machine501

Thanks to João Fernandes who just popped into our online chatroom and showed me this picture:

An ASUS handheld running a beta of Adobe’s AIR with the SearchCoder’s Dashboard 

http://apcmag.com/7220/intels_iphone_clone_umpc

That’s not quite a phone; it’s a handheld. But it means we’re getting closer to having AIR on a mobile device. That’s our SearchCoder/Dashboard (which you can download from here http://labs.searchcoders.com/dashboard/), an Adobe AIR application that makes lightning fast searches through the FlexCoders mailing list. It was written by me and my friend Tom Bray.

He and I both have been looking forward to seeing our flex apps on mobile phones, so that picture is just incredible, and it’s a total surprise too!

I’ve put a little chat widget for chatting about python on my blog sidebar.

I use IRC to chat with other programmers and I’m used to showing my code using a pastebin.  But when Tom and I started writing this flash chat widget I decided to come up with something that would let me paste code inline but not pollute the chat with a ton of code, so we came up with the syntax hiliting and code folding you see in this Flash chat widget.

There are other programming topics available for the widget but I decided to put the python chat room on my blog because that’s the language I love to work in.   Many of you come here looking for help with Tomcat and FDS so you figure I might be more of a Java guy …  I’ll explain why the emphasis in an upcoming post and how Python will come to play a greater role in my work.

If you want to put the flash chat widget on your blog just check out: http://www.chatopica.com/.  There are many more topics, like Java, Ruby on Rails, and even a Book Club for the literary types.  If you have WordPress there’s a widget you can use to install the Chatopica widget.