Object Oriented Vancouver

August 29, 2005

How much to charge for software?

Filed under: Links — kevinw @ 11:03 pm

If your business is based on software development or support, as either a producer a vendor or a 3rd party integrator, you need to know how to price your product.

O’Reilly OnLamp has some pointers for you on how to Calculate the True Price of Software.

August 26, 2005

Blogs are becoming mainstream - RSS isn’t

Filed under: Blogs, RSS — kevinw @ 9:48 am

You know they’re mainstream when Donald Trump has blog a in the top links list at bloglines.com
(#13).
polymercode rss 2.0 feed - get the latest RSS, blog, Flash and RIA Rich Internet Application news from polymercode.com
RSS on the other hand - while available with almost all blog software, is not mainstream even within the blogging community. A study by the Neilson Group shows that out of 1000 members of their research panel who are blog readers; 66% of the blog readers have never heard of RSS, and only 11% of the blog readers use it.

link - O’Reilly Radar

August 14, 2005

YouTube - A Video version of Flickr

Filed under: Blogs, Flash — kevinw @ 3:58 pm

Like Flickr.com, you can create a free profile and upload media. In this case it’s short video clips instead of images. Like flickr, they use flash to display the media, making it more difficult to copy off of their site. They also include features like links, and RSS feeds.

Simple, straight forward Flash movie player interface is a major plus.

For example,
office sports
extreme 747 landing


Links like this make me wonder how long they can go without a lawsuit…
Family Guy Season 4, episode 8

August 12, 2005

Details about Macromedia Flash 8 and Studio 8

Filed under: Flash — kevinw @ 12:28 pm

macromedia flashA detailed list of new functionality that will ship with Flash 8 including BitMap API, Filter API, Text Rendering, Post Processing and External API.
link - flashmagazine.com

Update your operating system, Flash 8 is not going to support Windows 95, NT or classic Macintosh.

Tons of Macromedia Flash 8 and Studio 8 articles.
link - casario.blogs.com

Download Free Desktop Flash Video Player

Filed under: Flash — kevinw @ 12:28 pm

Download a free desktop Flash Video Player.
link - flashguru.co.uk

Integrating Flash Clients with Server Side Applications

Filed under: Flash — kevinw @ 12:27 pm


WebOrb - connect your Flash or AJAX clients to your server side applications. Integrates with .Net, Java EJBs and POJOs, ColdFusion, and XML Web Services.

brought to you by- the midnight coders.com

Flash(R) by Example and Flex(TM) by Example will ship with the SYNC Socket Server Framework. SYNC allows you to create a multi-user server with a custom protocol tuned to your application.

August 10, 2005

A better Flash Developer Tool, Deep linking & Search Engines

Filed under: Flash — kevinw @ 7:09 pm

Check out Ripple - a Framework designed to help structure your Flash site so that it may be deep linked and indexed by search engines.

Developing in Actionscript? Don’t do it in Flash. Try the MTASC plug-in for Eclipse

Find other Open Source Flash projects at OSFlash.org.

thanks peterjoel.com

August 8, 2005

Flash 8 Released today

Filed under: Flash — kevinw @ 7:34 am

As expected, Macromedia Studio 8 was announced today.

Macromedia employees are already writing about how to make use of its improvements.

August 4, 2005

The Business of Blogging

Filed under: Blogs — kevinw @ 11:24 pm

A few months ago Kottke.org went pro. Jason quit his job to work on his blog full time. He generated the money he needed with a short PayPal driven donation drive where people could, and did, donate whatever amount they felt comfortable with from a couple of cents to hundreds of dollars. In typical kottke fashion, he even posted the results of the drive on his blog.

Another blog that I visit regularly, The Jason Calacanis blog talks about the business behind weblogsinc.com. They make over $2,300 a day - just from google ads. That’s just shy of a million dollars a year. With money like that, it’s easy to see how they can afford to pay bloggers to blog. Is that the simplest ways to make money from your blog?

For business advice, FastCompany is another blog I visit. They recently posted a list of Top Business Blogs - I was astonished to find PolymerCode was not one of them ;-)

FastCompany was one of the blogs that made Forbes list of best Small Business Blogs. The most recent Forbes - Best Of The Web series features Blogs That Matter - their list of top blogs which include blogs on a variety of other subjects as well.

The unfortunate thing about these lists is their heavy focus on the US. Being Canadian, not all of their advice is relevant. Where are the top Canadian Business Blogs?

Even if you’re not being paid to blog, there are other ways to make a return on your investment. Heidi Cohen is getting a lot of traffic lately after she wrote an article about measuring the ROI of corporate blogs; A very good article that mentions some of the tangibles and intangibles that blogs bring to a business irrespective of what country you call home.

August 2, 2005

What features would you like to see in Zorn?

Filed under: Flash — kevinw @ 7:38 pm

Macromedia working on the next generation actionscript editor codenamed Zorn. They’re asking for your ideas. I’ve put in my 2 cents. You should to.

August 1, 2005

BC Day Tech Links

Filed under: Technology — kevinw @ 1:29 pm

Add View Source to your Flash and Flex applications

I’m thinking of buying a new hard drive. It time for me to learn how to reinstall windows without losing your data.

IE7 (beta) isn’t fully CSS complient. They’re fixing bugs, but it looks like IE7 still won’t be fully CSS complient before it ships.

Opera says they’ll pass the W3C Acid Test. Opera also says that their next version will stop spoofing user agent as IE. This should give a more accurate distribution in most sites web statistics.