TheRealTimeWeb.com - General

Introducing membermeister.com - Super Simple Member Management

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 08:38:00 +0100

Apologies for the recent lack of posts, but I have a great excuse which is also the topic of this latest update: I've been very busy trying to get my latest product membermeister (my latest project) up to MVP stage. Membermeister is an online membership management service targeted at small business owners that have to deal with a large numbers of members - for example sports coaches, childcare providers, dance teachers, personal trainers and so on. It allows them to keep all their member information in one place, create groups, schedule sessions and classes and most importantly produce invoice and track payments amongst other things.

Together with my friend Paul Bou-Samra we have been busy building this Rails based application for the last few months and we're now at a stage where we have something at hand that resembles a usable product.
We've learned a lot along the way, but the journey has only just begun and my intention is to write more about our experiences and ongoing learning in future blog posts.

Paul has taught himself Ruby on Rails in record time whilst I have tried to get to grips with the front-end development (not sure what I would have done without twitter's bootstrap) and heroku/ deployment. I've also got a good handle on the Rails asset pipeline now... don't ask. Heck, I've even dabbled in Photoshop and Fireworks to create graphics and designs - in a nutshell we are bootstrapping this baby 100%.

Those subjects are just some of many I could write about, and that's only the technology side of things. I have read somewhere that a successful product is one third code, and also needs one third execution and one third marketing. This certainly rings true for us, and we made sure to talk to potential customers BEFORE we embarked on building the application. Was it enough? Only time will tell.
But one thing's for sure, working on your own products is the most fun you can have as a developer (at least in my opinion), and if you manage to sign up paying customers then you're onto a winner and won't be likely to return to whatever you've been doing previously. It's addictive.

Right now membermeister will focus on UK based customers (in true MVP style you can't actually pay us yet!) with a view to expand in the longer term. Our backlog of to-do items is ever growing and for every item we tick off there seem to be two new ones springing up. It's true but if you're building a product you'll never be finished. We're ready to embrace the process. More to come.

Oh and if you know of anyone (maybe your tennis coach, your son's karate trainer or daughter's dance teacher) who seems to struggle with producing invoices, tracking payments or attendance then we'd love to talk to them. A tell tale sign of a potential membermeister customer is if the invoice you receive from them consists a of small piece of paper which your child fails to hand to you in time :-)

Combine Multiple .vcf Files Into One - Google Contacts

Thu, 25 Oct 2012 09:00:00 +0100

Today I needed to move some contacts (about 100 or so) from my wife's phone into a new Google account I set up for her. Unfortunately the upload page on Google's site only allowed individual uploads and it would have taken hours to upload all contacts one by one.

If you are, like me, on OSX (or Linux) you can quite easily combine a folder full of .vcf contacts into one by using this command (navigate into the folder which holds the .vcf files first):

cat *.vcf > combined.vcf

I'm sure you can do something similar on the Windows command line too. In fact I've Googled it for you. :-)

Enjoy.

LiveCycle Collaboration Service Gets a New Lease Of Life

Wed, 17 Oct 2012 07:26:00 +0100

Adobe's LiveCycle Collaboration Service has been rescued and given a new lease of life by Influxis. Now called the Influxis Collaboration Service (ICS) it gives existing LCCS customers the chance to migrate their applications over to ICS. If you recall, Adobe previously announced that they would shut down and discontinue the LCCS service without any obvious ways for existing customers to keep their LCCS based products and services online - ICS is therefore good news for many of those customers.

ICS will be comprised of two different account types, dedicated and shared accounts, with various price points starting at $25/month for a 10connection shared account. An extensive FAQ can be found on the Influxis site.

As you may know, LCCS (or now ICS) enables you to build real-time collaborative applications quickly using a variety of pre-built modules including FileShare, Chat, Whiteboard, Webcam and of course - dare I mention it - screensharing.

Let me know if you're building any applications with ICS and I'll link to them here.

2012 - Onwards And Upwards

Sat, 31 Dec 2011 13:53:00 +0100

As 2011 is drawing to a close (seriously, where has this year gone?) I think it's time for a quick look forward.

It's been a turbulent year, especially for the Flash Platform. We have some ups, and definitely some downs, and at times it felt as if our beloved community was imploding. Some folks have moved on and are quite likely never to return - 'sinking ship' comes to mind. Whilst I'm not the captain of that particular ship, I certainly hold the rudder for my own little boat and despite what Adobe may want us to believe it is clear to everyone that Flash has had its peak. I feel a bit sad about that, and it's not really because of the technology but because of the aforementioned community; I just don't feel that I'll find the same mix of creativity, problem solving and 'thinking outside the box' spirit elsewhere. The Flash community has been and still is one of a kind and I hope it will stay that way in 2012 and beyond.

In terms of new technologies to pick up next year there are plenty to choose from. Too many almost, and I for one feel a bit overwhelmed at times. I have a feeling I am not alone.
I'm also not totally sure which way to turn; it would be logical to brush up on some JavaScript (and here I was thinking I had closed that chapter 10 years ago...) and clearly it wouldn't be too hard to get up to speed. After all the similarities between JS and ActionScript are huge, but that alone won't make you a happy coder. Above all one needs to truly love what they are doing, as only then will the results be outstanding. So yes, JS is a definite win in terms of paying the bills, but I'm not yet sure if it'll be as much fun as Flash, Flex and ActionScript have been. Time will tell, and time it will take to make a decision, at least for me.
Having had a closer look at jQuery and some other JS libraries I think it *could* be fun - at least the JavaScript part. What I'm not so sure of is how much fun HTML and CSS will be - again those technologies are something I've left behind, at least to some extend. Sure, I still have to touch it almost daily, building user registrations forms and even entire sites, but it's never something I get much enjoyment out of. Perhaps I too am too lazy to be an HTML developer...? On the flip side, maybe HTML5 could change that - finally we can build applications - not just websites - that bear some similarity to Flex RIAs. Taking things a step further, I can see that it could be Flex developers who will be the ones bringing the most experience to the table. And don't fool yourself: JS syntax may be easy to pick up, but you won't become a JS developer overnight. Experience is gained by putting in the time, and building real-world applications, not by reading a dozen books (although that won't hurt).
Don't be distracted by people telling you that you must learn x or study y this year. Sure, have a play, explore new things, but only stick to it if you like what you see, and move on to something else if you don't.

So maybe you are like me and you too are excited about a developer in this day and age. And maybe you too won't just jump on the next bandwagon because it's 'cool', but because you enjoy the ride. I know I will, I'm just not quite sure which ride it'll be. The choices are vast these days, and I think it's important to choose carefully.

Happy new year, let's kick ass in 2012!

Forum Posts Resurrected

Mon, 05 Dec 2011 07:52:00 +0100

Due to several enquiries I've had over the last few weeks I have decided to put the old FlashComGuru forum back online for reference pirposes. It can be found at forum.therealtimeweb.com (or http://www.therealtimeweb.com/forum) and has been put there for reference purposes only. I have no plans to enable new signups again but would encourage people to sign up to this site's mailing list instead.

A Quick Word About Apps

Wed, 28 Sep 2011 13:18:00 +0100

Very briefly: why is everyone these days talking about 'apps' when they are actually referring to websites, games, products, services and real businesses? Maybe it's just me, but the term app seems to be terribly overused and de-values the task at hand.

Is 'app' the small brother of a 'real' application or piece of software? How many apps do you know that are both app and business rolled into one? I can't think of many since most of the time we're all building much more than an app. Would it make sense to not distill our work down to less than what it actually is just because it sounds fashionable?

Nowadays an app increasingly defines a small piece of software that one may use once or twice and then never goes back to again. I also expect an app to be very affordable (read: cheap or even free) and of relatively low value.

I think it's time to go beyond apps and call the things we build by their real name. Unless all you are building really is nothing more than an app...

Getting Started With node.js

Mon, 26 Sep 2011 21:46:00 +0100

I've been spending a little bit of time with node.js in the last few days and although I have not yet built anything meaningful with it I'm already quite impressed by it - despite it being JavaScript based :-)
In case you don't know what node.js is, let me give you a short intro (if you are familiar with FMS's AS1-based server side syntax then you'll quickly feel at home with node). Combine this with node's event based nature (everything in node runs asynchronously with extensive use of callbacks) and you can see how there is also some similarity with the events you may be used to from ActionScript3.
The fact that node is both asynchronous and single threaded means that every operation it runs is non-blocking, making the platform extremely scalable when it comes to handling large numbers of concurrent requests. LinkedIn for example have apparently had great results porting some of their apps from a Rails backend to node. Reportedly they went 'from running 15 servers with 15 instances (virtual servers) on each physical machine, to just four instances that can handle double the traffic'.

For me at least that sounded interesting, although I have to admit that I do not have any scaling or capacity issues using any other (thread based) server technology so far. Instead what attracts me to node is the similarities both in lamguage and syntax as well as in functionality (node is great for building real-time apps with add-ons such as socket.io).

The most-used example of a simple node.js app is probably this http server from the node.js homepage: var http = require('http'); http.createServer(function (req, res) { res.writeHead(200, {'Content-Type': 'text/plain'}); res.end('Hello World\n'); }).listen(1337, "127.0.0.1"); console.log('Server running at http://127.0.0.1:1337/'); It almost requires no explanation at all. Once started it will respond with 'Hello World' to every request. But as I said I have not actually got any code of my own to share right now, but wanted to point you to a great resource for getting started with node which is this page from smashingmag. It has a ton of links to other sites, all containing tips and tricks around node. I found nodebeginner.org particularly useful, but please judge for yourself.

Do you use node? Maybe in combination with a Flash based frontend (I think this would make for a great duo...)? Please leave a comment if you do (but don't hesitate to comment if you don't), and include some demo links if you can.

The End for Adobe's Multi-Screen Strategy?

Mon, 22 Aug 2011 16:35:00 +0100

The End for Adobe's Multi-Screen Strategy? - This is a question that Tim Siglin asks in his recent article on the sudden death of the HP TouchPad and WebOS.

My initial reaction to reading that header was one of suspected link-baiting; but since I know Tim well enough I knew that his style of writing goes substantially deeper than that of an attention-grabbing headline (but hey, this didn't stop me from re-using it. You see my standards are far far lower and since you are now reading my post it clearly has paid off ;-).

So does Tim have a point? Does the demise of WebOS and the sluggish uptake of other (non-iOS) mobile operating systems outside of Android really spell bad news for Adobe and its multi-screen dream?
On some levels the answer is clearly yes as it cannot be argued that deploying to a lot of OSs from one codebase is better than to just a few. And Tim rightly points out that one cannot talk of a multi-screen strategy when there's only two major OSs left to play on (iOS and Android).
Tim goes on to point out:
"A full 80 percent of the tablet devices that Adobe showcased at last October's MAX event either never made it to market, made it to market and floundered, or made it to market and were killed off quickly."

Clearly he makes some good points, and those numbers sound grim. But as a developer who has dipped his toe into mobile development for PlayBook, Android and iOS I do wonder how important those 'other' OSs really are. The PlayBook did not take off in the way that RIM had hoped, in fact one can't even call it a take off at all. Sure, we may see a next revision or a PlayBook2 but whoever thinks that this device will give the iPad a run for its money must be smoking something that I'd like to try some of.

But is it really a loss for Adobe that the TouchPad is dead, that the PlayBook is not all it promised to be and that the iPad still outsells all other tablets put together? I'm not so sure, after all multi-screen is about so much more than mobile. Adobe is making its revenues from selling authoring tools, and with Flash Pro and Flash Builder (including some other HTML-centric tools) have got a decent offering when it comes to targeting not only Android but iOS as well. Flash Player may not be present on iOS, but the Flash ecosystem (which includes the development tools that many of us use daily) is present nonetheless. Developers are actively building and deploying Flash based games to all major mobile platforms - Terry Paton being one example - and even Flex-based applications have been climbing the iTunes chart lately (see Politifact for example which even made it to number 1 in the news app section).

In summary I think Tim is partly right, it would be better for Adobe to have a wider range of platforms it can support in the mobile space. On the flipside the entire mobile ecosystem is still in its infancy and it is unlikely that more than 2 or 3 major OSs will become and stay mainstream - not too dissimilar to what happened on the desktop.
I think that if Adobe can offer publishing tools and workflows that can target the main players in the mobile space (as well as on the desktop, and maybe on the TV as well) then they've got little to worry about. In 2010 Adobe could bank its first $1 billion quarter, with revenue up 33%. Q1 in 2011 was equally successful for Adobe and represented their sixth consecutive quarter of sequential revenue growth.
My oh my, I am starting to sound like an analyst now, but clearly they are doing something right. Could they do better? Of course, but considering all the bad press and Flash-hate that is making the rounds in these times of oh-so-fashionable Adobe bashing it sometimes helps to get some facts down and a reality-check from all the 'tech-news' that we're subjected to recently. I'm starting to get really bored of it - and I'm not including Tim's articles in that.

Why WebRTC Will Power The Real Time Web

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 22:41:00 +0100

Well, there seems to be more to the WebRTC project than first meets the eye. First I thought of WebRTC to be a pure browser play but I'm not so sure now.
A little bit of research seems to suggest that the original WebRTC effort was kicked off at http://rtc-web.alvestrand.com before going to IETF and W3C (and WHATWG). There was an initial workshop in October 2010 to kick the project off, and what's more (and in the true spirit of openness) the agenda, participants and even presentation slides are available. The presentations in particular give an insight into the direction that this project is heading for, and it is clear that browser to browser communications are just one piece to the puzzle.

So if it's not just browser to browser then... well you guessed it, app to browser and app to VoiP systems interoperability is on the cards. An which app comes to mind before all others? Tip: check the participants list again. Yes, it's Skype of course. I also noticed a familiar name in the participants list - Matthew Kaufman, previously an Adobe engineer and co-inventor of RTMFP and now working for Skype. Oh yeah, nobody from Adobe was present at the workshop...

So basically there is hope for those of us who have briefly installed Skype 5 on OSX, as soon we will be able to connect (and integrate) Skype-like functionality to our own apps, call Skype users from a web page, conference in a phone user, and whatever else you can think of. Best of all it can be done without a Skype UI :-)

If you have any doubts about my assertions just have a quick look at this page with job postings from Skype.

How about becoming a Senior Software Engineer responsible for Skype's Core Library Porting? Porting to what? Not just Windows Phone 7 I believe, but browsers too. And I actually start to think that after all this I could imagine Skype actually starting to make some money. Skype will be everywhere, and the entire web will be compatible with it.
And that's just the Skype part to it all. On top of that WebRTC will enable all the other types of RTC based web applications that we have been building for years, but this next generation will have a much wider reach. Great news for developers, but other RTC platforms need to take note here or they could be left behind.

Google's WebRTC Will Bring Real-Time Communications To The Browser

Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:48:00 +0100

*** Update, follow-up post added ***

Interesting news:
http://sites.google.com/site/webrtc/home

The WebRTc project by Google aims to enable web browsers with RTC capabilities over JavaScript APIs. For me this may just be the incentive to pick up JavaScript again. For FMS this means even more pressure outside its core function of streaming video.

Some key points and features about WebRTC:
- NAT and firewall traversal
- choice of protocols such as SIP, XMPP and others
- VP8 video
- iSAC, G.711, G.722 and iLBC audio codecs
- acoustic echo cancellation (AEC), automatic gain control (AGC), noise reduction, noise suppression and hardware access
- license allows use of other codecs
- Google Talk will move to WebRTC
- royalty free use of all included codecs

From the WebRTC blog:
"Today, we are making available WebRTC, an open technology for voice and video on the web. With WebRTC, we'd like to make the browser the home for innovation in real time communications.
With WebRTC, we are open sourcing the voice and video engine technologies from our acquisition of GIPS, giving developers access to state of the art signal processing technology, under a royalty free BSD style license. This will allow developers to create voice and video chat applications via simple HTML and JavaScript APIs."

Exiting times, and you can get involved in this very new project.
If this doesn't kick FMS into gear for stepping up its efforts for RTC based apps then nothing will. I'm not holding my breath.

Adobe Files Lawsuit Against Wowza. Wowza Responds.

Tue, 10 May 2011 19:12:00 +0100

Oh what a mess. I had hoped this would not happen but here we are: Apparently Adobe filed a lawsuit against Wowza Media Systems last week alleging "patent infringement and unfair competition complaints regarding Wowza's business practices".

I do not have any specific details on the lawsuit and am merely reporting to the press release I received via email from Wowza. In it Wowza's David Stubenvoll states:
"Adobe's lawsuit against our company is completely without merit, and we look forward to resolving this matter in court. Wowza's position is that it does not infringe on Adobe patents and that we have engaged only in skillful and fair competition with Adobe. For the implementation in question, we disclosed our activities to Adobe more than five years ago and continued to be open and up front with Adobe regarding our activities. It is only after five years of Wowza growth, independent technology innovation, and market leadership that Adobe unexpectedly filed this unfounded and spurious lawsuit.

Wowza has always had a policy of timely, accurate communications with all current and prospective licensees, and so we have made the decision to communicate this matter swiftly. This action is not anticipated to interrupt our current product offering or future product plans. We will continue to innovate and provide the market with the best technology at reasonable prices while we respond in court to these unfounded allegations. We remain confident in our intellectual property position and welcome the opportunity to settle this matter definitively."

Let's see how this pans out, but in the end there will be no winners. In most people's eyes Wowza have developed a top notch product and provided great support to developers, offering a lower priced and feature rich alternative to Flash Media Server.
Honestly I feared something like this may be on the horizon, but I would have out bets on an acquisition of Wowza by Adobe instead - guess that option is out of the window now. Lisa seems to agree with me.

Anyone know where I can find the details of the lawsuit?

Configuring an Access Database on ColdFusion for 64bit Windows 2008

Mon, 21 Feb 2011 22:19:00 +0100

I've just had to move a website from one Windows 2008 R2 Server (64bit) to another. The site was running on an Access database backend (don't ask...!) and I had forgotten how I managed to set up the datasource a couple of years ago - however I do remember that it was a PITA.

Unsurprisingly it took me a good 2 hours again today until the site was back up and running on the new server and there were a couple of things involved (at least I think these two steps are the important ones):
1) Make sure your site runs in a 32bit Application Pool in IIS. Ok, admittedly I am no longer 100% sure if this is needed but it works for me. I set up the site in IIS and configured it to use its own separate Application Pool. Then I selected 'Application Pools' in the tree under the server node in IIS, selected my site's Application Pool, then chose 'Advanced Settings' on the right under 'Edit Application Pool' and in the window that opened I set 'Enable 32-Bit Applications' to True. I also changed the '.NET Framework Version' to 'No managed code' in order to disable .NET altogether for this site (it does not use .NET and I think some server error 500s I was seeing were caused by this, however I cannot be sure anymore. What I am sure about though is that my site works using this setting :-)

2) Next I needed to set up the datasource. Usually you do this in CF Admin but if you try this on a 64bit Windows machine it is likely that you're presented with an error. If you use the OS's ODBC Data Source Admin then you won't see any Access Drivers listed because the default ODBC Admin is the 64bit version and that one does not have an Access Driver. You must therefore use the 32bit version which can be found at C:\Windows\SysWOW64\odbcad32.exe

Once I set up my datasource using this tool I was able to get my site up and running again.
Hope this helps someone. And no, the site in question is not this blog :-P

Twitter Favourites - January 27th 2011

Thu, 27 Jan 2011 12:00:00 +0100

I've decided to start posting some of my Twitter favourites and hope to do this semi regularly. Sure, one can always head to my public Twitter profile and see the entire list there but who would seriously do that on a regular basis?
So consider this the first edition of what are generally interesting links, at least in my opinion. What usually happens is that I favourite tweets on my phone (using TweetDeck for Android) to later read them on my desktop (using TweetDeck for desktop).

PS: Anyone know of a simple widget to semi-automate pulling in the actual tweets?

Bob Wohl (@bwohl)
Some very awesome art work (via @brandon_ellis)
http://abduzeedo.com/amazing-brushless-graffiti-portraits-david-walker

Rob Christensen (@robchristensen) Interesting perspective: "Why I'm Moving From HTML5 To Flash by @tametick: http://bit.ly/hQkkEi

Simon Whatley (@whatterz)
Killing sign up forms http://j.mp/fYY39n /via @lukew

Iain Gavin (@iaingavin)
Save the day - aws uk developer day - 17th march. Central London. Looking into tech sessions on beanstalk, rds, etc event page up soon

Jason Fincanon (@FlashCanon)
RT @flashape pretty nice customizable load indicator in AS3: http://blog.sitedaniel.com/2010/08/creating-a-simple-load-indicator/

Joseph Labrecque (@JosephLabrecque)
[blog] Flash Developers: What Comfort Zone? : http://bit.ly/gJ1N7j #Flash

Juan Lopez-Valcarcel (@jlopezvalcarcel)
Trendspotting > [TechCrunch UK] Seedcamp reveals the 18 companies selected for London http://bit.ly/hp6xJt

John Dowdell (@jdowdell)
Top Mac App Store entry endures needlessly-foul support calls: http://is.gd/zHySqE "Once upon a time I looked forward to support emails...."

ActionScript Snippet: Return Characters After Last . (dot) From A String

Fri, 17 Sep 2010 13:59:00 +0100

A very quick one. I needed to determine the last n characters from a URL string which points to a file (not web page) in order to return the file extension. It's quite easy in AS3, so here's the snippet in the hope that someone finds it useful. This code will return all characters after the last dot.


var s:String = "http://media.wiley.com/product_data/coverImage300/91/04703811/0470381191.jpg";
var extension:String = s.substring(s.lastIndexOf(".")+1, s.length);
trace(extension); // traces: jpg

The End Of Codec Woes? Google Opens VP8, Sets Up WebM

Wed, 19 May 2010 18:40:00 +0100

Today's definitely a big day. The Google I/O keynote is about to start but some details of what will be announced are already public on the web. In particular it is clear - as was expected - that Google has released the source code for the VP8 video codec. VP8 of course is a supposedly high quality video codec which Google now owns after its acquisition of On2.

Not stopping there, Google set up a new media file format called WebM. You heard it here first :-) I can tell you you will hear a lot more about this very soon, and for a long time to come.

So what is WebM? According to Google it is 'an open, royalty-free media file format designed for the web. WebM files consist of video streams compressed with the VP8 video codec and audio streams compressed with the Vorbis audio codec. The WebM file structure is based on the Matroska media container.' Wow. That's pretty awesome and could definitely a game changer.
WebM is also royalty free. As they explain: "Some video codecs require content distributors and manufacturers to pay patent royalties to use the intellectual property within the codec. WebM and the codecs it supports (VP8 video and Vorbis audio) require no royalty payments of any kind. You can do whatever you want with the WebM code without owing money to anybody. " Well, I think one should add that we will need to wait and see about possible patent trolls coming out of the woodwork once they had a look over the VP8 source code. At least Google is well used to fighting attacks like this so let's see how this plays out. So to sum up, WebM is 100% free (at least initially), and open-sourced under a BSD-style license.

Also interesting is the WebM supporters page. There are many well known companies and brands listed including FireFox, Opera, Android, Chrome and - wait for it - Adobe Flash Player. Wowzers. Maybe we'll hear more about this at the keynote? VP8 in Flash Player would be sweet. The keynote starts in 10 minutes (from the time I type this). One logo notably missing from the supporters page is that of Apple. But that does not mean anyone is missing them.