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ADM Blog
25Mar/090

Flex and Visual Studio

Visual Studio is really popular with developers and for good reasons. It's fast, has some of the best Intellisense and debuging there is and now you can also use it for Flex authoring. Amethyst is developed by SapphireSteel and it's currently in public Beta.

One of the smartest moves Adobe ever did was to release the Flex SDK and make it easy to integrate it with other code editors. We know of quite a few editors (commercial and open source) that use the SDK, so this is certainly extending the Flex echo-system. Amethyst is a free IDE that builds on Visual Studio. If you already have Visual Studio and the Flex SDK installed, you only need to run the Amethyst installer to get started.

ambeta3-debugger

Amethyst offers code completion, formatting and intellisense for AS3 and MXML. There's class templates for AS3, AIR, MXML, MXML components and more. The code is color coded and collapsible and all the neat Visual Basic panels such as Object and Solution Explorer works. The Personal Edition of Amethyst will be a free download for always, but some IntelliSense features may be provided in the ‘Professional’ edition only. The latest version was released only days ago and the beta now has super-fast intellisense, so if the slow intellisense in Flex Builder is killing your productivity, this could be worth a shot.

Check out more and download from here

25Mar/090

Auditory illusion

head-phones Shortly I came across an mp3, titled the “Virtual Hair cut”, and believe me I was bewitched by the level of hearing illusion. By the time I finished the mp3, I got hold of my hair to assure that they are ‘there’ and It was just an illusion!!

So highly recommended, download and play it with the Headphones on!! (Headphones are a must).

 
 

Virtual Haircut

A Matchbox:

Auditory illusion?

Most of us are aware of the fun side of Optical illusion but auditory illusion is a less popular term. Auditory Illusion is the illusion of hearing sounds which are not present in the stimulus, or impracticable sounds. The illusion demonstrates our ability to locate sounds in space; by comparing the inputs to the two ears, we can work out where a sound is coming from.

For those who are interested in going into details of “Whats going on?”

LINK 1
LINK 2

Now The Technology Part!
So as its supposed to be a technology blog, the technology part:

The fact.co.uk reports that several projects are exploring the potential for creating an illusion of presence within virtual audio environments and researching ways to piece together illusory space onto an existing space through the use of a hyper real 3D audio system to provide an invisible but realistic “Parallel world” .
Researcher’s are looking forward to the prospects of transmitting a 3D audio experience live (in realtime) from one place to another via the internet. Other longer term project exploring various viewer tracking devices as a ‘hands free’ interactive model for realtime audio composition.

23Mar/090

Really useful firefox keyboard shortcuts

firefox-shortcuts-mark1. Automatically complete .org and .net addresses

Yes, we know that if we type ‘google’ in the address bar and press Ctrl+Enter it directly goes to www.google.com . But what about .org and .net addresses? .

In Firefox, Shift+Enter takes you to .net

And Ctrl+Shift+Enter takes you to .org addresses automatically .

2. Alt + D or F6

You can use this to navigate directly to the browser address bar of firefox. Very useful.

3. Ctrl+T and Ctrl+Shift+T

Ctrl+T helps you to open a new tab and Ctrl+Shift+T reopens the last closed tab.
This comes quite handy in case you accidently close a tab. Another way to do this would be go to History -> Recently closed tabs.

4. Alt+Enter

This can be an extremely useful shortcut. It automatically opens a website in another tab when you highlight it in the autocomplete list. For example you want to go to Facebook and you start typing www.face…, in the address bar and it starts showing the list below. You just need to use the down arrow key to highlight the selection (facebook.com in this case ) and press Alt+Enter so that it opens in a new tab.

5. Use of Delete Key

The Delete key can be pretty useful because it helps you delete specific addresses in browser history or autocomplete forms.  If I want to delete the 2nd entry from autocomplete history, I’ll just point to it and press Delete key. Simple, isn’t it .

6. Ctrl+Tab

Ctrl+tab helps you to navigate between different firefox tabs quite easily.

7. Ctrl+[1,2….9]

Ctrl+tab can help you navigate alternate tabs but if you are a heavy tab user like me and want to go to a specific tab then just use Ctrl+corresponding tab number. Ex:To go to the 3rd tab use Ctrl+3.

8. Spacebar and Shift+Spacebar OR PageDown and PageUp

Spacebar or PageDown key scrolls down the webpage you’re on and Shift+Spacebar or PageUp scrolls up the webpage you’re on.

9. The Middle Mouse Button

This is not a keyboard shortcut but it is an excellent shortcut. Just point to a link anywhere on a webpage and press the middle mouse(scroll) button. It opens the page in a new tab .Also middle-clicking a tab with the mouse closes the tab.

10. / Button

This (backslash) if you hit that once will bring a quick find option. We dont have to puch CTRL+F for searching.

I hope these shortcuts will enhance your browsing productivity with Firefox. Share your other interesting shortcuts which I may have missed....!

12Mar/090

Xobni Makes Life Easier. Really. It Does.

xobni_scXobni is a new plugin for Outlook 2007 users and it kicks your email capabilities ass.

Email search. Way faster than the current Outlook07 search. When I started typing in the first two or three letters in Xobni it immediately began pulling up emails with those letters used. It has been a time saver because Outlook takes forever to search through 2 years of emails. With Xobni, it's pulling them up in seconds.

Email Analytics. Fancy little graph showing you the frequency of email usage between you and your contact. Below the graph, it shows you the number of messages sent in and out and the contacts rank based on that number.

Click-to Functions. Click on their phone number, click to schedule time with person (creates a default email and pulls your availability from your calendar!), or click to email this person.

Network. Shows you all the people you and that person are associated with.

Conversations. Shows you the history of correspondence between you and that person. How easy!

Files Exchanged. Shows you all the files you and that person have exchanged. How convenient!

Fun Facts. Share fun facts with your contacts, such as who responds the fastest to your emails.

Unlike many Outlook add-ons, Xobni seems to add its functionality without dragging down Outlook's performance, or worse, crashing it. It's useful and it doesn't get in the way. There's no reason not to try it, but be warned: it's still in beta, so just because others haven't had problems doesn't mean you'll get away scot-free.

And the download link.

Enjoy

6Mar/090

World Builder

When i first started this blog i said to myself I'm not gonna post dumb videos from all over just to keep visitors busy. But this video makes the exception. It's fantastic.

This award winning short was created by filmmaker Bruce Branit, widely known as the co-creator of '405'. World Builder was shot in a single day followed by about 2 years of post production. Branit is the owner of Branit VFX based in Kansas City.

In his own words: "A strange man builds a world using holographic tools for the woman he loves."

Hope you like it