Develop iPhone and iPod apps with Flash?

The light is at the end of the tunnel! iPhone apps with Flash? Yes, apparently Flash CS5 will be able to do this! But how? When Apple seems to still shun Flash?

Well, it's all thanks for the iPhone Packager, but you will have to wait until "later in the year". I have registered for the BETA release, so will see how smooth this all is.

I'm guessing Apple will have a flood of apps to review when this happens. There are already 30,000 games for the iPhone and iPod. No disrespect to Flash developers, but there will surely be a lot of crappy apps and games developed. Hopefully there will also be an increase in the fun and useful apps too!

Read about the Adobe iPhone Packager here.
Watch Adobe demo at CS5.org here.

Beautiful site...

Full of great artwork, design and photo posts! www.beautifullife.info

Cufon or sIFR?

sIFR is very popular and a great way of using great looking fonts in websites... but a new (ish) kid on the block for using whatever font you like on your website if Cufon!

Down sides? It is not selectable like sIFR and underline rollover only seems to work in Firefox on a Mac. Upsides? It is a lot faster than sIFR and does not need Flash.

Basically you send them the fonts you want to use and you get back a funky little bit of Javascript... Read more about it here.

Enjoy!

Tiny your URL...

OK, if you have ever posted on Twitter, you have probably used this already... Yes, it is "old as the hills"... but not as old as that saying! Check it out: Tiny URL

World of EOS...

OK, this may be a bit off blog... but I am a Canon man myself.
If you are too, and perhaps just starting out - check out this site World of EOS.

If you want some inspiration on filming in Full HD with the new 5D (II) or 7D, check out Philip Bloom's website.


P.S. Just for Marc... Nikon sux! :-)

What a twisted Semantic Web we weave...

"I have a dream for the Web [in which computers] become capable of analyzing all the data on the Web – the content, links, and transactions between people and computers. A ‘Semantic Web’, which should make this possible, has yet to emerge, but when it does, the day-to-day mechanisms of trade, bureaucracy and our daily lives will be handled by machines talking to machines. The ‘intelligent agents’ people have touted for ages will finally materialize."
– Tim Berners-Lee, 1999

Sounds very futuristic... but what does it all mean?

Semantic Web is all about editors having the ability to publish content in a format that has more meaning and structure to the machines rendering and searching the data. These "machine" readable descriptions will enable human like sorting, linking and prioritising of content by computers.

So for example, content like: $2.99 is a price of this item number 458869 that is a DVD and in the catalogue XYZ. Rather than straight HTML code meaning display this text "$2.99", next to this text "458869" and link to "XYZ". Further, as W3C's example shows, you could be viewing a calendar that shows photos you took on certain days even bank transactions on that date. So it's also about information being linked and viewed across multiple data bases.

So will this so called Web 3.0 really materialise? Some feel that a semantic web will create the need for two sets of published documents, one for humans and one for machines. "They" also say that there are issues of security and accuracy.

I fear though that we can all get ready to cringe as marketing peeps discover this latest web term!

Further reading at W3C

Google Products in BETA

If you are a fan of buying online, and most of us are... then you will be pleased to see Google has added a new service called "Google Products". This search tracks down items for sale online and lists them with ratings, shipping and reviews. Stores that support Google's checkout system are highlighted with an icon and filter - of course! Search includes advanced sorting and a shopping cart.

Check it out here: Google Products