Congrats to Dave Coletta and team! It is great to see Flex RIAs taking off and to know that all the resources available to Adobe will be put behind this amazing product.

I had previously posted about working with Karl Fisch and Scott McLeod on this project at XPLANE, and I'm very excited about the new version. In fact, Scott has already previewed the video at several large lectures to rave reviews.

As this video is meant to be a launching point for more discussions on the topics within, I suggest you visit http://shifthappens.wikispaces.com and join the conversation. Scott McLeod has posted more information on his blog, Karl Fisch has his thoughts on his blog, and Dave Gray (founder of XPLANE) is also looking for feedback on his blog.

[Update: After the first two days the video has already been viewed over 5000 times!]
[kml_flashembed movie="http://www.youtube.com/v/pMcfrLYDm2U" height="350" width="425" /]

Almost equally brilliant is the project code name: "Operation Spamalot". Don't get it? Click here.

You can read the full SEC press release here.

I've been waiting for the new MacBook Pro's to be released for a few months, and when I saw they came out this morning I decided to take the plunge. If nothing else, it'll be nice to have a 17" laptop that doesn't weigh 20 lbs!

Check out the new specs here: http://www.apple.com/macbookpro/
I'll write up a review when it arrives. Until that time, let the 7-10 business day countdown begin.

In a word, no. I've seen the demonstrations on the Internet about how you can find another person using a Zune and give them a song they can play three times. It takes forever. By the time you've gone through all that, the girl's got up and left! You're much better off to take one of your earbuds out and put it in her ear. Then you're connected with about two feet of headphone cable.

---

In a time when most corporations are effectively reducing the memorable experiences in our lives, Apple and Steve Jobs are thinking about enhancing those experiences. Brendan Dawes gave a great talk about this at FlashForward 06 in Austin, and ever since then I have been thinking more and more about where all of those daily experiences in my life have gone.

For instance, I am in the process of ripping all of my CDs to MP3 and storing them on a large external hard drive. For almost every CD I pickup I am reminded of an event that took place while I was listening to it, such as a warming up for a particular basketball game in college. Once I rip them into iTunes as a digital format, I'm not reminded of that experience nearly as often.

This idea goes even further because not only is this having an effect on me, but it is spreading to the population on a fairly grand scale. Keeping with the music theme, think about iPods and how many people now walk around with their ear buds in listening to music and thereby creating this lack of interpersonal interaction.

Kudos to Steve Jobs and Brendan Dawes for their efforts to bring the experiences back to our daily lives.

Indeed.com has just released their salary search engine that allows you to do a "Google-like" search to estimate your salary worth. Overall the site is very easy to use and produces some fairly accurate results. I say "Google-like" because it gathers the data from over 50 million job postings over the last 12 months. This is a great usage of and extends the "mash-up" theme and concept.

They gather their results by searching through job postings on "thousands of unique sources" and compiling the data. This is very similar to what Mario Klingemann has done for several of his Flash mash-ups, where he uses RegEx to search through an HTML page's source code and pull out only the data he is going to use. This completely removes the need for an open API on your data source because now any website which produces a somewhat consistant HTML page can be used for your data set.

For instance, lets take a look at one of their sample searches, graduate degree salaries. If you do the search the resulting URL is:

http://www.indeed.com/salary?
cat=degree&q1=Bachelor%27s&q2=Master%27s&q3=Ph.D.&q4=MBA

Looking at this URL, it'd be pretty easy to construct via user input. In fact, I even tried the URL without the cat=degree, and it worked just as well and even gave us a cleaner page with less copy.If we view the source of the resulting page, you'll find this snippet of code which is ripe for pulling data from:

So from here you could search through the HTML until you reach:

From there you could pull out all types of free, open data including the job title, the salary and the width of each bar for a comparative graph (hey, it'll save you from doing the math!).

I'm sure you can see how easy it would be to apply this same concept to a variety of different sites that do not have an open API or RSS feed, etc. I can already think of several web apps that could benefit from displaying an average salary within them.

Having full Outlook e-mail and contacts on your phone is more liberating that you think. But, in order to actually get real-time push email you have to have access to a Microsoft Exchange Server and use it for your email. This might not be a problem for larger businesses, but for a small business this can be costly and excessive.

I started searching around and found that my (then) web hosting provider 1&1 Hosting offered hosted Exchange for less than $7 a month. I signed up and was happy for a couple of months, but a few weeks ago I switched over to a service called 4Smartphone and haven't looked back. So, I thought I would share since I searched for days looking for the right service provider.

While the service is great, I'm just generally impressed with how well everything syncs between Outlook, my Treo, and Outlook Web Access (the included webmail client). Microsoft seems to have gotten this right. And while the 700w is a bit bulky, it is nowhere near the size of a Blackberry, but still has all of the functionality. Now whenever I'm heading out of town for a few days, I rarely take my laptop unless I've got actual development to do.