Adobe Integrated Runtime

For those of you who have had trouble in the past with using Flash / websites to make desktop-like applications, there is Adobe Air (formerly known as Apollo).

Basically Apollo is a desktop runtime (compatible with both Windows and Mac) which allows you to embed Flash and HTML/CSS/JS+AJAX inside a desktop runtime (similar to a Director Projector).

Why would you do this?

• You can have cool icons for your apps, and can put them on the dock
• It can access the file system!!!!!
• You can use it to make quick and easy applications
• It can access all other types of system level functionality
• It can interact with other programs (eg: take information out of a website)

An example is the Adobe Creative Suite 3 installer, which is actually made up totally of HTML/CSS/JS (pretty cool if you have seen it, simple and effective).  Don't know if it uses AIR as such, but same concept.

So yeah, its pretty cool :).  It also leverages Adobe's Flex platform (naturally).  So yeah *HINT* maybe a nice feature of your social site might be a nice desktop interface that people can use if they choose (this is my personal random thought) /*HINT

Can find it at: Adobe's Air Site

cheers

Other Online Communities

Evening Kids,
Since we've been posting other online communities, I thought I'd post a few more that I quite like.

For the designers out there, theres "COLOURlovers" ( love the correct english spelling there ). People post various colour pallettes and you can vote for your fav's or merely look at how amazingly well some colours blend into eachother. Great for people looking for colour combinations / schemes for websites etc.

For the professionals, there's "LinkedIn". Which as far as I can gather is a professional networking site - good for employment and increasing your contact base through other people.

Another Myspace/Facebook competitor I looked at for a while was Virb. Virb is quite nice, definately one of the better designed social networks out there. But with the giants overshadowing it, it's a bit hard for it to make a name for itself.

Threadless is a nice little t-shirt designing website. You submit a design, people vote on the designs, and then if your t-shirt is selected as one of the top designs, you get a cash prize, and gift certificates for the website, and your shirt is printed. Not bad!

Finally, for those looking for a place to upload videos ( other than youtube ), I highly recommend vimeo. Large(ish) file sizes of fairly decent quality are accepted, and it's a nice community of video-share-ers.

I'm sure some of those have been mentioned before, but I like them - so I thought I'd mention them again.

- Anthony

Deviant Art

Hey I'm surprised no one has said anything about deviant art. Its such a great community for people who like doing anything possibly art related from drawning to graphic design and photography. Its a perfect example of a community of like minded people comming together to share their projects.

Anyway my account for anyone who wants a look: http://midnightjackel.deviantart.com/

Pownce

I wasn't sure if we could just post here, but since we're on the topic of all things web 2.0 and social, I've got 10 invites to "Pownce" if people would like to give it a try ?

It's a social networking link/picture/event/file sharing system ( co-created by one of the founders of digg.com : Kevin Rose ).

Check it out here, and if you want one of those invites, give me a yell.

Manage Your Life with SMS

Hi all

I thought I'd share this article on Life Hacker about how more and more social networking sites are becoming mobile with the help of SMS.

Twitter Inside Blogger

Hi,

Just found this post on the blogger updates, might be useful

"Twitter badge for Blogger Our friends at Twitter just released a nifty new web badge, which you can use to easily display your Twitter updates in your blog's sidebar:

http://twitter.com/badges/blogger"

Twitter everywhere :)

More on getting connected

Hi all. Here is the first class announcement via the course blog, and it's to clarify what you need to do at the end of signing up to the social software sites for class participation. I asked for you to email us with the addresses for the feeds of your accounts on various sites, but of course not all the sites have rss/atom feeds. Here is a more detailed version to help clarify what I'd like, illustrated with examples from my own accounts:

• del.icio.us: feed for your bookmarks
  
• [http://del.icio.us/rss/viller]
• flickr: feed for your photos
  
• [http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/photos_public.gne?id=86488898@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200]
• and feed for comments on your photos [http://api.flickr.com/services/feeds/activity.gne?user_id=86488898@N00&lang=en-us&format=rss_200]
• last.fm: feed from your profile page (I think XML is the best option)
• [http://ws.audioscrobbler.com/1.0/user/viller/toptracks.xml?type=overall]
• twitter: feed from your profile page
• [http://twitter.com/statuses/user_timeline/778607.rss]
• facebook: no feed, please join the comp3505 facebook group
• [http://uqedu.facebook.com/group.php?gid=6455473920]
• Google Calendar: public feed (go to 'Manage Calendars' and then 'Calendar details' to get the link)
• [http://www.google.com/calendar/feeds/0803cc6bfs5hlmom8kcmeem658%40group.calendar.google.com/public/basic]
• Blogger: just sign up once you receive the invitation and then you'll be added as an author to this blog.

Any problems, add a comment here, or ask in the tutorial.

Stephen.

Why not aggregate Twitter and Facebook?

Access your twitter site via Facebook using the Twitter application :)
Will show your latest tweet on Facebook and will allow you to jump straight to Twitter anytime you want to tweet.

Welcome

Hello world, and welcome to the blog for UQ course COMP3505: Social and Mobile Computing.