I was browsing around the Adobe Dev Net sites this afternoon during lunch and read this article "Top 10 Mistakes when Building Flex Applications" by James Ward & Jon Rose I agree with about 90% of what they were talking about.  Except for #5) "Trying to hire experienced Flex Developers".  This statement to me is just emphasizing how easy it would be for a Java programmer to get into Flex, but I really think it's a marketing comment and doesn't belong on the top 10 list.  Now if the title was "Top 10 Mistakes when Staffing for a Flex Project"  I would definitely agree it should be on the list. ;)

Overall, a good article, short, sweet and to the point.  I especially like #10 "Not Preparing for Offline Applications".  Now that we have AIR every project that is using Flex or AJAX for that matter should have a offline/desktop supporting architecture, or at least a place holder to add it in later.  In the next 2 years, users and customers will be demanding offline capability with data syncronization when the user is back "online". 

Here is an example use case:

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I created a new Mango plugin, now you can add blip.tv videos easily using the Mango Post tool in the admin by adding a simple tag [bliptv:postId]. All you need to do is pass in the post ID when creating a new post in Mango and the video will display in the position of your posting. 

It is pretty basic right now.  I ping blip.tv''s API, pass them the post_ID and do some xmlParse/xmlSearch stuff and it returns the embed code.  The plugin just outputs that and displays it in your blog.  Like I said very simple and basic, I haven't figured out how to modify how the player gets displayed, such as height, width, options the player has on it, etc.... feel free to improve upon it :) You can thank my dog for waking me up at 6am on a Saturday morning for getting this done.

You can download the source here.
Just drop the bliptv folder in your "components/plugins/user" directory and it will display in your Mango Admin under Add-ons than all you need to do is activate it.

I got the idea after seeing a Thermo Video on Ryan Stewarts blog and figured what the heck, if WordPress can do it Mango can!!

I am considering converting my 2007 Prius to PHEV.  The cost is still a bit high, I have seen numbers of $6k+ depending on the batteries you use.  I hope that data is old and the kits are cheaper now.  Looks like Toyota and Ford have created a couple prototypes and Berkley and UC Irvine are studying them.  Anyway, here is some information I found out for all you Prius owners out there.  Getting 80-100+ MPG would be sweetness wouldn't it?

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/PHEV
http://www.calcars.org/photos.html
http://www.toyota.com/toyotaSearch/search?keyword=prius+plugin
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Electric_vehicle_conversion
http://www.calcars.org/resources.html (wow, thats a lot of information)

My wife and I are also considering trading our Buick Rendezvous in for another Prius since we love driving that car so much.  Gas prices in St Louis today hit $3.59 a gallon.  Wow crazy how gas prices jump up, but they never jump down.... here is a funny image a friend sent me last week that I think we can all relate to, especially those pick-up truck owners who drive solo down the highway that pump at least $80+ bucks into their tanks ;)

I know the title sounds like I am a sales guy for Midnight Coders, but I was pretty impressed with what I saw and felt the need to share this.

I was at a Boeing Flex User Group meeting yesterday that is hosted by Mike Kollen and a couple folks at Boeing.  Mark Piller (CEO of MidNight Coders) showed off the capabilities of WebOrb which is a "platform enabling development, deployment and runtime execution of Rich Internet Applications.  The product facilitates connectivity between rich clients created with Flex, Flash or AJAX adn server-side applicationed developed with .NET, Java, Ruby on Rails, PHP or XML Web Services."  Mark showed us how easy it was to start a project using WebOrb to create all of the backend services, than create a project in Flex Builder 3/Eclipse and bring over the items WebOrb created.  In a matter of minutes he created a simple demonstration that was communicating back to the newly created serverside logic. 

Mark showed two demonstrations, one with a .NET backend and one with a Java backend.  I was pretty impressed with the capability and how easy it was.  One thing I was really impressed with was it has Data Service capability out of the box.  Now its not Adobe's Data Services, its thier implementation of the concept and capability of Data Services.  The second thing I was impressed with was the fact that this is all FREE... yes FREE!  The product support of course is not free, a guy has to make a buck here and there somehow.

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So I did some research this weekend on the going rates for Flex/AIR Developers and I found this through a couple different blogs (Mazharharhasan & SeanTheFlashGuy).  HotGigs shows the average billable rate @ $100 bucks an hour. 

So I am a simple mid-west guy living in a simple town of St Louis, MO.  So let me ask people outside (or inside) that bubble, is this real? Are these "really" the going rates? What is interesting is that in 2007 the rates where $60-80 and they shot up.  I wonder if the capability of AIR into Flex had anything to do with that?