CS3 licensing – a pleasant surprise

Posted on June 29, 2008
Filed Under Adobe | 5 Comments

To be blunt, for the honest, hardworking developer, Adobe’s CS3 licenses are expensive.

Sure you get an amazing toolkit of applications in any of the CS3 packages you choose (be it Web/Design, Premium or Standard), but the price of entry to the CS3 world is prohibitive to say the least.

Having been developing using the Allaire Macromedia Adobe toolset for over 8 years now I have been lucky enough to not worry about the licensing cost of the tools I have come to rely on like Fireworks, Photoshop and Acrobat etc – the organisations I have worked for have purchased or already owned licenses.

However recently that changed. I desperately needed these applications and didn’t have the luxury of company owned licenses. I felt like I was pulling my hair out getting by without them. So I took the plunge, shelled out my hard earned and bought a license for CS3 Web Premium… and now I’m much more productive I’m happy to say.

I now need my toolset available on my other laptop, and I discovered (very pleasantly) this afternoon that the Adobe CS3 license permits installation on a 2nd PC/laptop for home use. Fan-bloody-tastic! Thank you Adobe!

It’s nice to feel like with all the hard earned sunk into the CS3 license, that I’m actually being thrown a bone by Adobe.

I love Photoshop and Fireworks – they’re amazing tools in their own right – I regard them as “best-of-breed” in their product spaces. Using other image editing tools lately has made me appreciate just how good they are. Acrobat is just starting to come into its own as a genuine development platform and I don’t use Dreamweaver – hate it in fact.

So sure you get a lot of kit with CS3. But am I wrong in thinking Adobe software is expensive?

Subversion Part 1: Version control just keeps getting better

Posted on June 29, 2008
Filed Under Subversion | Leave a Comment

I was recently tasked with the job of speccing a new development server that will soon be ordered and built by me. But in the interim, a mirror of the development server had to be setup on my laptop and act as a proving ground for how the new development server would be setup.

The company I am inheriting the site from don’t have version control implemented – it seems as though I go from organisation to organisation where version control is either non-existent or in the very early stages of implementation. Once you get version control integrated into your workflow, I find it hard to not use it – I find it integral to development whether you are in a team of 10 or a team of 1. The safety and sanity it provides is invaluable.

Since I have had to setup SVN from scratch again, I’ve been pleasantly surprised to see how much the platform has matured since I last implemented it. At that time it was stable but still somewhat of a newcomer up against CVS. The clients were pretty mature, but the server installations on Windows were tricky. Not anymore.

Enter VisualSVN. Couldn’t be easier to install and setup – provides a very nice set of defaults, a configuration GUI that makes setting up of users and groups and piece of cake, a built-in webserver for repository exploring and installs as a service to boot – best of all it’s free.

It’s such an easy installation process that it couldn’t be further removed from my experience trying to setup an SVN server 2 years ago. Painful doesn’t describe it. So if you’re looking for an SVN server installer, I can’t recommend VisualSVN more highly.

Icewhole.com – social networking for the film industry

Posted on June 28, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion | 1 Comment

Icewhole

Perhaps this is a little bit of blatant promotion, but I am working on a very exciting project at the moment that takes social networking to the film industry – Icewhole.com

It’s an entirely ColdFusion powered site with an MSSQL backend and On2 Flash encoding engine powering the film and music video sections of the site. It’s still in beta form with plenty more improvements to come in the near future, but the crux of the site is that it empowers independent film makers to network with other professionals in their industry to help them produce and showcase their films.

Short films can be uploaded and promoted on the site (much like youtube, but better quality and at a targeted audience), with various awards handed out each month for uploaded films as voted by a panel of judges including names such as Morgan Freeman and Richard Attenborough.

There are some great films showcased on the site already so do visit and check them out, leave a comment for these young, upcoming filmmakers and if you like the site, signup as a “Film Fan”. If you have friends in the film industry casting directors are already perusing the site for potential talent so it’s the place to be if you’re in the industry and want to get noticed.

It’s exciting to be involved in such an innovative, exciting project with much more to come soon!

Firefox extensions – the essentials for any CF developer

Posted on June 24, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion, Firefox | 6 Comments

Since I discovered ColdFire and apparently I was late to the party, I thought I might detail the small number of extensions I rely on every day. They were the first things that got installed once I setup my dev environment on my new laptop and I regard them as absolutely indispensible for an CF developer.

The only other extension I use every day is FoxClocks – not strictly development related, but seeing as I am an Aussie living in the UK timezones and world clocks are important to me and I haven’t found a neater way yet of keeping track of the time back home. Regularly updated, it just keeps getting better. One of the best general purpose Firefox addins yet IMO.

If there are any other firefox extensions other ppl are using that you regard as indispensible, let me know!

Coldfire – revelation!

Posted on June 23, 2008
Filed Under ColdFusion | 6 Comments

I’m probably late to the party, but I only just discovered ColdFire – an addon for the indispensible Firebug Firefox extension.

I already find Firebug a must for any web developer. When I don’t have it available to me, I feel like I am blind trying to find my way around the maze of CSS box floating left, absoluting right and positioning relative. I wonder at times if whoever wrote the CSS spec was on drugs. But I digress.

ColdFire hooks into the CF debugger so you can get access to the same debug info you would get from CF if you had debugging turned on. Problem is, I often have it off these days since it severely slows down page rendering on some frameworks (ModelGlue) or buggers up the rendering of CSS layouts.

ColdFire to the rescue! Apparently it’s just made the top 3 downloads on RIAForge. Why haven’t noticed it before??

Anyway I’m a happy camper. The more tools in a web developers arsenal, the better as far as I’m concerned!

Welcome to On the Bubble

Posted on June 23, 2008
Filed Under Random musings | Leave a Comment

After a hiatus, I’m back blogging about tech stuff. I already blog about personal stuff elsewhere since I’ve left Aus for the UK, but I’d prefer to keep the two seperate, so this one has been revived!

The combination of new things I’ve been stumbling across dev wise since coming over to the UK and a good friend inspiring me to get back into blogging about tech/dev stuff was the catalyst and couldn’t be at a better time. There’s a lot of exciting stuff going on in the Adobe/RIA space for web developers right now.

Hope I make sense some of the time :) Enjoy.

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