Thursday, August 23, 2007

Green website

But first a little bit about a meeting I went to last night... I heard about this event from one of the guys in my MakePhilly group. He is a computer guy who does Flash stuff. Flash is a program (now owned by Adobe) that is behind all the fancy things you see while surfing the internet (Like movies, audio, animation, etc...). I've always wanted to learn Flash, but in spite of me buying several books on the program it's not the kind of thing that is easily learned by book. I even tried one of those tutorial DVD's, but that didn't work either. Anyway! Adobe had a big press release type event last night in the city and I went. I mostly went to see what this new product was, and how (if at all) would it effect the graphics business. Well, it turns out, it's a pretty cool application, and I can see how this could be "the next big thing" on the web. In a nutshell, it allows web programers (flash, and html and javascript) to build these "small" desktop programs. They are very similar to the desktop "Widgets" that are now popular, but these are a bit more robust (I did see a potential fear though in how these apps could be easily exploited by virus makers). Well, after about 2 hours of being there, I finally slipped out the back. They were hand-coding their own html apps and 99.9% of it was going over my head. At one point, I thought... "This is what my parents must feel like when I start speaking computer geek" - it was like that times 10. One small item i noticed... the guys in the crowd were all geeks (no surprise there), but it was also about 98% guys and only a handful of women. C'mon ladies... get coding out there! :) The other thing that I thought was "funny" was that Adobe must know their audience... the event had free beer, free redbull, chicken fingers, cheese sticks, several xbox video games set up, and on each table was a handful of "nerds" candy and poprocks. It was so cliche it was almost funny. I was also impressed with the amount of money Adobe was putting into promoting this traveling bus tour. With prizes, and venues, free "schwag" etc... I didn't have the guts to speak up to say I thought Adobe borders on the "evil corporation" line for me :)
IF you have any interest in this go over to http://onair.adobe.com/

Wow, that had nothing to do with my title of this post did it!?
Well, I wanted to post about this website I just discovered (via make)...
http://www.inhabitat.com/
Looks like another neat "green" website like treehugger.
What caught my attention was the clip on the bicycle powered clothes washer.

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