-12T22:43:00.001-07:00

So, long story short, I ended up buying an iPhone. I really wanted to wait for the 2nd gen phone (rumor is that the 16GB HSDPA-enabled version out in November), but I had a $125 Mall gift card burning a hole in my pocket which was about to expire, and then came the $200 drop in price, so... yeah.

As revolutionary as the iPhone is, it is a 1st gen product. Many things which we are used to on smartphones do not exist in the iPhone (although many of those "features" are not necessary). I think Apple did a great job of identifying what are the key features in a communications devices and optimized it for that. Everything is a tight and focused experience.

I am still amazed at the apparent lack of all "lag" in a device as small as this. I thought that surely the user experience has to be a little slow, right? If you've every used a Windows Mobile device, you'll know what I'm talking about. However, everything is silky smooth, transitions between apps don't stutter, scrolling is always smooth. It's almost like everything in the OS is always in L2 cache (screw RAM!)

We've all heard that AT&T's EDGE network is slow and horribly crappy. I've had a Cingular 8125 (HTC Wizard) before the iPhone, and let me tell you, browsing on that phone is about clicking a link and then finding something else to look at for 2 minutes. After viewing the same pages on the iPhone, I am surprised how much of that delay was also due to 8125 being a crapfest! I mean, I'm not giving AT&T an award here, the EDGE network is much better on the iPhone than it is on the 8125.

Anyway, call be Debbie Downer, but I like to gauge devices by what they can't do. So here's what I don't like:

I don't know what it is, but I hate iTunes.

Unlike other Apple products, it just feels slow, bulky and resource hungry in Windows. Just scrolling your library is cringeworthy. I have a fairly powerful machine too: Dual Core X2 Athlon 64 4400+ with 2GB of RAM, yet iTunes is just... slow. Like an app that's dying for a lite version.

The iPhone doesn't have disk mode like other iPods.

I don't know if it's a technical or legal limitation, but it's a big problem for me. You see, I use the excellent Winamp to manage all my music and transfer music to my iPods. This is possible if disk mode is enabled on the device. Even from iTunes, I cannot manually choose what music goes in my iPhone!! I have to "sync" my music. Thanks Apple, that's great - I'll take my 160GB of music and videos, and have you decide which of my music I should listen to in my 4GB iPhone. Oh what's that? If I have my media distributed across different machines I'm screwed unless I sync only with one computer? Hey, now we're talkin!

A common "workaround" is to make playlists for everything to get it on the iPhone. But this is exactly the type of cumbersome user experience that I thought Apple shunned. I mean, they practically invented drag & drop-style intuitive experiences!

UPDATE: I'm not the only one.

Sorry, back to iTunes for a sec: When my iPhone is syncing, one of my CPUs hits 100%.

I didn't notice until I looked up at my Winbar that one of my CPUs was crying for help. In that particular sync, I had modified 4 contacts on the phone. It takes me like 15minutes to finish one sync! Maybe it's a Vista thing, but Sheesh

Unlike other people, most of my gripes are with iTunes experience. The device itself has been excellent so far. I'm glad I replaced my 8125 for it. Now it's time to hack the thing :)

Some of the cool stuff I'm interested in are the XBMC Remote. A list of cool hacks/sites are aggregated at TUAW's iPhone Page.

What Flex needs: A proper HTML component

2007-09-05T15:55:00.000-07:00

One of the upcoming features of Wimzi is (hopefully) emoticon support. Since I'm new to Flash, I didn't think much of it because the TextArea control (mx.controls.TextArea) could handle all the HTML I'd thrown at it so far. That is, until I tried to put a wee little <img> tag in there.... holy line breaks Batman!

Flex has the same issue (as it also uses mx.controls.TextArea). Some solutions I've seen vary from crazy to ingenious, but none of them seem very elegant:

Use a separate "layer" for emoticons over your textArea

This is computationally expensive, not to mention probalby a pain in the ass to do. This wold involve calculating the width of every characters and leaving enough space in the text layer to handle an emoticon, then another layer (with only emoticons) would be composited on the text, making it look like it's part of the text.
I can't imagine doing this for a text control that could potentially resize, not to mention dealing with scrolling.
I think this is what userplane's excellent WebMessenger app uses.

Use an Iframe from the surrounding webpage and "place" it where you need to, making it look like it's part of your Flash app.

This is what this guy has done.

You make an ExternalInterface call to the outlying JS to make you a div, and then control the position and height of that div. The absolute position has to be calculated using the localToGlobal() function in Point.
The problem with this is that you are now tied to the browser
Your flash becomes less embeddable in things like Facebook because they might prevent the creation of div tags, etc.

Create your own "emoticon" font!

Embed a custom "font" of your emoticons into your .FLA or Flex project, and then just insert into your text as just any other text.
Seems the most elegant, though very specific to emoticons
Doesn't help for any other HTML features (Buddy Expression wallpapers, etc)
Corey suggested this one, but I don't know yet if it will work.

All of this results in feeling like Adobe really should have provided us with a way to have bits of HTML work correctly within the Flash runtime. They have added this for the AIR runtime - those lucky guys get an "HTML" component based on the Webkit platform (what Apple's Safari browser uses), but the web world has no such luck. Perhaps in the future they can provide us with some sort of an "official" workaround or just fix it outright. I mean, we are supposed to be making RIA's, right?

Tell me who you are in Wimzi

2007-08-30T19:20:00.000-07:00

Just a quick note: I've missed a lot of Wimzi IMs because I wasn't at the computer. Usually it's from someone I know, but I can't tell who are unless you say who you are, or change your nickname.

So, sorry if I don't get back to you! Let me know your name so I can write you back later :)

Flex framerate attribute

2007-08-29T11:10:00.000-07:00

I always though that one could tell Flex apps from Flash, not only because Flex generally has standardized UI components, but also because Flex always looked a little jerky to me. When things resize, etc, it was never as smooth as Flash.

But I didn't realize that Flex has a default framerate of 24fps. You can change the framerate to whatever you want in the main Application tag:

<mx:Application frameRate="60" .../>

Simple change..... soo much better! As a bonus, the added fps doesn't seem to affect my CPU at all :). Perhaps it's a matter of finding a 'sweet spot' for your application. 60fps works pretty well for me right now...

Skype pwned by Patch Tuesday

2007-08-20T10:16:00.001-07:00

This is one of those things that makes us realize the fragile world of software. Skype's servers went down during Patch Tuesday (when Microsoft releases major updates to Windows through Windows Update). The sheer number of computers simultaneously restarting and reconnecting to the Skype system was enough to bring the Skype servers to a resource-deprived crawl.

Of course, a bug in their code to deal with the issue didn't help either. Apparently their algorithm for "self-healing" network resources had a bug which caused, um, not much "healing". Arstechnica has more here.

Skype is what I use to call into AOL meetings and keep in touch with my family in Bangladesh. At $30/year (yes, YEAR), I get unlimited calls to phones in the US/Canada, plus the cheapest international calling rates EVAR. Something like 6 cents/minute to call Bangladesh. Unbelievable yet awesome :).

Skype works best with a USB headset (so much easier to plug in than having to reach behind your computer to plug in headphone/microsoft jacks). This is the one I use: Logitech USB 350 Headset. It doesn't hurt that the headset is also awesome for games like Battlefield 2, either.

Wimzi

2007-08-06T16:19:00.000-07:00

Update: We released Wimzi for Facebook!

So, I mentioned briefly earlier that I'd joined the AIM team. One of the things that I'm working on is the Flash-version of Wimzi.

What is Wimzi? Wimzi is a way for people that have blogs, Facebook accounts (coming soon) and Myspace accounts to put up a little panel from which the visitors to their page can IM them. The best part is that the person's IM screenname is not exposed, and the visitors do not need to sign in (or have an AIM account) to talk! Go there and create one now.

I'm working on some newer, fresher UI concepts for the next version of Wimzi, so keep checking here as I might test some out on this site.

In the mean time, I have one set up for me on the right -------------->

Hot AIR?

2007-07-17T12:56:00.000-07:00

So, I've joined the AIM team! I'll be working on using WIM (Web AIM) technologies to build cool new apps, so I'm very excited about the new opportunity :)

Ok, enough about me. Yesterday the Adobe onAIR Bus Tour rolled into LA, so James, Richard and I drove up to get a hands on introduction to AIR (formerly codenamed Apollo). I'll post my conference experiences later but I thought I'd talk a little just about AIR first.

AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) is a platform to build desktop applications. Well, actually rich internet applications (RIA's). Ok, so it has the Inturnets in its name, is it a web page? Is it a browser? No, it's a way to use either Flex (.mxml + .as), or HTML (.html + .js) for building full featured desktop apps. You get a lot of cool services through the AIR runtime, so you can get access to file I/O and drag & drop support to JS, and you can now save and open files from your computer.

I know what you're thinking: "What about the security issues?!? This is dangerous!", "So basically it's like a webpage with system-level permissions, right?" Well, no and NO. See you're still thinking of this as a webpage! Stop! Yes, you're using HTML + JS to build an app, but it's not an app that you accidentally navigate to and all of a sudden somethings writing files to your desktop.

Take the browser out of the picture. Go on, I'll wait. Ok. Ready?

A user has to have the AIR runtime installed on their machine. Just like Acrobat Reader, etc. Get it here.
You can now download and install .air files. What's an .air file? It's a fancy relabeled .zip package that contains MXML, ActionScript, HTML, JS (or any combination thereof), and whatever else resources (images, etc.) that gets installed on your machine. I'm talking in Add/Remove programs, Start menu integration, etc.
The point is, .air files don't just suddenly execute by you going to a web page. The user has to download it and install it.

So what does this give you AKA "Why are you trying to not be on a webpage for chrissake??"? First of all, the user experience on a desktop is much richer than that on a webpage. Ever keep an eBay page open and occasionally refresh it so that you can keep track of your bid? Imagine what eBay on the desktop can do:

First off, when you look at eBay, you're looking at a webpage, in a browser, in a window, on your desktop. That's a lot of visual and mental clutter. Imagine an eBay window that has your watched item and is tracking it for you, that is designed to be just for eBay
You can get a growl-like notification when you get outbid. Now compare that to hitting the Refresh button constantly on your browser. No comparison :)

Of course, the example above was not made up by me, eBay has been working on an AIR app: San Dimas.

AIR apps have started popping up all over the place. Pownce released their AIR app the same day they opened the site. FineTune (which I've blogged about before) has a desktop media player that, because it's on your desktop, can now act not only as your internet radio, but mix in your music from your iTunes library. A web app can't do that.

Ok, so I've sold you on rich internet apps, right? This is obviously not new, as Boxely can also do these things. But Adobe has put a lot of people behind promoting this platform and are determined to make it the de facto standard for rich internet application development.

Microsoft Surface-like demo

2007-06-04T17:01:00.001-07:00

Pretty cool. Written in Silverlight:

Microsoft Surface-Style Demo

If you wait long enough (depending on your connection), it even shows a video which you can manipulate while it's playing :)

More info here.

Boxely mentioned in TopCoder's TC Channel

2007-05-25T14:54:00.001-07:00

TopCoder recently launched the "TC Channel" which is a new video podcast site where the TC staff deliver news and information in the world of TopCoder.

What's interesting is that Boxely is (briefly) mentioned in their first episode!

Check it out.

There's no indication of time on their video timeline, but we're mentioned around the 10% mark.

Okay Already

2007-05-16T10:28:00.000-07:00

So there's obviously a lot of buzz around Silverlight from Microsoft. It's gotten people asking a lot of questions also within AOL. What's gonna happen to Boxely? How can it compete against Microsoft? Etc.

We don't know the answers to the questions yet, and we're looking into it. There's been a lot of positive and negative opinions on Microsoft's latest offering, so I've decided to check out WPF from the context of Boxely. I'll post my findings and guides to getting set up with WPF. So to the two of you who read this blog, watch this space :)

Some of you may be thinking, "Why WPF? Why not Silverlight?" Well, WPF is the desktop solution for applications (like Boxely), while Silverlight is targeted for the Web. (Silverlight is a subset of WPF, in case you didn't know). So the real question is how does Boxely hold up against WPF, not Silverlight. When we decide to release a "Boxely Web runtime", I'll take a look at Silverlight.

First things first. WPF needs .NET Framework 3.0. If you have Vista, stop now; it's already installed. But on XP, you need to download a 2.8MB installer. Oh no wait, I'm sorry, it's 26MB! That's right folks, don't be fooled by the size of the installer. That alone is just the piece that goes and fetches the actual components. Kinda made me wonder why the bootstrap installer is still 2.8MB. I suppose there's logic in there to pick and choose what components are really needed based on your system configuration, but whatever.

Back in the day

2007-05-08T09:27:00.000-07:00

When I started at AOL, I didn't really realize how much client UI platforms needed a kick in the butt. I had come from a Java AWT/Swing world. While I'd gotten pretty handy with its layout managers (i usually would write the UI part by hand as well, because the "WYSIWYG" editors at the time would barf out hundreds (thousands?) of lines of code), getting to use Boxely for the first time I was blown away.

In hindsight, I shouldn't have been, because I'd done some web programming and it shouldn't have been such an eye opener to see an easy-to-use declarative layout engine actually running. Of course, I should have also known about Mozilla's development of XUL and their Gecko layout engine. (Interestingly, I used to look up XULPlanet's references when I was starting out learning Boxely)

Since then, a lot more players have set their sites on being the next "UI" platform. Adobe Apollo, of course, and Microsoft's XAML (in WPF and Silverlight). OpenLaszlo is also saying "don't forget about us!" Mozilla is working hard on greatly improving their layout engine (Gecko 1.9) and their graphics (codenamed Cairo?), set to drop for Firefox 3.

I'm not sure what Boxely's position is in this new landscape. We're desktop-only right now, though we are working on running inside a browser (essentially creating a "/e" version of our platform). Cross platform is something we're also very interested in.

Still Boxely has some tricks up its sleeve; It uses the blazing fast graphics renderer written (mostly) by Sree Kotay. The styling system, in my opinion is better than CSS if only because it's XML-based, and we support animations in a very easy-to-use markup language.

2007 is definitely shaping up to be the Platform Wars. I'm sure I'm not the only one following this very closely...

Update: Looks like Sun's jumping onto the bandwagon with JavaFX

Keeping up with the Joneses

2007-04-13T14:46:00.000-07:00

Somehow, AOL is always playing catch up. Even when we are ahead, we end up in the back of the pack. Why do we lose momentum so fast? We're like a Ferrari that weighs 2 tons*.

I really do think that what we've done with Boxely is great. We've solved some very important problems when it comes to dynamic UI (and possibly created others ;)), and we've managed to keep it extremely easy to use. Yet, our management priorities are on serving our main clients, AIM and OpenRide, not actually extending the platform to 3rd parties. That's fine, but you set yourself up for things like this and this to come and recover all the ground you made.

Latest bad news: The FineTune Desktop player made by Adobe Apollo.

I tell you, this should've been us....

*this is why we're good going downhill ;)

Respecting your OS Look & Feel

2007-04-06T11:18:00.000-07:00

I've always said that any self-respecting UI presentation runtime should *always* be able to honor the host operating system's look & feel. I think it was Java's horrible "cross platform look & feel" that really burned this opinion into my soul.

Eventually, even Java relented and there is now a getSystemLookAndFeel() function to support looking like your favorite operating system. Still, this support lacks in many ways, not taking advantage of XP / Vista's "themeing" engine.

XUL has largely succeeded in getting Firefox, Thunderbird et. al. to look like they are native applications, but XUL isn't without it's own issues. Rather than rely on straight-up win32 or .NET libraries, how can you make your UI platform support the operating system?

I've set out to enable Boxely to leverage its operating system look & feel and deliver a new theme for all the base gadgets. Ok, so Boxely isn't cross-plaform (yet ;)), but given all the flavors of windows themes, we can't just fake the look.

So here's what Boxely currently supports from the operating system:

It can use the GetSysColor() call in win32, to get the reported "theme" colors from Windows. This is a good way to at least keep from leaving the OS's color palette. But that can't draw complex shapes and gradients. How about drawing my checkbox for me?

For that we have support for a "OSTheme(element, part, state)" type of fill. This leverages the DrawThemeBackground() function available in XP. To support Window 98 and when Windows is using the classic theme (the theme manager is no longer available in this situation, just like 98/Me), our code will fall back on DrawFrameControl() from back in the day, and even resorting to hardcore manual drawing to recreate the old-skool Windows look.

Starting off, I noticed that text fields are ignored in Classic theme because they're not supported by DrawFrameControl, so I went ahead and added support to fall back on my manually drawn text fields.

We haven't implemented everything possible in DrawThemeBackground(), so I set out to finish up the list. As I added some new parts and states, some of them worked, some of them didn't. I thought it was my code, but then I found the useful ThemeExplorer application, and found out that even though Microsoft has this API, the default Luna theme doesn't even implement all that it says it will! Column header drop down arrows don't even show up (Interestingly, they show in Vista, but even Vista's theme is not fully rounded out).

I'm not sure what to do at this point. Sure, I could hack together something that kinda-sorta looks like a Windows UI element using only GetSysColor(), but I wish Microsoft would have come through here. How can you blame them I suppose; they still haven't figured out UI for themselves yet.

Photosynth Preview

2007-02-27T09:51:00.000-08:00

Yeah, it's been forever, but I’ve gotta talk about this. Microsoft isn’t the slow technology giant it once was and this a perfect example of some of the research they’re bringing to the public. Photosynth can take collections of photos (of, say, like a famous landmark) and map the photos out in 3D space for you. The best part is the interface is smoothly animated and intuitive. Check it out:

Photosynth Technology Preview

If you’re using Firefox, you may get a “installing” page and not much else. This is because you have to allow labs.live.com to be a trusted publisher that you can install software from. There should be a yellow bar near the top of the page, telling you that the software was blocked. Click on the button on the right, and put labs.live.com in the “Allow” list. Then refresh the page.

Interesting Views on the CEO

2006-12-01T10:37:00.000-08:00

Arstechnica has a small article discussing different opinions on the departure of Jon Miller and the future of the motherland.

Visualizing Sorting Algorithms

2006-11-16T07:04:00.000-08:00

Everyone who goes to school for Computer Science will learn about Big O notation and Sorting algorithms. Here's a great visualization (needs Java enabled on your browser) of a few sorting algorithms:

http://www.cs.rit.edu/%7Eatk/Java/Sorting/sorting.html

Using solidBrush: Addressable Colors

2006-10-31T11:18:00.000-08:00

Usually for your UI you will have a color scheme which uses the same colors in different places. You can normally just set up a style element which everything inherits, like this:

<style id="lightBG" fill="#ADADAD"/>
<style id="myLightButton" inherits="#lightBG"/>
<style id="lightPanel" inherits="#lightBG" flex="1" padding="5"/>

but this doesn't work so well if you're using the same color across different style types, like fills, strokes and textColors. What you end up with is the color being used all over your style file:

<style id="myLightButton" fill="#ADADAD"/>
<style id="myTextButton" textColor="#ADADAD"/>
<style id="myPanel" fill="#FF0000" stroke="#ADADAD"/>

To do that, you can use a solidBrush:

<solidBrush id="lightColor" fill="#ADADAD"/>
<solidBrush id="darkColor" fill="#505050"/>
<style id="myLightButton" fill="url(#lightColor)"/>
<style id="myTextButton" textColor="url(#lightColor)"/>
<style id="myPanel" fill="#FF0000" stroke="url(#lightColor)"/>
<linearGradientBrush id="solidBrushGradient">
<rotateTransform center="50% 50%" angle="90"/>
<gradientStops>
<gradientStop color="url(#lightColor)" offset="0%"/>
<gradientStop color="url(#darkColor)" offset="100%"/>
</gradientStops>
</linearGradientBrush>
<style id="myGradientPanel" fill="url(#solidBrushGradient)"/>

This also lets you store all of our colors in a single place so colors can be updated more easily as well.

IE7 - OMG Tabbed Browsing!!1!!!

2006-10-26T09:27:00.000-07:00

So now that IE7 has been released to the public and we are on the cusp of automatic upgrades for it, get ready for the world's n00bs finally discovering tabbed browsing. It has some serious implications. Here's what i mean:

You'll have people come up to you and try to explain why tabbed browsing is so great (even though you've told them about Firefox a thousand times). People will now talk about tabbed browsing as the greatest thing since sliced bread (it is), and they'll credit Microsoft.

Heck, there will probably even be articles with titles like "Beginner's Guide to Tabbed Browsing!" or "How to get the most out of Tabbed Browsing!" All of a sudden your friends that never listened to you when you told them about tabs or even cared which browser they used will try to introduce you to tabs.

I can't wait for the collective groans from the legions of users of Firefox / Opera / Maxthon / everything else that came before it.

7 Reasons You Should Check Out AIM Lite

2006-10-16T10:42:00.000-07:00

UPDATE: Greg has a post about AIM Lite/ET on his blog and it contains screenshots, including what one of the developers' cubes look like. Read his post.

AIM Lite Website

A small group of AOL developers have been working on an alternate version of AIM. This version doesn't really have a name because nobody knows how to describe it. AIM Lite, Lighter AIM, AIM ET (Experimental Technology). I think the best name for it is LAIM. It's cool, easy to say, makes fun of itself (lame), and differentiates itself from AIM by not having 'AIM' as a word in its name. I've had some experience working with members of the LAIM team, and here are 7 reasons you should check it out.

1. Lightning Fast. There's no (software) middle man. Every component is there for a reason, and great steps have been taken to ensure that performance is not compromised. Sign in time is quick, and even large buddy lists load dramatically fast. I was surprised by how fast the app feels.

2. Small Footprint. No middle man means less mouths to feed. Memory usage is lower than most IM clients by a long shot. The LAIM team treats new code like its a module in a space capsule, if its too heavy it won't fly. And it's the plan to keep it that way.

3. Simple Installation. Sometimes big companies like to advertise other products or bundle their apps with other things. Even worse, these things are sometimes opt-out, not opt-in. LAIM uses a nice NSIS installer that cleans up whatever it installed on your machine. If you try and install a newer version of LAIM, the installation is silent, like Google Talk's upgrade feature.

4. Back to Basics. This is a reset. LAIM is back to chat and file transfers. Other things are being added, but the point is to keep it as a tight functional core. Many people who run LAIM for the first time will probably feel like the fluff is gone. Things that can be done inline are done inline. UI clutter is at a minimum (well, because there aren't that many features yet). For example, there are no menu bars. The menu bar on the Buddy List is the leftmost titlebar button that looks like a drop down arrow.

5. Room to Grow. Firefox proved to the world that building an app as a platform is the way to go. LAIM's being written to eventually be a platform for allowing extensions / plug-ins. Let's not forget theming, that's on the plan too. By letting it be a platform, new experiences can be tested in LAIM before making it to production AIM clients (like AIM Triton).

6. New Technology. LAIM uses Boxely, the new XML-based UI platform, which is also being developed at AOL. Boxely is like XUL on steroids. Easy to customize but very powerful. It supports animations, compositing UI elements like Photoshop layers, different layouts in a simple XML language which is easy to understand. There's a reason LAIM doesn't encrypt its UI, you can find out why yourself ;)

7. It Needs You. You can tell the LAIM developers what you like and don't like about the app. Unlike other apps at AOL, this is an experimental client, so the requirements are well, flexible. Click on the WTF? button and leave feedback. You can believe me that they read every comment. Use the comments to pitch an idea of how you think instant messaging should be.

This is really early software, so even the site is not finished, but check it out and download it. I promise it won't bite!

Windows Picture & Fax Viewer quirk

2006-10-11T17:34:00.000-07:00

Here's a weird one: It turns out that Windows Picture & Fax Viewer's performance becomes super crappy if you have a bad shortcut in the same folder as the picture you're viewing. I had uninstalled an app but had a shortcut lying around on my desktop when I realized that opening images there would cause my hard drive to thrash.

I think this comes from the part that pre-loads images to improve performance. Still, it shouldn't take too long to discover that a local link is invalid.

Funny XBox 360 video

2006-09-12T12:15:00.000-07:00

I'm still having after-laughter about this video.

Link to Kotaku

Not a good time to be Rizwan's Hard Drives

2006-09-11T12:45:00.000-07:00

Last week, I received a replacement 74GB 10,000RPM SATA drive, for the same model which hosts my operating systems. Not a big deal, 'cause Western Digital's excellent warranty service sent me a new drive in a couple of days, so I can transfer files and then return the defective one.

Then, on Friday, a problem occurred on my storage drive - the one with all my pictures, music, and development folders. Those of you AOLers familiar with CMSuite for Windows will know what I'm talking about. The cm folder which holds all your compressed libraries (used to reduce the amount of time for building other stuff, like Boxely), was suddenly unable to have any new files downloaded to it or deleted from it. Further inspection revealed that some of the files and folders had become locked, like when you try and delete a file that's open by some application. Nothing worked. Rebooting, Process Explorer to see open handles, MoveFiles - access denied. I even downloaded Knoppix and booted from CD and tried to delete - Access Denied! Yeesh. Time to buy a new HDD, so I went over and bought a shiny new 500GB SATA drive to take over for my 250GB EIDE drive. So long, Maxtor.

I was planning to work this weekend to submit something great for the internal Boxely contest. Hey, when you're buying a house, any cash prize isn't a nice-to-have - it's a goal. I only had about 5 hours to come up with something. Let's see what happens.

AOL 9.0 considered badware

2006-08-28T11:16:00.000-07:00

From slashdot (comments):
"The bad news at AOL keeps coming. First they get in trouble for releasing search data on more than half a million customers, then it gives away security software with a nasty EULA, now its free client software is accused of acting like badware according to Stopbadware.org, the Google-funded rating group."

Hopefully someone at AOL will get the point. We can't claim to know what the user will or won't like. Let's offer them a service without ramming others down their throat. There's other ways to help people "discover" new products. Other similar tactics, in other companies:

Would you like to supersize it for 25 cents more? (McDonald's, though they don't 'supersize' anymore)
Try our 8-week free subscription to EW weekly? (Best Buy)
Sign up for our Gap card today? It's 10% off!!
Click here to NOT receive FREE email updates and information about our new products

It's like how you have to pay extra to 'avoid' getting telemarketed to death (yes i know about donotcall.gov). I used to think that everyone sort of knew the difference between right and wrong. These are some things that I wish every software developer would follow:

Your software is "invited" to a user's computer, don't abuse that trust
Install what you need to get your software running, no more.
If you are installing a systray app (or something that runs at startup), ask the user if this is ok.
Your "update" software shouldn't run outside of the app that you just installed.

Hopefully Vista's UAP will block things like trying to add "AOL is teh best intarnet!!1!!" links to your Favorites and Desktop. OK, rant over. I just wish we could have an official "hippocratic oath" like doctrine applied to our software, similar to this.

Go vote this up on Netscape.

Return of the Intellimouse Explorer 3.0

2006-08-23T14:10:00.000-07:00

Due to immense pressure from fans and gamers, Microsoft is bringing back the much-loved Intellimouse Explorer 3.0. It is arguably the best Intellimouse Microsoft ever made, now with improved feet, for better gaming.

In the last few years I went through a couple of different mice, always returning back to this mouse, because nothing else provided the same kind of tactile feedback. The scroll wheel, in particular, is the last one before Microsoft went for the no-notch feel of the new ones. It also is the only one where *clicking* the wheel is the most comfortable (compared to 4.0 and up). Mouse wheel clicking is very useful in Firefox, to open links in new background tabs, as well has closing a tab (by middle clicking on it). For some reason, newer mice (by design) have harder-to-click scroll wheels, and they are annoying for gaming or browsing, in my opinion.

So, if you never had an Intellimouse Explorer 3.0, here's your chance to get a new one! Now, if you also get a Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000 (like I did), you'll be all set with your (back to 2000) hardware!

read more | digg story

Back in DC for a week

2006-08-17T01:57:00.000-07:00

So I'm going to be back in the Dulles campus starting Friday, staying till next Friday. I'm mainly coming for the Boxely Code Kitchen which is happening tomorrow (8/18) from 1-4pm. In the code kitchen I'm going to cover the basics of Boxely and also demonstrate how to use the MaxiXML service to interface with the Flickr public API.

This is all part of the Boxely Contest we are having. The contest is in-house only, and there are cash prizes involved, as well as a chance to have your stuff be included in the upcoming public release. Submissions are due Sept. 10. If you're an AOL employee, I'm sure you'll get email on it soon.

I'm also here to do some training for Project Infusion employees next Friday (8/25), before I fly back. The rest of the time, I'm going to be working on the public release of Boxely.

Speaking of which, Larry's set up a Boxely community site, so check it out.

I'm currently working on the new toolkit for Boxely and the new samples that showcase the toolkit. Within the toolkit, I've been focusing on cleaning up the library's gadgets. Things such as gadget inheritance, properly cascading style trees, and yes, a new look & feel. We can't have everything remind us of AOL can we? ;)

For those of you who have an questions on Boxely (yes I do Boxely tech support!), or want to request something be covered in the code kitchen, leave a comment.

Nice work, folks

2006-08-07T16:29:00.000-07:00

Not to be outdone by the launch of AOL Video, AOL Research FTW! As Shawn said, how 'bout just ONE week?

read more | digg story

AOL Video (beta) launches

2006-08-07T09:49:00.000-07:00

So today we launched our beta of AOL Video. First impressions look really great; hopefully we can see some good integration with AOL's UnCut video site in the near future. Mixing professional content with user submitted content in a nice slick interface might be the key differentiator against other sites like YouTube, Google Video, etc.
So far clicking on a video link opens an old school popup "player" window with extras like playlists, etc. I've never like this way of showing video. I think a better approach is embedded video on a page with comments, etc, just like UnCut. (And speaking of UnCut, why do you have to install a "VideoEGG" something or other, just to upload a video?)
I know that everyone on the AOL Video team has been working extremely hard in the last few months to get this beta out the door (nights, weekends, you name it), so definitely big congrats for the team for getting the job done.

read more | digg story

Boxely Code Kitchen

2006-08-02T22:33:00.000-07:00

I'm running a code kitchen tomorrow of Boxely. It's going to be for pretty much any developer at AOL Dulles. It's to help point people in the right direction for the contest. What contest you ask?

Well, we're trying to release a public version of Boxely at the end of this month. So we are hosting a contest (in house only, sorry!) to see who can make the coolest little app using Boxely and preferably the MaxiXML service. The MaxiXML is a wrapper around the XMLHttpRequest object used to help write AJAX-y apps, but in a local (connected) environment.

Stop by 2-5pm in the Berners-Lee (CC2) room if you want a brief introduction to Boxely and the MaxiXML service and to just pick up contest information. Following that we'll do a hands on demo and try to write up a sample on the spot. Yeeeeeeeeah we'll see how that goes, but we have some ideas ;-)

Work Update

2006-07-25T22:32:00.000-07:00

Warning: Non-techy people turn away now. I did not just post this.

Ah yes... I do have a job. Lately, we've all been working hard trying for a public preview of Boxely. You heard it here first, folks! I've been working on... documentation! I just went through much of the Boxely toolkit, updating the comments as we now are now testing an automated documentation generator (a la Doxygen). Hopefully when you download the SDK, you'll marvel at how clear the comments are!

Other than that, there's been some bug fixes. One of the recent changes made in Boxely is that it no longer loads the default toolkit (gadgets.box) when the renderer is instantiated. This is the first step to making Boxely's UI toolkit completely separate from the renderer. While the hope initially was that we'd maintain a global toolkit, and every app would just use/extend that toolkit, everyone seems to want different things, and the global toolkit was packin' on a few pounds. So now, we can leave it up to you: if you want the toolkit, go right ahead and explicitly import it, or you're free to make up a toolkit entirely yourself.

I've been playing around with Vista Build 5472, and I feel like it's time for a little toolkit upgrade ;)

Net Neutrality

2006-07-21T22:48:00.000-07:00

You've obviously heard that some companies are pushing for the development of a "premium" tier of the Internet, whose traffic is given higher priority than normal traffic. To me, this is completely absurd, as the it goes against the whole principle of the Internet. I'll let Jon Stewart explain this to you:

More on this issue:

Update: Here's a link to a more serious video on the issue.

Getting your Sound Blaster Live! card to work with Vista Beta 2

2006-07-16T23:11:00.001-07:00

So, I'm compelled to explain how i got my sound card to work in Vista Beta 2, mainly because I scoured the reaches of "teh InterWeb" and couldn't find a fail-safe solution. Here it is:

Just got to Creative's site and download the latest drivers for XP. The file you download should be LiveDrvUni-Pack(ENG).exe.
Running this installer doesn't work, so you have to right-click the exe, go to Properties > Compatibility tab, and check "Compatibility Mode" for Windows XP Service Pack 2.
Now run the installer, it should be able to "detect" you sound card right and get basic sound working.

Ok, altruistic moment over.

Ahh the irony of the Internet

2006-06-15T11:25:00.000-07:00

We launched our beta "digg-killer" on Netscape.com. Here's what was on the first page: Two negative articles about AOL. I thought I should record it for posterity's sake:

www.beta.netscape.com

I think this is a genuinely good use of the Netscape brand. It's like giving the name back to the users. Also, since editorial control is largely left to the site's users, we'll have to be prepared to deal with a lot of negative press about AOL on the site for a while.

Visually the site is a little busy, but at least it's not tying in every other AOL product we have. I like that there are non-technical channels (something digg is about to introduce to their site soon), although the "text matrix" is a little distracting from the stories.Overall i think this is a good move, on AOL's part.

The one thing i'd suggest is to NOT use the word member. Sexual references aside, "member" implies exclusivity and a financial prerequisite to something. A "user" is a better term, IMO.

The Mercedes-Harley People Mover

2006-06-14T12:28:00.000-07:00

Over the weekend, my Mercedes ML430 SUV broke its catalytic converter. It sounded so awesome we went out and bought cheap leather jackets and road wraps for our heads. Can you say UPGRADE??

Beat that, AMG! I'm off to the race tracks!

Smooth Criminal lean explained!

2006-06-13T13:44:00.000-07:00

Ever wonder how Michael Jackson does the forward lean on his Smooth Criminal video? I found this on digg and finally one of those huge questions in my life have been answered

AOL opens up to developers

2006-06-02T13:23:00.000-07:00

Finally, the developers within AOL get a voice.

We are transitioning away from being an ISP and have started to open up our plaforms to the developer community. As it says on the main page, "We want you to hack our stuff!"

Of course, i'm most excited when Boxely gets to be public! Go over there and check it out. It's a good start:

developer.aol.com

I posted this on digg too, so go ahead and digg it!

The emotions of the internet - We Feel Fine!

2006-05-30T17:03:00.000-07:00

This slick web app scours the blogosphere and displays all the emotions people are expressing. As it turns out:

We Feel Fine!

Each emotion is a particle floating around in the space. Pretty cool interface. From digg.

Have they hugged you today?

2006-05-24T05:20:00.000-07:00

We had a meeting today with a big wig at AOL. It was mainly about his vision for the future of AIM. I mostly agree with what his vision is, but one thing in particular caught my attention.

Other companies like Google and Yahoo "hug" you for visiting them. When you visit their page, they're like "Hey! You're here! Great! Look at all the things you can do!" Whereas AOL has become complacent. "Oh hey. There you are. Here use these things we made."

This one of the things we need to change at AOL. We need to make our users feels that they are appreciated for using AOL software and not inconvenience them for trying to use AOL services along with services of our competitors. The "walled garden" that AOL made its business out of is going away. Let's hope AOL doesn't decide to create a "greenhouse" instead, just replacing its concrete walls with glass ones.

Have you been hugged today?

WinBar

2006-04-11T10:26:00.000-07:00

I can't believe I haven't mentioned WinBar in this blog yet. I've used this program for the last 4 years on every computer i've had. It's a pretty configurable sys meter that docks to the top of your screen.

I have it configured to show the date, CPU, RAM and HDD usage, Volume controls, Uptime, DU Meter, etc. You can choose whatever color or opacity you like. Visually it's not the prettiest by default. Running it at 75% opacity with no separators between the modules makes it look pretty good, and prevents it from standing out too much.

more screenshots

Once you use this for a few days, your desktop feels naked without it. And if you really need the screen space, you can click on one of the arrows on the side to make it undock and collapse to the arrow. When programming, I constantly look at the CPU and RAM usage. It's great for when you're doing stuff on the internet, because the DU meter tells you the total downloads/uploads occuring on this machine.

Download this program (its freeware). Use version 1.2.95, not the Winbar2 public preview.

View Rendered Source in Firefox

2006-04-05T18:03:00.000-07:00

I just installed a new extension for Firefox called View Source Chart. This thing is another take on code folding and syntax highlighting. I like it! It's very easy to visually see your markup because of the pastel colored backgrounds that define each block of code.

I think Boxely needs to have an editor like this when we develop a GUI builder =)

While You Were Out

2006-04-03T13:00:00.000-07:00

I guess a lot can happen while you're out to lunch. I got back to my desk and saw an email from Jon Miller with the subject "Say hello to AOL LLC." From now on, America Online is no more; like MCI before it, it has decided to drop the name and just go with the initials AOL.

I guess this should not be news. AOL is 5% owned by Google and 95% by Time Warner. Not many people call the company America Online anymore anyway. Everyone knows it by AOL, or by other, more unfortunate names. Our new branding uses the term AOL, not the old 'hard' triangle with funky 'America Online' written on it.

The Browser War Is Over

2006-03-31T14:17:00.000-08:00

Firefox? Obese.
IE? Slutty.
Opera? Homely.
Safari? Oh c'mon!

There is a new browser king in town, and it is here stay.
AOL introduces to the world a browser-based browser. Gone are the security holes, missing features! Nothing to install! It'll take any internet buzzword and eat it for breakfast! So check out it's AJAXY, MASHUPY, Web Twoey alpha release right here! Hurry, there are only a few trial spots left!

Some facts about B3!:

Some say B3's name is from when he ate 3 browsers in one sitting.
B3!'s original name is Bubbba, but like all fabtastic gangstas before him, he must have a gangsta name
Whenever another browser adds a new feature, B3! will come and eat it.
When Bubbba goes surfing, webpages shy away from other browsers, and flock to it like teenage groupies.
Once, Bubbba reached a page with bad html. Bubbba then roundhouse kicked the host server until the webpage fixed itself.

Boxely TV

2006-03-31T08:06:00.000-08:00

Some you guys know that I work on Boxely, but don't know what it is. Rather than explain it, I'd rather show you. Corey has 2 videos he did from grabbing his desktop monitor to demonstrate some cool Boxely demos. Check them out here and here.

Boxely Autocomplete Changes

2006-03-24T11:14:00.000-08:00

Ah, autocomplete. Such a simple great idea, yet you have to get it just right for it to be a good experience. I've been making small changes to Boxely's aolSmartInput gadget (and related objects) to make it a better experience than what we have now.

I've added a delay before lookup is invoked. Previously it would autocomplete on *every* character typed, immediately. Adding a small delay allows the user to type quickly into the autocomplete, and as soon as they stop typing to run the lookup. The delay is something small, like 250ms, and is used only when the popup is not already displayed.

I've also added some preliminary support for returning richer results from an app. Right now, I've added another third parameter to the call back registration (defaults to 0 if you dont supply it):

attachStringLookupCallback(context, handler, lookupType)

If lookupType is 0, then the smartInput will call you back, expecting a javascript array of strings. If lookupType is 1, it expects a javascript array of struct-like javascript objects. Currently the object has 2 properties, displayText and value. This allows the app to display something such as: "John Doe " but insert "johndoe@aol.com."

Mail composition is a big user of autocomplete, so I've been looking at the Thunderbird Autocomplete Specs, which have been very useful. I'm considering support for icon and tooltipText for each match.

MSN Live Messenger Beta

2006-03-21T16:18:00.000-08:00

Looks like there was some sort of a "glitch" which allowed the general public to start trying out the "invite-only" beta of MSN Messenger 8, a.k.a MSN Live Messenger. Ars Technica has an interesting look about some of its new features.

One of the first things that stood out for me was that MSN's finally added the "find as you type" search field above your contact list. Something with AIM Triton and Google talk have had for a while. The Ars review also mentions that its ads have gotten more annoying, but I don't think it could be worse than the "ford focus flash ad" I saw in AIM which pops out and takes up a huge amount of your desktop while you hunt for the "X" button floating somewhere around your desktop.

Not as wise as I was 30 minutes ago

2006-03-15T10:47:00.000-08:00

So, I just got back from the dentist (he's about 3 minutes away). He pulled my wisdom tooth out in 6 minutes. No joke! Here's how it went down:

"I'm going to apply some anesthetic..." <pinch> <pinch>

"Can you feel that?" I shake my head.

"Ok, you're going to hear some cracking, it's normal." I nod.

<YANK> "Ok we're done"

I'm supposed to not talk for an hour after the procedure. This is when being a nerd in front of a computer comes in handy.

Tablet PCs and Origami

2006-03-10T16:06:00.000-08:00

As some of you may know, Microsoft released details of their secret project, codenamed Origami. Essentially it is a very tiny tablet PC, with no keyboard or mouse. It fits somewhere between a PDA and a subnotebook. It runs a special version of Windows, so it can play music, videos and normal applications too. Microsoft isn't selling the hardware, it basically created the specs for it, which is where my issue with it is. I think we're headed down the same road that Tablet PCs did a few years ago.

Technically, the MS Tablet PC works great. The screens are rock solid (you're supposed to touch them, put your hand on them as your write, unlike normal LCD panels) and the OS integration is great. So where did they go wrong? The Price to Performance ratio. To adjust for the cost of the tablet screen, many manufacturers went up in price. When that proved unpopular they cheapened other specs to bring the price down. The result was you'd pay top dollar for a not-so-powerful laptop, but HEY, you could write on it!

However, I don't think price is the only problem for tablet PCs. Most people I know use their tablet PCs as a notebook first, tablet second. While Windows Tablet PC edition is good, it still essentially treats the pen as a mouse alternative. Microsoft's OneNote is a great (almost killer) app, but it's it's too structured for the note-jotter. It's extremely powerful but it the end of the day, it's like running Outlook. When you exit out of it, you're back to (basically) windows. I think OneNote (or its feature set) should have been tightly integrated as part of the Tablet PC OS. I think that Live Lists are actually a great complement to Tablet PCs.

Another useful way to integrate the pen further with the OS is to incorporate mouse gestures at the OS level. Make a pre-defined gesture with your pen, and windows reacts with the response you designated. Make a large swooping right-click-drag from the top of the screen down, and all your apps minimize, for example.

At the end of the day, it'll be interesting to see whether Origami (which is a tablet first, notebook second) will win over hearts. It faces the same price/performance challenge as Tablet PCs did, since MS is leaving the hardware up to 3rd parties. If the thing is $1000 but you get limited hardware, then you've lost the consumer. Let's see what happens...

New Keyboard

2006-03-10T00:18:00.000-08:00

The funny thing about instant messaging is that your conversational timing still matters. I was never good at typing until I first got on the internet back in 1997 (hey! I was in Bangladesh! Third world, anyone??) only because I had friends on ICQ. I just did the ol' "lets-not-lo^h^hok-at-teh-kaybo^h^hrd trick", and eventually, it worked.

My favorite keyboard has always been the Microsoft Natural Keyboard Pro, which is now discontinued. Many people think that to use an ergonomic "split" keyboard, you have to be trained in the Black Art of Touch Typing (aka Mavis Beaconus). Nonsense I say! I definitely am not a traditional typer by any means. Ok so I don't employ the 2-finger claw-hand like my wife Ashley does, but I'd say I get my fingers on the right key at the right moment.

One fine day, which from now on is known as "The CounterStrike Incident," I totally lost it when I got pwn3d by some n00b who got lucky with his AWP. Consequence? Broken spacebar. But I couldn't replace my keyboard! I mean it sort of worked, but you had to press really hard. That's ok right?

Eventually I came to terms with my loss and went to the usual places, Worst Buy et. al., but Microsoft had done away with natural keyboards and replaced them with everything wireless! Don't get me wrong, I've always loved Microsoft hardware, and it's a shame that they went out of the gaming hardware market, but I couldn't understand the wireless fandom.

There's something about battery-powered input devices that just don't feel right. (Stop right there sicko, I'm talking about keyboards and mice.) To a normal person, they are probably fine. But I couldn't help but feel that there is a lag. It's very subtle but it makes your computer feel less responsive. It's probably all mental, I know, but trust me on this one.

Recently, Microsoft has gone back to its old ways and have once again started releasing ergonomic keyboards. In particular, they have released the Natural Ergonomic Keyboard 4000. It's definitely the sucessor to the (late) Natural Keyboard Pro, and I had to have it! Now tracking down that mouthful of a keyboard was no easy task. All the Best Buys near my area were out of stock. CompUSA, forget it. Circuit city? Back order. I guess I wasn't the only nerd looking. Finally, today I got lucky.

The keyboard is very sturdy and doesn't feel cheap at all. The keys all depress easily and are really really quiet. The split design is a little different than a normal ergonomic keyboard, but I like it. Unlike other ergonomic keyboards, this one actually angles down at the front, so the keys are actually at a downward slope away from you. I thought this would be weird, but it actually works! Best of all, MS went back to the ol' 3x2 layout for the Insert/Home/PgUp keys. They've also moved the 'Sleep' button so it's not at the top right corner (right next to the num pad), making it harder to accidentally hit it.

Wow, this is a long post about a keyboard. I'd say if you're looking to get a new keyboard, give this one a shot. Even if you've never used an ergonomic keyboard before, you'll be surprised at how quickly you'll get used to it.

Cleanin' up the MP3 collection

2006-02-28T23:22:00.000-08:00

So since building my new machine, I vowed to go through all the mp3's on my machine and fix up the tags, filenames etc. Yes, I know I'm a masochist. One of my pet peeves with digital media in general is that I don't agree with most of the cataloging schemes there are out there.

Most of my vexation has to do with the way they are represented in your filesystem. Sure, a filename is not the perfect way to catalog your data, but it shouldn't be ignored just because images can support EXIF data and mp3's can hold ID3 tags.

For digital photos, just imagine if your filenames could automatically be named with the date in the file. You'd be well on your way to being able to see a timeline of your pictures just from your OS. No more having to go into Picasa (which is awesome, by the way) to look at your pics in order. Yes, I know, you might not have set the date right on the camera, what if you took pictures at the exact same time and so on. Add some more info into the file name!

YYYY.MM.DD_HH.MM.SS_CameraName.JPG

That's a start. Might not be as pretty as IMG004546.JPG, but I think it's more useful. Include an optional suffix. Fix up dates when you forgot to change the time zone. You know, I think writing a tool to do this might not be a bad idea...more on that maybe.

Anyway, back to the topic of mp3 collection. I found a tool like this for mp3 management called ID3-TagIT. I've been using it for a while now, and it's awesome. The UI can be a little overwhelming, but it's simple once you learn the keyboard shortcuts. Lots of useful things like capitalization fixes, filename-to-tags, tags-to-filename, etc. etc. Anyway, you might enjoy it, if you have an mp3 *cough* collection like mine.

If Microsoft Marketed the iPod

2006-02-28T11:05:00.000-08:00

You've all seen the packaging for a new iPod. Nice cube box, matte finish, hardly any writing on it. It sells itself. I was reading Arstechnica this morning and there was a link to this video of "The Microsoft Packaged iPod." It's awesome! I think it's a pretty good impression of how Microsoft does package their software! Love the "Human Ear Edition."

Wedding Pictures Online

2006-02-28T00:27:00.000-08:00

Ashley went and put a bunch of our wedding pictures online on Flickr. I know i've been meaning to send an email to all our friends telling them of our trips, but we're horribly lazy and irresponsible. Please still be our friend! Wedding #1 and Wedding #2. More pics on the rest of our Bangladesh / Thailand trip to follow.

It had to start at some point...

2006-02-27T13:50:00.000-08:00

Alright, I give up. I succumbed to peer-pressure and now I have to have my own blog. Justin said 'everybody's doin' it!' I have no idea what's going to go on here, but just having a blog for the sake of saying you have a blog is reason enough.