Midnight Cheese

How to whistle at 126dB over at the TapeOnline Blog.

I spent half a day last week playing with Flex and the new Adobe Apollo runtime. Flex was fun once I figured out the proper syntax for referencing XML data. The Flex scripting language is tag based, similar in structure to XML, but obviously with quite a bit more power. An interesting “feature:” Flex doesn’t connect directly to a DB, but only to an XML data set.

You have to install an Apollo add-on to Flex to publish Apollo applications, but once that’s done the process is a fairly painless “export” dialog.

As an example, I published a little Apollo application that reads in XML data from Candor Gallery. Obviously this is all alpha software, but my example was less than cross-platform as the Refresh button only works on OS X systems.

Nevertheless, from a development view, Apollo looks promising. Getting users to download the Apollo runtime will be another issue.

Download the Candor Gallery Apollo app. There’s also a Flex version that doesn’t require the Apollo runtime. Flash Player 9 is required, however.

Gmail Paper was good, but I think the announcement from the WebKit team was the best April Fools for the geek folk. It hit my stomach with that deep feeling of despair. Very nice.