boostworthyisryantaylor

I’m somewhat limited on what I can disclose at this time, however I did want to announce that I am currently writing for two very big book titles which are due out in Q2 of next year. Book #1 is the AIR Bible (Wiley) which I am co-authoring along with Ben Gorton, Jeff Yamada, and Peter Elst. Book #2 is the Flex 3 Cookbook (O’Reilly), and for that one I am contributing several recipes on using Ant to automate builds and perform some other useful tasks. If time permits, I may end up contributing some other recipes as well. Both of these projects are shaping up to be great resources on their subject matters, so be sure to keep them in mind when you are book shopping next year.

Stay tuned for more details in the near future.

[Update 10.31.07]

If you have been getting error messages when you try and launch Parallels under Leopard, try disabling Spaces, launching Parallels, then re-enabling Spaces. I was having all sorts of problems getting build 5540 working and this workflow has solved those issues for now.

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[Update 10.30.07]

The Parallels team has posted an open beta of build 5540, which addresses compatibility issues with Leopard.

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[Update 10.29.07]

Amazing review of Leopard over at Ars Technica. I totally agree about the design changes that Apple made to the UI; some good, some very bad.

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[Update 10.29.07]

Well, I’m still having some issues transferring files from OS X to Windows (Parallels VM); it’s giving me some sort of permissions error that I haven’t found a way to resolve yet. I read something about ACLs being enabled by default in Leopard (they were disabled by default when introduced in Tiger); I’m guessing that’s the cause of this issue. I was also experiencing some serious performance issues, so I went and checked on Time Machine and realized that I forgot to exclude my Parallels VM files from being backed up. That’s a big no-no, don’t forget about that one. Other than that, everything is running smoothly at this point. I definitely feel like Leopard has required more maintenance than previous OS X upgrades, but once you get past all of that, everything is nice. The semi-transparent menu bar still hasn’t grown on me. The background you use definitely plays a big roll in how good or bad it looks. For instance, it doesn’t look too bad with the default galaxy wallpaper; however swap it out in favor of a brighter wallpaper and it suddenly looks very out of place sitting above your application windows. The new dock active application icon (blue orb) and folder icons could definitely use some work as well.

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[Update 10.28.07]

A fix has been found (and not by the Parallels team) for the issue in which the Windows drive was not mounting in OS X. It’s a very simple fix; I just tried it for myself and it works.

1.) Download and install the latest version of MacFUSE (for Leopard). Parallels uses MacFUSE, however they are not using the latest version in their most recent build, thus the reason you need to go download it yourself.

2.) After you are finished installing it, restart your computer.

3.) Under the Finder menu, browse to ‘Finder > Preferences…’ and check the box next to ‘Connected servers’.

4.) Launch Parallels. Upon your Windows VM loading, your Windows drive should now mount in Leopard like it used to under Tiger.

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So, I arrived at the Atlanta Apple store on Friday evening just a little before 5:00pm to find that there were already 100 or so fellow Apple nerds in line ahead of me. This took me by surprise, as I only remember there being maybe 40 people in line for Tiger way back when. I guess this is a testament to how quickly the Mac fan base is growing. By 6:00pm, the line was easily 300+ people. I wasn’t shocked to see a crowd this size for the iPhone, but for an OS release? Pretty crazy.

Ok, anyway - on to the good stuff. I got home that evening and began upgrading my Macs one by one. No major issues with any of them. I have been reading horror stories about people having massive problems with their installs, but all of mine went very smoothly. The average time it took for an upgrade was around 1 - 1 1/2 hours I believe. After the process was complete, I then began exploring the new features and testing my existing apps and stuff to make sure everything still worked. Below are some notes on things that you may want to take into consideration before upgrading.

- Parallels is NOT Leopard ready. My Windows drive no longer mounts on my Mac desktop; that means no sharing files between the two. This is a big deal. No word from Parallels at this time on when an upgrade will be released for fixing this.

- Mail wasn’t syncing with my Schematic mail (exchange server) correctly. I had to delete the account and create a new one in order to get it to successfully sync everything. Things seem to be ok now, however some of my attachments in previous emails are no longer present.

- On one of my machines, I left it for awhile and when I came back, it looked like it was in screen saver mode…minus the screen saver. The display was on, but nothing was on screen. Despite pressing keys, messing with the mouse, putting the machine to sleep, etc. - I was unable to get it to recover from this strange state. I finally had to do a hard restart. Everything has been fine since then.

- I went to use an existing external hard drive with Time Machine, only to find out that it needs to be reformatted. The drive is formatted in FAT32 so I can share it with both Windows and OS X. Time Machine requires that the drive be formatted in HFS+.

Other than that, everything has been ok so far. I’m not sure how I feel about the semi-transparent menu bar; maybe it just has to grow on me. I’m also disappointed in how little you can customize Spaces. On Tiger, I was using VirtueDesktops (link appears to be down right now), and I was very pleased with it. Two features of Spaces that I do really like are 1.) being able to zoom out and see all spaces at once with the ability to drag applications between spaces and 2.) being able to bind applications to certain spaces upon being launched. On the downside, you can’t name spaces, change the type of transition between spaces, or customize the transition’s duration.

Overall, I like Leopard. I think there are definitely some additions to new features that would really polish things off if Apple quickly pushed out some updates for such. The only other biggie as I mentioned is that the Parallels team needs to roll out a fix for Leopard very, very soon.

If you just upgraded to Leopard, feel free to share your thoughts and experience as well.

If you haven’t already heard, Apple has finally confirmed the launch date for the next iteration of OS X. It will be going on sale at 6:00pm on Friday, October 26th. More details are available here.

So, as if the magic we witnessed at MAX weren’t enough, Adobe is now speaking publicly about some research they are doing for Photoshop and the future of digital photography. Basically, the idea is this - take a 3D lens, which is essentially a collection of tiny lenses all pointing at different angles (much like the eye of an insect) and use that to record three-dimensional data. Once the data is loaded onto a computer, new software in Photoshop will take advantage of the extra data, allowing you to rotate around the scene and use a focus brush for adjusting focus. Of course, none of this really does the technology any justice, you simply need to see it for yourself.

For those interested, I uploaded my files from last nights presentation on programmatic animation at AFPUG. Included in the zip file below is an AIR app which is the presentation itself, and also a folder containing the demo files and source.

Download ‘afpug_100907.zip’

You can use the arrows in the bottom-right corner of the presentation or the left and right arrow keys to move slide to slide.

Enjoy!

I posted about this awhile back, but I just wanted to throw up a quick reminder that I will be speaking at AFPUG tomorrow night from 7:00pm - 9:00pm, here in Atlanta. My presentation is on programmatic animation and I will be covering everything from simple linear animations, to basic/complex easing, sine waves, working with color, physics, sequencing, and more.

Additional information and directions can be found here. If that link throws a bunch of errors when you click it, try it a second time (not sure why it does that). You can also just head directly to the main site and look over on the right-hand side of the page.

http://www.afpugatlanta.org

Hope to see you there!

I originally wanted to do a big post each day about all the announcements, what sessions I went to, etc., but yeah… that hasn’t been happening. So to catch everyone up on the best parts, below are some summaries, links, and photos.

First and foremost, we got to see some Flash Player 10 (codenamed ‘Astro’) in action. The big three additions to the player that they demonstrated for us were simple 3D support, advanced text layout, and support for writing our own filters and effects using a new image processing language called ‘Hydra’. The AIF Toolkit for writing and testing Hydra code is now available on labs for download. That thing is going to be owning a lot of my time in the weeks to come.

Next we got to see a new application that is in the works, codenamed ‘Thermo’.

In a nutshell, Thermo allows you to import design comps (such as a PSD file) and then select pieces of the design and automatically convert them into Flex UI components and mxml. The photos below do not do the app justice, you really must see a demo for yourself.

As if this weren’t already enough, we then got to see some demonstrations of Flash CS4. Demonstrations included a much more powerful timeline tweening engine, support for inverse kinematics, and the ability to preview content (such as video files) on the stage without publishing.

Last, but not least, wow…this one really knocked us off our feet. There is some R&D going on for building Flash files using C/C++. Yes, you read that correctly. Amazing. As cool as that may sound, it didn’t really hit us just how insane this was until we saw the game ‘Quake’ running as a SWF file. AMAZING.

I’ll write up some much more thorough posts about this stuff whenever I can.

This conference is truely amazing. The size of it, the amount of people here, everything is just awesome. More to come soon.