January 17, 2008
Scoble Encounter and Thermo Interview
I, along with other members of the Thermo team went on a customer visit in downtown San Francisco yesterday to get feedback on new features. After each of these meetings we get together at a coffee shop to debrief and record what we learned.Immediately after we came out of "Massimo", where I had a nice Cappuccino, Steve Heintz and I ran into Robert Scoble, who did a quick video interview with me about Thermo. We also talked a little about Silverlight, competition with Microsoft and a few other things. You can see the interview here.
Robert, who I believe is in San Francisco attending MacWorld, was with photographer Marc Silber, walking around town testing out a Nikon D3 which Nikon graciously loaned him. Marc took a picture of us that he posted to his site here. Robert and I are both ex-Microsofties, so it's always great to talk with him about what's going on.
Interestingly, Ethan Eismann, who is the product designer from Adobe's XD (Experience Design) Team working on Thermo also blogged about this. Ethan is a key part of the Thermo team and we work closely together.
Ethan and I even had a bit of a "bonding experience" when, while riding in a cab on a previous customer visit, we noticed the distinct smell of marijuana while stopped at a traffic light that got stronger after we asked the driver to close the windows. It was then, while driving at high speeds on the freeway that we realized that our driver was completely stoned! This was confirmed when we arrived at our destination and the driver giggled uncontrollably and referred to Ethan as "fancy pants"!
So, after all we've been through, I was suprised to see Ethan's post titled "Marc Anders, Scobelized". Ethan, it's Mark with "k"! Maybe that's his way of getting back at me for continuously reminding him of the "fancy pants" moniker!
Posted by Mark Anders at 06:16 PM | Comments (0)
March 01, 2006
Actionscript 3.0 Libraries and FlexUnit Released on Adobe Labs!
There is a great set of resources for Flex 2.0 and ActionScript 3.0 posted to Adobe Labs. You can access them here. There are a number of really useful ActionScript 3.0 libraries that allow you to interact with services such as Flickr, Mapper, Odeo and YouTube, as well as ones to deal with RSS and Atom. Additionally, there's a "core" library that has lots of useful stuff such as MD5 hashing, JSON serialization and more.
One of the most important things, from my perspective, is FlexUnit. Over the past year, a lot of people interested in Flex Builder have asked us if it included a unit test framework. Our response was that we would release one, and with the release of FlexUnit, we've delivered. Unit testing should be an important component of your development practice, and so I encourage everyone who's interested in Flex to download it.
Enjoy!
Posted by Mark Anders at 10:12 AM | Comments (1)