SteveX Compiled

Looking for a Twitter client? Own a Mac? Get Tweetie.

That's an ad up there at the top of my feed. Tweetie puts those in until you pay for it, and I haven't paid yet. Likely I will, though, even with the great free clients out there like TweetDeck.

There are two things that make this my favourite Twitter client. You can close the Tweetie window without closing the app. That's just good Mac behaviour. And, it's got great keyboard support.

Tweetie also adds a menu bar notification icon that indicates when there's new stuff - not just in the people you follow but in the searches you've marked as favourites as well. I prefer the passive notification to Growl popups for Twitter updates - most tweets aren't worth interrupting me for.

The free version is ad-supported so it's easy to check it out.

Here's an interesting idea. The Brantford General Hospital is testing out a drive-through triage system for H1N1 patients.

I hope I can get fries with that.

Halloween is past so now and Costco has had their Christmas aisle open for weeks now, so I guess it's time to start talking about Christmas.

One of the fun things about running Ottawa Events when I lived in Ottawa was finding all the events going on for the holidays and listing them. In Brantford, the City runs a pretty good listing of Brantford Events, but of course that only covers Brantford proper. The distance from Brantford to Burford, St. George, or Paris is less than than the distance from Riverside South to Orleans in Ottawa, so it makes sense to cover some of the goings on in the towns around Brantford as well.

So in that spirit, here's are some Christmas goings in and around Brantford.

Ingersoll Rotary Christmas Parade, downtown Ingersoll, November 21st at 11am.

The Welland Santa Claus Parade, downtown Welland, November 28th at 6:30pm.

Christmas in Ancaster, at the new Ancaster Fairgrounds, November 28th and 29th.

Christmas Craft and Bake Sale at the Bell Homestead in Brantford, November 28th.

Holly Jolly Faire is a Christmas sale at St. Mark's Church on November 28th.

The Brantford JCI Santa Claus Parade runs through downtown Brantford on November 28th at 6pm.

The Burford Christmas Parade is December 12th, no time listed.

Looks like Simcoe puts on a big Christmas lights display at the Simcoe Panorama, through all of December.

(And then there's big Santa Claus Parade in Toronto on November 15th at 12:30pm, which may be worth a day trip to the big city).

Hey, apparently it's National Blog Posting Month. Sign me up.

(This is my entry for November 1st - I'm off to a pretty lame start).

I've been reading stories about hours and hours worth of waiting in line for H1N1 vaccine in Ottawa.

Seems to me the problem of "how do we get a lot of people through a lineup" should be fairly well solved by now.

There are some key principles that make this sort of wait less painful. Don't make people wait around. That seems fairly obvious, but so many stories I've heard from folks in Ottawa, through CBC, CFRA and blogs, tell of hours worth of waiting in lines, waiting in waiting rooms, waiting in staging areas, etc.

From the Ottawa citizen:

At a clinic outside Ottawa, people said they had started lining up at the Kanata Recreation Centre at 2 a.m. local time.

How can you keep people from having to wait around? Well, first off, give them some idea of the current load, and suggest an arrival time. Handing out tickets or wristbands is one way, and some clinics have done that. But why should I have to line up at 2am to get a wristband?

Here's how I'd set this up.

You go to a website and register. Or pre-register anyway; I know some of the registration process has to be done by medical professionals. But get some of the details out of the way. Give me an approximate time when I should arrive, that's got a half hour or so of buffer, but let me enter my cell number so I can receive SMS updates as my arrival time gets closer.

So, for example, when I register it tells me that I should plan to be at the clinic at 3pm. At 2:30pm I receive an SMS that says I should arrive at 2:45pm, or 5pm. Whatever the updated information is. Too many times I've been waiting in the doctor's office for over an hour for my "scheduled" appointment, fuming that they could have called me and let me know they were running late. Why not let the system do the calling?

Anyway, that's my ideal system, and that's not what the Brant County Health Unit has, but they have something pretty close.

You visit this website (apparently built with Joomla - kudos), and pick an available 5 minute time slot. Assuming things don't get too far behind (and that may be a big assumption, we'll see), that's it - you show up at the time slot that's reserved for you and get your shot.

You'd think the big cities would have the best processes, but maybe the smaller communities have a level of agility that the big cities can't manage. Anyway, we've booked an appointment for our son and I'll post back with how it went.

I just watched a MAX 2009 video on Flash Builder 4 Advanced Tips and Tricks. I'm a keyboard user and this video focuses on how to get the most out of Flex Builder using the keyboard. It's well worth watching, but if you're not going to watch it, here are some that I found especially useful.

Ctrl-3 - Brings up a way to search within the app for commands.
Ctrl-O - Navigate quickly within the current file (type to filter)
Ctrl-Shift-T - Open Type (filter for types using caps - BB for ButtonBar)
Ctrl-Shift-R - same thing but for non-code (resources, xml files, etc)
Ctrl-I - put cursor at right indentation for current line or reindent selection
Ctrl-D - delete current line
Ctrl-M - toggle maximize the editor

Also you can hold down the Ctrl key to turn any symbol in the editor into a hyperlink.

Some of these are Flex shortcuts and some are Flash Builder.

Here's the video:

I recently moved into a house that's about 30 years old and I've been dealing with lots of little house problems. Of course I turn to Google for answers but often all I find are people asking the same questions, often years ago, and conflicting answers.

The engine that Jeff Atwood has built for Stack Overflow is designed to be the ultimate Q&A website engine, and seems well suited to bringing all this together. They've created a hosted version of Stack Overflow called Stack Exchange, and it's open for beta signups now.

So I created Sink Overflow, a Stack Exchange site geared towards the kinds of problems you might run into around your house. Plumbing, heating, electrical, whatever.

What I'd really like is for people to contribute content. If you have any of these sorts of issues that you've had to deal with recently, please post a question, and then answer the question. Even if you don't know the answer, ask the question anyway - hopefully someone else will.

The key to building a site like this is drawing in a community. I'm still working on how to do that. I'm even open to the idea of paying people for good answers to questions if I can come up with a way of doing that, although I know Jeff is opposed to the idea.

I'm still testing the waters on this idea, so I'm also interested in what happens to a hosted knowledge exchange site when the owner decides to pull out. Does that content disappear? Will Stack Exchange offer to let someone else buy the site and keep it going? Will Stack Exchange simply assume ownership of it?

Either way, if Sink Overflow does get some good content and for some reason I don't continue with it, I will make sure that content stays on the Internet somehow.

I understand some people don't like Flash. That's fine.

But please stop using the "Punch the Monkey" ads from like TEN YEARS AGO as your example of why the web doesn't need Flash.

I was just listening to MacBreak Weekly episode 161 and they used that to justify that the web is just better off without Flash.

But here's the thing: People are using Flash to do lots of things, things that they want to do. If HTML 5 does take off and people start using HTML 5 to do the things Flash is doing, then HTML 5 will take on the negative aspects that people attribute to the Flash player.

Flash apps can be slow, use a lot of CPU, and kill your battery. Why is that? Because it's a runtime. It runs the code that the developer writes, and if the developer writes code that runs slowly, uses a lot of CPU and kills your battery, then that's what you get.

If you take a web designer who is used to building ads in Flash and ask them to build ads that run in HTML 5, they'll find a way to do it. And there's a good chance they'll still be slow, use a lot of CPU and kill your battery.

Then what? Will you want browsers to turn off HTML 5?

Amazon has announced the Kindle is now available internationally!

So if you live in Bolivia:

We are excited to now ship Kindle to Bolivia.

Same for lots of countries. Way to go, Bulgaria! But if you live in Canada:

Unfortunately, we are currently unable to ship Kindles or offer Kindle content in Canada. We are working to make Kindle available to our Canadian customers as soon as possible.

Insert Canadian self-deprecating joke here.

No, I'm not talking about a physics engine for Flash. Turns out if you call something Gravity, you run into a lot of search engine collision with this other force.

Anyway, I just wanted to link to a post by Stacy Young on some tech they're demoing at MAX next week, called Gravity.

What's significant about Gravity is that it lets you build Flex components that can be hosted by other Flex components, even if the components were built with different versions of the Flex SDK.

One of the reasons Microsoft has been so successful as a developer platform is because of the binary compatibility that COM enabled that let developers distribute components that other developers could use, even if they weren't using the same compilers, frameworks, toolsets, or whatever. Anyone who followed the protocol could create a COM object, and anyone who followed the protocol could use it.

Now, I don't know that much about Gravity but I'm going to go ahead and say it might bring some of that to Flex, be it in the browser or on the desktop via AIR.

And, it's inspired by OSGi (as in, it's as OSGi as you can get in Flex), which will make it familiar to you if you're already familiar with OSGi. (I suspect folks who read my blog are more familiar with COM than OSGi - they're conceptually similar although different enough that someone will want to beat me up for saying that).