Last week, at work, I was creating an Zend_AMF server for some project I work on. But because the front-end isn’t ready yet, I couldn’t test the server properly.

UnitTests are one thing, but I wanted to be 100% sure that everything is mapped correctly.

I was thinking of creating a browser like the one you find in amfphp or weborb, but I didn’t had the time.
Next option: search and find a browser with Google.

A few moments ago, I found ZamfBrowser. It’s an Air application, so perfect for every developer, whether you work with OSX, *nix or even Windows.

Features I like already:
- auto updates
- you can add amf servers as many as you want
- you can build your own request, with as many parameters as you like

Tomorrow I’ll test it properly, and I’ll post my findings later this week.

I was just looking at the walkthrough of Windows Phone OS (http://intruders.tv/inqtv/2009/07/31/windows-phone-os-walkthrough/).

Some remarks:

First of all, as usual, Microsoft has started his copier-machines and copied about everything of the iPhone OS and Android OS, but just not well enough.

I don’t like the mix of two kinds of user-interfaces: the Zune layout and the icon layout. Stick to one of them (neither one of them is great, I must say), that might solve a lot of disappointment for the end-user.
The iPhone OS is icon-layout based, but at least you can put the icons on different screens, so you can organize them in logic categories. In Microsoft Phone OS it’s one big list, not very practical.

Then the browser. Of course it’s IE and it seems to be very slow! The remark of the Microsoft rep is ridiculous: “there’s a lot of people here” isn’t a good reason. Also no multi-touch, so you can’t zoom in and out on an article. Not practical in my opinion!
The support of Flash is something we have seen in the HTC Hero phone, that’s running on Android OS, so actually, that’s nothing new.

Then the “new” app Microsoft Tag. How idiot can you be to try to invent a new kind of tagging system?! What’s wrong with the old one, everybody knows and uses.
- “Guys, we have to make an ad-campaign for a large company, and we have to put tags on them.”
- “Do we have to support Microsoft Phone users also?”
- “Of course”
- “So that means: two different websites and two different tags for the ads. That will cost a lot of money and time!”

Now, one more thing: if you’re about to give a demo of a mobile phone, make sure that everything is installed and configured properly, so you don’t get the annoying messages like “Would you like to import all your contacts?”.

Just discovered a website that delivers vector worldmaps … for free!

Apple finally dropped the iPhone SDK NDA on the first of October. Now every developer can publish tutorials and sample code. 

Apps Amuck publishes every day a new tutorial for creating iPhone apps. Every day you learn a new part of the SDK and XCode.

Tomorrow (Tuesday, October 14th) there will be a special Apple event. We all know Steve Jobs will announce new MacBooks and MacBook Pros. 

Today I’ve seen a very interesting mockup (I suppose) on Engadget combining a dock for the iPhone and a notebook. The iPhone is the brain and the touchpad.
I think this can be a very useful device for developers for instance: You create a (web)app or website, let it run on your iPhone (I should check if there’s already a webserver ported to the iPhone, or maybe there’s one build-in), with the keyboard it’s easy to develop on the road (let’s say on a train, plane or bus) and it’s easy to show your work when you’re visiting your client. The best of all: you don’t have to carry a large and/or heavy laptop.

Maybe, just maybe, Apple made such a device, or will make one one day.

Google Chrome is really nice! I’ve been testing it for only a few moments on my MacBook, using Windows XP running in a VM.

It’s super fast.

Launching the app takes about 0.5 seconds, and you can start surfing right away.

The Speed Dial function on the first page wasn’t working yet, there was a message that I should use Chrome a while longer before any sites would show up. Just gimme some time, Google :)

Browsing the web is pretty fast, of course, every depends on your connection. I had to reinstall the Flash player, and I loved it: multiple tabs were open, one tab was requesting to install the Flash player, which I did, and after installing the Flash player, only that tab reloaded and everything worked. No more “restart the browser” messages. I really love it!

Message to Google: bring us asap a Mac and Linux version, please!

Big news! Google will release it’s very own, created from scratch, webbrowser very soon!

It’s called Chrome, and I think it’s very promissing: multi-threaded, multi processes per tab, each tab in a sandbox … More details can be found in the comic.

Unfortunatly, it will be launched Windows only. Mac and Linux will be released a bit later.

Something to watch closely!

Thanks to the BBC tv-show Click online I just discovered cuil.com. 

Cuil.com has re-invented searching the Internet. It displays the search results in colums AND you can (thanks to Ajax) narrow the searchresults per subject.

It’s something to keep an eye on!

This one is very handy for me! I work almost constantly in Eclipse to create PHP/HTML/CSS/Flex/AIR/… apps.

Today I’ve found a solution for my FTP issues. Although Cyberduck is a great FTP-client, it doesn’t come even near Transmit, but Transmit isn’t free, unfortunatly.
I’ve tried to use FireFTP, but I don’t like it very much, because it ain’t easy to edit files straight on the remote server.

But since a few moments ago I’m able to use Eclipse as FTP-client! With remote editing included!

I stumbled upon a chat log with a link to the Target Management homepage.

The easy explination (this is only been tested for Eclipse Europa):

Go to the “Find and Install …” option in the Software Updates menu from your Eclipse installation.
Choose “Search for new features to install”.
Select “Europa Discovery Site”. 
Then select the “Remote System Explorer End-User Runtime” in the “Remote Access and Device Development”-tree.

After it’s installed, go to Window > Show View > Other … Then select the “Remote Systems”-view from the “Remote Systems”-folder.

Now you’re able to setup a new remote location, aka your ftp server. :)

This morning, I’ve lost some hours searching for a way to create an AIR app straight from ActionScript with Adobe FlexBuilder 3.

When you create a new Flex app, you can chose between a normal Flex app and an AIR app. With a new ActionScript project, you can’t.

You can create an AIR app from a standard .swf, but then you can’t use the native AIR framework.

Now, here’s a solution:

You create a new Flex project with AIR export in the Flex Builder.

In your favorite text-editor (e.g. TextWrangler) you open hidden .actionScriptProperties file, located in the root of your project folder.

You change the <application path=”<sourcefile>.mxml”/> into <application path=”<sourcefile>.as”/>. Make sure you have created the .as file

Now create a new NativeWindow in the constructor of the ActionScript class and …

now build your app.

You’ve just created an AIR app, based on an ActionScript class.

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