Big Bad Code

The AIR Application that I built for Disney and presented at Adobe’s MAX2007 is still generating some buzz. I  was quoted discussing the new capabilities of AIR by Computer Arts UK. Read the full article at http://www.computerarts.co.uk/in_depth/features/rich_internet_apps__design_and_development

Or you can see just the important part where I am quoted.

“AIR allows for local caching,” says Josh Bloom, design technologist at frog design. “That was a huge portion of the application – storing the most recent and relevant content was an important feature for agents. Dragging and dropping within and from other apps also made things much easier for agents than using paper and ink.”

Check out this interview of me hosted by Lee Brimelow of Adobe.

Bonus points to any reader who can identify my desktop wallpaper.

Check out Julie Campagna of Adobe interview Cary and I at the Adobe MAX2007 conference.
link to Adobe’s site

The AIR Application that I built for Disney and presented at Adobe’s MAX2007 conference was quite a hit. I was interviewed about it by Martin LaMonica from Cnet. Read his full coverage at www.news.com:8301-10784_3-9789007-7.html

Or you can see just the important part where he quotes me

That covers a lot of what a developer needs to build applications, said Josh Bloom, a design technologist at Frog Design, which helped design and write the Disney travel application.

In this case, he picked Flex Builder, Adobe’s development tool, to write the application and used Flash as well. Frog Design takes advantage of Microsoft user interface tools, which he said are more complete.

“You can be a full Web developer and have access to the desktop (with AIR) which you didn’t have access to before,” Bloom said.

I’m going to be at the Adobe MAX conference in Chicago for the next few days.

If you’re attending and want to say hi, stop by the Monday night Birds of a Feather session where I will be showing off an AIR application I built for Disney Travel Agents.

The session is at 8:30 and is titled “frog design presents a Disney desktop travel application”

If you don’t catch me there, you can probably find me at the Halo3 booth, or possibly the hotel bar

-Josh

When developing AIR applications under flexbuilder you may get a situation where the app is stuck in an unresponsive state and refuses to quit itself.

To kill it quickly on a Mac you can do the following from a terminal:

ps -A | grep adl


That will return a line that looks something like this

18132 ?? S 0:22.97 /Users/joshbloom/Applications/flexb_183522/Adobe Flex Builder 3/sdks/3.0.0/bin/adl -runtime /Users/joshbloom/Appl
18148 p1 S+ 0:00.00 grep adl

The number at the beginning of the first line first line indicates the process ID of your unresponsive AIR app.

To kill it you would run this command:

kill -9 18132


Be careful what number you put into the kill command, it will happily kill anything you tell it to. If you make a mistake you may have killed your window manager, your instant messenger or even something important like your twitter client.