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If you aren’t registered for MAX yet and you want to go, why not try for a free ticket by submitting some AIR tips to the Adobe AIR Cookbook. We’re running a contest with a bunch of prizes and all you have to do is submit a solution to a common AIR problem to be entered to win.

The AIR cookbook is a really good resource. It’s the perfect place to share a snippet of code for something you just figured out how to do or had to hack around. Unfortunately the contest is open only to US residents, so my apologies to those of who don’t qualify.

Here are the list of prizes:

• Grand prize: One pass to the Adobe MAX 2008 conference in San Francisco, California (November 16–19)—valued at US$1,695—and also US$500 in O’Reilly Media books
• Second prize: Every English-language Adobe Developer Library (ADL) book published by O’Reilly Media prior to September 1, 2008
• Third prize: Five O’Reilly Media books of the winner’s choice
• Community choice award: US$350 in O’Reilly Media books to the winner of the top-rated recipe during the contest period

This guy gets paid to write:

Sean Locklear, Maurice Morris and Bobby Engram were the only two players who didn't practice at well.

I usually try to give writers the benefit of the doubt, but there is so much wrong with that one rather short sentence that you've gotta start to wonder...

Thanks to Simeon, I’ve completely fallen in love with the Sprouts project and Luke Bayes, one of the co-creators, is awesome. Basically Sprouts uses a bunch of Ruby tools and workflow to help you quickly create Flex applications. One of the nice things is that it also generates all of the test suites for you. Using ruby command lines and the sprout command line you can generate code, compile code, and generally do a lot of kick ass stuff. As I’ve been digging more and more into Ruby and Flex it’s helped me learn the power of Ruby and made me a more productive Flex developer.

The main tutorial is on on the Sprouts project page but Luke added some instructions on getting it to work with the Flex 4 SDK as well as showing how to incorporate libraries into your project. You basically just edit rakefile.rb and add the libraries you want to include. It will download them automatically and get you ready to roll. He’s got everything from corelib to Tweener included in the repository.

If you haven’t checked out Sprouts, I highly encourage you to do so. My Mac died on me, but when I get it back from repair I’m planning a bunch of screencasts about how to use Sprouts. It’s just so damn cool and easy.

My use of Scrivener has been increasing of late. I’ve had a few different projects that require the ongoing collection and shaping of ideas. Yojimbo is my general idea bucket, but when I am focusing in on a specific project, Scrivener works much better for collecting, arranging and developing ideas and research in one place.

My soul (or at least my carpal region) has ached that Quicksilver was not hooked into Scrivener. Thinking this could not be, I scoured the Google today and am pleased with my findings. It is possible to capture an idea from your brain, a book, or a website, and quickly toss it into a Scrivener project with only a few keystrokes. Here’s how it works:

First, you need to activate the Services Menu Module plugin in Quicksilver. To do this, activate Quicksilver, and then press Command-” (or Apple-”). Or click open the Quicksilver preferences and click on the Plug-Ins tag. Scroll to the Services Menu Module and check the box next to it to enable it.

That’s all there is to it as far as Quicksilver goes. Now, make sure the project you are working on is open in Scrivener; it needs to be open to catch whatever you are going to throw its way. Now, activate quicksilver, type a “.” and type or paste the thought you want to capture. Hit [tab] and (start to) type ‘Scrivener’. You should see a choice of two Scrivener options: 1) “Scrivener / Create New Clipping from Selection”, or 2) “Scrivener / Append Selection to Current”.

If you use Append, it will tack the text onto the end of whatever note is currently open in Scrivener. I use Create which will create a new clipping item within Scrivener. I like to keep my notes separate to move them around easily. The only downside, as you can see below, is that each new note is merely titled “Clipping” with a datestamp. Not ideal for me, but I’m just happy to have the info safely tucked into Scrivener.

I’m not sure if my life is actually better now, but my mouse has been spared some clicks. Happy scrivening to you…and your mouse.

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quicksilver + scrivener = carpal bliss

I’ve used EditGrid for several projects now, including expense tracking for my new blog A House By The Park. In addition to expense tracking, EditGrid is useful for: Setting up company golf tournaments. Simply create a blank spreadsheet with your columns labeled, email everyone in your company the URL, and let people fill their teams [...]

It’s been really cool to have gotten to join Adobe just as AIR was entering prerelease and then watch the actual release happen. Throw in crazy stuff like the on AIR tour and a good part of my time at Adobe was spent focusing on AIR. And I’ve always been excited about what it offers RIA developers. So when I got an email about a press release we were doing that showed we’ve had over 25 million installs of AIR applications since launch, it put a smile on my face.

But one of the more important numbers didn’t make the press release. We’ve had 850,000 SDK downloads. That means not only are users excited about AIR, but developers are getting excited as well. It’s been fun to watch various Twitter reactions to AIR (some hate, some love) and watch the platform grow. Plus, we’ve got some fun things in store. Look at all of the stuff we’ve got with Flash Player 10 and Flex 4. You’ll be able to take advantage of all of that inside of the next version of AIR, codenamed “Cosmo”. Mobile is going to be another big push down the road. Just as AIR enables you to create and deploy desktop applications on 3 operating systems at once, a mobile version of AIR could go a long way towards making it easy (and cost effective) to build applications for a variety of mobile platforms.

I got a kick out of this post by Ted Dziuba because on one hand, he’s very right. On the other hand, the web has evolved into an operating system all its own. And I think AIR plays a big part in that regardless of advancements like Chrome or Gears.

My Mac Book Pro is dead and I’m waiting for a part so I was left without my primary development machine which is kind of a pain in the ass. My gaming machine is a Windows Vista box with an installation of Ubuntu and since I’d been spending a bunch of time in Linux with some Rails and Flex stuff, I figured why not try to go the whole week in Ubuntu and convert everything I do - with the exception of Supreme Commander - over to Linux. This turned out to be kind of difficult. One, I had to get the VPN working so I could get my Adobe email. Then I had to get VMWare installed so I could do some windowy things. I ran into all kinds of problems. But the great thing about Linux? No matter how obscure your error message is, someone, somewhere, has blogged about it or posted it in a forum, and someone else is there to help.

It doesn’t matter how random or long the error message is, I’ve never run into a problem that I couldn’t find a response to. Sometimes the response goes over my head and assumes I know more about Linux than I do, but I can usually Google the response to figure out what exactly it means.

I think the Flash community is really good at this. A lot of times when I google a Flash problem, I have tons of responses. I think that does more than anything else to help the learning curve, so after today, I’m going to try and blog solutions to all of the random Flex/Flash/AIR stuff I run into. Hopefully someday we’ll open source the Flash Player and AIR so that the whole Linux community can jump in and start helping with those problems as well.

But that’s probably reaching a bit too much

The Artist’s Way Collective begins week 2 today. Week 1 focuses on Recovering a Sense of Idenitity.

For those who are participating with us, you can share your thoughts in the comments below. If you are using your blog to process your experiences, please leave us a link.

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the artist’s way collective: week 2 hub

About a week ago my friend Mike messaged me on Google Talk with a link to an article at Seattlest, a blog I read regularly. Upon reaching the article, I immediately recognized my own photo included at the top.

While catching up on the Seattlest web feed tonight, I also noticed that they used another one of my photos in an article about the Seahawks posted back toward the beginning of August.

I regularly add photos I've taken to the Seattlest Flickr pool, so it's pretty cool to see that some of them have been recognized and utilized on what is a pretty cool local blog.