Web Architecture, Management and Marketing

I’m at Flex Camp Chicago right now.  Bob Tierney from Adobe is giving a keynote, reviewing some internal proof of concept flex apps.  While Bob did not specifically mention this, he had an interesting New York Times article on his screen.  This article, Airlines Work on Systems to Reduce Delays has an image of an application from American Airlines that is clearly a Flex app.  That’s a pretty big name company using Flex, particularly for a publicly facing app.

Also this hasn’t been mentioned yet but I notice the Mate framework for Flex will be discussed at cfObjective this upcoming May by Laura Arguello.  I haven’t been able to get my hands on this yet but it sounds interesting.

MacHeist’s software bundle may or may not live up to all the hype it received over the past few months.  Either way, I do feel it’s a good deal on software.  Pixelmator is an incredibly cool photo editing application.  It’s hand down one of the most beautifully crafted software apps out there both in user interface and stability.  The fact that it uses your video card’s ram in order to work with images makes things so incredibly responsive.  That app in itself makes the bundle’s price of $49 worth it if you’re specific imagery needs are met by Pixelmator.   Unfortunately for some of the more mundane stuff I find myself needing to do with images like prepping for the web are a bit cumbersome in Pixelmator if not impossible in some instances, but as a secondary image app for creativity, it’s really cool.  I will also find myself using CSSEdit and Snapz Pro X for work.  I do already have Xyle Scope for css but CSEdit may work out a little better.  And I do not have an app like Snapz pro.  1Password has been interesting for password management and I may use that permanently for my personal passwords.  For work, we’ve been using the website http://www.passpack.com as a shared, web based password management system.  That’s really worked out well.  But I’ve been finding that for two different sets of passwords, it’s handy to have two totally separate systems.  As for the rest of the MacHeist apps, I think it’s mostly fluff but I’m sure there’s some useful stuff to be had.

As of the writing of this post, there’s 9 days left to get the bundle at $49.  If you check it out at this link, I’ll get some freebies too