Burad's Blog » adobe

Evolution of a blogger

burad — Tue, 20 May 2008 20:20:14 +0000

It has been almost 3 year, When I started blogging. Looking back to see how my blogging style has changed, change in content of blog post or change in my motivation for blogging to sum up how I am evolved as a blogger. First I’ll tell you how my reasoning behind blogging has changed:

Why do I Blog ?

Because I wanted to blog, seeing so many on internet.
Then as catalog of stuff I’m doing, for me and may be for others to know.
And with time it changed to showcasing what I like, what I’m doing, sharing tips and then taking readers opinion, discussing with them. (at leasts thats the aim)

In all above cases common things can be to pass time and share experience plus along with we are (I am) also always looking for recognition and admiration.

And about change in my blog content:

May 2005, Posted some pictures, wanted to avoid much writing.
June 2005, Just write about your projects, so that you don’t have to dwell for blog content.
November 2005, You try to write some good posts(Solving Rubik’s Cube, Speed up firefox) but you end with posts like Unnatural laws whose content is generally a email forward or similar.
February 2006, You try your best looking for good content to post but most of post were result of “submit to blog” button on digg.
July 2006, Most of blog post consists of linking to stories of others blogs or quoting parts of posts from other blogs.
September 2006, Now blog posts are mixture of posts from above categories.
January 2007, Now You are improving with some good posts (sharing knowledge firefox: about pages). Also tried covering some events in IITB (Techfest 2007: Feeding the Fish, Creative Commons, India launched on 26th Jan at IIT Bombay)
Then there is also a time when you stop blogging for some time (for me this hibernation period was from May 2007 to Nov 2007)
Decemeber 2008, January 2008: You are trying to get back in form and you want to write good posts now)
February 2008, Some good posts which includes what new you tried Adobe AIR: Web to Desktop, Trying hands on Google gadgets) or tips you want to share(Google movie search tricks).
Now I feel, I have a good enough blog which people (atleast some) want to read. And I’m always ready to try, explore new things and share with my viewers and always waiting for there feedback. (Check my posts for this month)

In all these time periods you will always have some good posts and some just blog posts.

Share with your motivation behind blogging and how you pick up content for your blog. I’m not a good writer (I try to share mostly technical, geeky stuff through my blog) so any suggestion/feedback to writing style are always welcome.

Adobe AIR: Web to Desktop

burad — Tue, 19 Feb 2008 21:28:44 +0000

Past few days, I have came across Adobe AIR through digg, techmeme, delicious and so today i thought i should try this. Adobe AIR lets us their existing web development skills in HTML, AJAX, Flash and Flex to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop. For Application development you will need two things:

Adobe AIR Runtime : Necessary for running AIR applications. (For windows & mac)
AIR_SDK Provide necessary libraries to build AIR application

Having Adobe AIR extension for Dreamweaver CS3 can be very helpful as it facilitates to package and preview .air application files directly within Adobe Dreamweaver CS3.

As my first AIR application, I ported my rubiks cube timer as a desktop application (RubikTimer.air). Its very easy using dreamweaver extension, have a look here : Create your first HTML-based AIR application with the AIR SDK (great tutorial for beginners).

One problem I faced: Usually setInterval(“display()”,500) works with Firefox/IE but it was not starting with no error message to look into but then i found out about using Adobe CommandLine tool. (via Three ways to debug Adobe javascript Application). It´s called ADL and resides in the /bin folder of the SDK. ADL showed the Error: “Unsafe javascript”. Then after some random changes when i change it to “setInterval(display,500)”, It started working. Another problem I faced was related to keypress events in javascript, were not working with AIR (still have to resolve this issue)

Download RubikTimer.air here
Web Based Rubik Cube Timer

Sample Adobe AIR Applications
Trying hands on Google gadgets

Making LaTeX Beamer Presentations

burad — Sat, 14 Oct 2006 22:45:00 +0000

I came across this nicely compiled page on :
how to make Latex Beamer Presentations

If you want to create overhead presentations (á la Powerpoint) with LaTeX, you can do so by using Beamer class, which creates surprisingly professional and sophisticated documents that you can then display using any pdf viewer (e.g., such as Adobe Acrobat). The advantage of using LaTeX over a program like Powerpoint is that it doesn’t require expensive software for either creating or displaying your presentation; it thus makes the presentation truly “portable”.