bricemason's blog

My goal as a developer has always been to produce products that have a positive, lasting impact on the user experience. Having spent a good part of my career in the non-profit sector, I understand the added challenges of meeting this goal. Tight (non-existent) budgets and little access to enterprise resources play a big part as barriers to working in this field from a technological perspective. Luckily there are a number of organizations whose goal is to support nearly every facet of this industry to ensure their success. One of these organizations, Netsquared is promoting the DonateNow Mashup Challenge, sponsored by The Case Foundation. This is a contest which challenges you to create the most innovative solution which supports the online donation process using the Network for Good API. Come up with the winning idea and you've earned yourself $10,000.

In my last post I talked about all the new developments not only in the world of AOL API development but with supporting technologies such as Flex 3 and AIR 1.0 from Adobe and a taste of the Ext JS JavaScript framework. Today I'll expand the tour to include a look at the latest version of the Ext JS framework which includes many helpful features for creating AJAX flavored AIR apps. I'll then complete an OpenAIM/Mapquest AIR mashup which will map the top 10 ranked AIM Fight users.

Although my original intention for this week's blog was to create an Adobe AIR application mashed up with a little Web AIM and Mapquest, I got to thinking that it was becoming more than that. There's been quite a bit going on over the last couple months. While Adobe recently shipped Flex 3 and AIR 1.0, perhaps the biggest and most important releases for us come from AOL with their authentication support for desktop applications such as Adobe AIR via clientLogin, Mapquest's free edition, the incredible advances for the Open AIM platform, and the soon to be released Userplane Media Player. While I will still be producing an AIR/AIM/Mapquest mashup, I'll also touch on the new authentication available to AIR too.

The past couple of weeks have been pretty big for AOL and Adobe. If you're a developer on either, or better yet both platforms, you should have a fairly wide smile as Adobe shipped Flex 3 and version 1 of their AIR platform two weeks ago. AOL which has been one of a handful of companies to adopt and support AIR technology in its early stages, released their Xdrive Desktop Lite client. This post will review the client and how to get started using it.

The last two posts, we've been covering how to develop a Dreamweaver extension which simplifies the process of including permalinks to published Xdrive assets. Last Tuesday we finished the actual coding but there is the final step of packaging and optionally submitting the extension to the Adobe Exchange to be shared with others.

Last Tuesday, we covered all the basics required to start developing an Adobe Dreamweaver extension to aid in the process of linking published Xdrive assets to sites developed using Dreamweaver. In today's second part of three in this series, we'll finish development of the extension by building the user interface.

For a while now there's been a good amount of coverage on AOL Xdrive, usually resulting in a wealth of information on how to construct your own applications and services using this awesome service. Today we take a different route as we begin part one of a three part series which walks through the development of an Adobe Dreamweaver extension using HTML/CSS/JavaScript which leverages the Xdrive service.

On Tuesday I demonstrated the use of a proxy to upload pictures from AIR to Xdrive via drag and drop. Today we wrap up this series by showing you how to download files from Xdrive to AIR using this same technique, but this time using a context menu control.

We left off last time with our user interface filled out nicely with pictures from both the local filesystem and the "My Photos" folder on Xdrive. Today, we'll add some drag/drop interaction using Ext to facilitate the uploading of local pictures to Xdrive.

Although we've made great strides the last couple of posts developing the Xdrive picture syncing utility with Ext JS and Adobe AIR, today we get going with the really good stuff. In this third part of a five part series, I'll show you how to retrieve and display pictures from both your local file system and Xdrive.