Thor Mitchell, a Maps API product manager, explained on the Google Geo Developers Blog, “I’m happy to say that we have now begun reaching out to developers who have expressed an interest in building check-in applications using the API, including those working on client applications for the Buzz API.”

Mitchell then hinted how developers who haven’t been contacted can help themselves.  “If you have already applied to use the Places API and you feel that your use case fits this initial focus, please log back in to the Application Form and ensure that your description makes this clear,” he wrote.

Just don’t expect an immediate response.

It should be interesting to see if an independent developer helps Google get ahead of established leaders in the check-in space like Foursquare, Gowalla, and Loopt.

The company has also announced it will partner with Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), accelerating the commercial launch of WAC-enabled application stores. The transaction is set to be completed in September 2010. WAC outlined the business models and technology evolution path that will enable developers, operators and other commercial organizations to monetize applications and services.

Peters Suh has been named the CEO of the Wholesale Applications Community. Most recently Peters was the CEO of the Joint Innovation Lab (JIL), a joint venture between China Mobile, SOFTBANK MOBILE, Verizon Wireless, and Vodafone.

“Today the Wholesale Applications Community comes into being as an established company, and this is a hugely exciting time for everyone involved in the organisation,” commented Suh.

“Our goal is to create a wholesale applications ecosystem that will establish a simple route to market for developers to deliver the latest innovative applications and services to the widest possible base of customers around the world.”

At launch, WAC will allow operators to distribute applications through their respective application storefronts and charge users through their existing phone bill. In this model, developers will set the application price and will receive a revenue share for the transaction.

The vanishing tool is only available in photoshop CS2 and up.

The first method I will show you with the vanishing tool is how to put text on the wall of a building at an angle. I am going to use graffit text to make it look like graffiti and I downloaded some free graffiti fonts from this website, http://www.dafont.com/theme.php?cat=606
..

Once you get those and install them download this image of an angled wall I am going to use.

Now open up the image in photoshop.

Lets go ahead and use the vanishing tool to get our angles.

If you go to filter on your top photoshop menu you should see the vanishing point option or you can hit Alt+Ctrl+v on your keyboard.

Now go into your vanishing point tool and you will see a different screen. You will see this menu on the side:

Once in there zoom in on the image by pressing ctrl+.

When you open up the vanishing point tool you should already be on the tool you need to use first which is the “create plane tool”

This tool will allow you to make 4 points to create a box on the section of wall you want so I will first click on the very left side

Then choose your other 4 corners. If you give photoshop a good angle it will turn blue but if and if its just a decent angle it will be yellow but a bad one will show up red.

Good angle

Bad angle

You can adjust each point to get a good angle easily. After that click OK at the top and you vanishing point settings will be saved.

With your installed font write some text on the image like I have

I used white and yellow because it blends in the best on the wall after my experimenting before this tutorial.

For the vanishing tool to work you have to copy and paste whatever text you want to use into the vainishing tool window so duplicate your text layer to have one for backup.

With your copied layer, you need to turn it into an image so it is not text which is called rasterizing the layer.

To rasterize the text go to layer>>rasterize>>layers

With the rasterized layer chosen use the keyboard shortcut ctrl+a to select all and ctrl+c to copy it into the clip board.

Next create a new layer above that and hide the previous layer.

Go back into your vanishing point tool and paste in the text with ctrl+v

When you do that it will paste the font in with a selection around it.

Then grab the text and drag it into the box you made and it will conform to the wall angle. You can hit ctrl+t to transform it to size it down and fit better

Now I will set the layer to overlay.

Then duplicate that layer one more time and set it to soft light.

Here is my result:

Thanks for checking out this quick tip!

leo.json

{
   'Name' : 'Leonardo',
   'Weapon' : 'Samuri Sword',
   'LikesPizza' : true,
   'Age' : 15,
   'CatchPhrases' : [
      'Narly',
      'Turtle Power!'
   ]
}

Assuming we’ve opened up our JSON file and stored the contents in ‘jsonTMNT’, the following code will allow us to traverse through the JSON data:

using (JsonTextReader reader = new JsonTextReader(new StringReader(jsonTMNT)))
{
   while (reader.Read())
   {
	// do something here
   }
}

With this code, the reader will traverse the nodes of the JSON file. We can then check to see what the node type is, and handle appropriately:

if (reader.TokenClass == JsonTokenClass.String)
{
    Console.WriteLine(reader.Text);
}

The above code will check for a string node. If that’s the case, then the value of the node is printed.

output:

Leonardo
Samuri Sword

This method of retrieving JSON data works fine, but is not really beneficial if we need to manipulate various parts of the data at one time, i.e. build a string made up of various parts of a JSON object or use various integer values from JSON in the same calculation. For more complex operations, we can use JsonConvert.

object tmnt = (object) JsonConvert.Import(typeof(object), jsonTMNT);

if (tmnt.age < 13 || tmnt.age > 19)
   Console.WriteLine(tmnt.name + ' is not a teenager.');
else
   Console.WriteLine(tmnt.name + ' is a teenager.');
Console.WriteLine(tmnt.name + ' uses the ' + tmnt.weapon + '.');

output:

Leonardo is a teenager.
Leonardo uses the Samuri Sword.

As indicated in Part 1, working directly with JSON can improve readability across all code of your application, and will boost performance on the area you have the least amount of control: the end-user’s JavaScript engine.

1. The TITLE tag is the most important tag. Ask someone NOT involved with your site to review your title. Is your title what they would be searching for?
2. Build your site based upon what people are looking for, NOT the other way around.
3. Clarify your business goal, brand objective and value proposition. These are extremely difficult to do, but essential to your success. Answer these first!
4. Make sure what is ranking for any given keyword is relevant and not a 404 or non-related page. We’ve all seen these pop up in the serps.
5. Solve a problem for your customer. Make sure the page does this with proper SEO and a call to action. It comes down to answering user questions.
6. Don’t put SEO front and center. Ditch the the huge list of links. Good SEO is unseen and should be an invisible layer. Make the best user experience, then leverage SEO.
7. Give the SEO team the power to do things.
8. Give the SEO team their own development resources (This is my FAVORITE!).
9. Make SEO part of the work flow, but don’t bring it into the development cycle too early. However, make the SEO team aware of product and value development as they progress.
10. Great content + Great User Experience + SEO = Traffic

Thanks to Loren and the whole crew at BlueGlass LA 2010. Fantastic conference!

Comments

That book is currently selling for $71.08, so “free” is a pretty huge improvement.  The downside is that the copies that are up for grabs are just ebooks, so you won’t get anything to line your shelf or decorate your desk.  Or use as a doorstop or exchange for cash at a yard sale, if worse comes to worst.

But of course the information’s still all there.

As for some other specifics, Eric Miraglia explained the situation on the Yahoo User Interface Blog.  “Suggest a question or tutorial you’d like to see from Satyam on a YUI 2.8-related topic as a comment on this post, and if Satyam picks your suggested topic for one of his three ‘Ask Satyam’ blog posts Packt will make an electronic copy of Satyam’s book available for you to download,” he wrote.

As of this writing, there are absolutely no comments on the post, so any DevWebPro reader’s odds of winning are looking quite good.

Version 7.0 gives developers more flexibility in developing applications with the SDK.

It includes tools, documentation and samples developers can reference to write, build, test and deploy .NET Framework applications. It is also designed to improve speed time to market for companies who use the SDK to develop or integrate document reconstruction and archiving applications within their product set.  Solid Framework is immediately available for download from the Solid Framework Developer Portal.
“This release of Solid Framework 7.0 further underscores our commitment to the developer community,” said Michael Cartwright, Solid Documents’ founder.

“Dozens of companies are already integrating Solid Framework into their product offerings. With the release of version 7.0, we’re confident many more developers will find immense value and unequalled capabilities in our technology.”

Not a lot has been confirmed (or denied) yet – Apple did little besides release the beta, and most developers seem to have gone into isolation mode after getting their hands on the it.  But an AppleInsider article stated in response, “Most critically, the release is expected to include a fix for proximity sensor malfunctions on the iPhone 4.”

And that’s because, if you haven’t heard, “users have found that the touchscreen on their iPhone 4 will sometimes activate while on a call, resulting in accidentally pressed buttons that can place a call on hold or even end it and dial a different number almost instantaneously.”

So let’s hope that issue’s been resolved.  Maybe Apple has another fun surprise or two in store for developers, as well.

Under the deal, Playdom shareholders will receive a total of $563.2 million, and a performance-linked earn-out of up to $200 million.

Playdom’s titles include Social City, Sorority Life, Market Street and Bolo, the company estimates it attracts 42 million active players each month.

“We are at the start of a once-in-a-generation opportunity to transform the way people of all ages play games with their friends across devices, platforms and geographical boundaries,” said Playdom Chief Executive Officer John Pleasants.

“Disney is an incredibly forward-thinking company that shares our vision and is the ideal partner to further our mission to bring great entertainment to people around the world.”

Playdom, which has 15 game development studios, will remain headquartered in Mountain View, California. Pleasants will become an Executive Vice President of the Disney Interactive Media Group (DIMG) and General Manager of Playdom, reporting to DIMG President Steve Wadsworth.

First off, I think we always knew this would be a difficult job. CFML is actually a pretty big language that has grown in a fairly haphazard way over more than a decade, mostly without a steady hand that understands programming language design. There were a few internal Allaire / Macromedia / Adobe groups over the years before Adam Lehman joined the ColdFusion team that tried to steward development of the language but for a variety of reasons they never really got much traction. Two years ago, Adobe announced the CFML Advisory Committee and made me chair of it. It came hot on the heels of my resignation from the Open BlueDragon steering committee and it was quite a surprise (the announcement at CFUnited 2008 was actually the first time I knew of my role on the committee).

Over the next six months, we worked hard – Adobe, Railo and community members – to map out the tags and functions in CFML and categorize them as ‘core’, ‘extended core’ or ‘vendor-specific’. We used a Google spreadsheet with the lion’s share of the early work being done by Gert Franz and Rob Brooks-Bilson to provide a framework for us to vote. We got the CFML Advisory Committee web site up and the initial cut of tag/function categorization published (kudos to Rob Brooks-Bilson for all his hard work on the wiki content). We’d agreed early on that “all” CFSCRIPT would be core language so we didn’t focus much on defining what was “CFSCRIPT”.

At the beginning of February 2009, Ben Forta announced that Adam Lehman would join the committee, taking over from Sanjeev Kumar to represent Adobe. Ben also said the time was right to invite OpenBD to join the committee and we quickly agreed on Matt Woodward as the best choice. Matt quickly came up to speed, added his votes to the spreadsheet and added all the OpenBD-specific tags and functions to the mix, just as Gert had done six months earlier.

At the beginning of April 2009, Adam shared the CFSCRIPT enhancements that Adobe were considering adding in ColdFusion 9, then under the codename Centaur and in private alpha testing. Round about that time, we also made the decision to tackle tag attributes and function arguments and categorize those. In hindsight, that was a mistake. It was too big a task and it bogged us down.

In mid-April, I joined Railo and Gert stepped down from the committee so that Railo would continue to have a single representative on the committee. Since I was previously a ‘community’ rep on the committee, we needed a replacement and selected Peter Farrell by unanimous vote.

We continued to review and discuss the CFSCRIPT enhancements and found that consensus on the committee for certain features didn’t always match what Adobe was already implementing in ColdFusion 9 – and that some features were contentious enough that we couldn’t reach consensus at all. I reached out to the community on my blog to help us resolve a few issues but that input didn’t actually move us closer to consensus. These were hard issues.

Unfortunately, the gargantuan task of categorizing the tag attributes and function attributes, combined with the lack of clear consensus on a number of key features in CFSCRIPT seemed to sap the will of the committee. Voting became slower and slower, Ben and Adam became very focused on the upcoming launch of ColdFusion and it became harder and harder to get their input (and understandably so – Ben continued to vote as and when he was able but Adam pretty much stopped voting on issues completely). By the end of August, progress had completely stalled and discussions stopped.

There was a flurry of discussion at the end of November, spurred by a comment made by Alan Williamson (OpenBD) questioning whether the committee was even relevant. Then things went quiet again.

I tried to get the discussions going again in early February. We’d clearly missed the “CFML2009″ opportunity but I felt we could pull together a reasonable “CFML2010″ and I recommended the following approach for a specification (quoting here from my email to the committee):

• “Retains the core / extended core / vendor specific partition of tags and functions that we’ve already agreed.
• Does not dig deep into attributes and/or arguments.
• Incorporates most of the CFSCRIPT document we already created.
• Simply omits CFSCRIPT recommendations where we had trouble reaching consensus.
• Adopts the existing Adobe CF9 syntax for CFSCRIPT constructs where “CFML2009″ differs in core details (lock, transaction etc).
• Adds a clear, concise description of expressions (this is new work – but it is necessary).”

Ben, Matt, Ray and Rob all agreed and offered to help.

A few days later, Peter Farrell resigned. Adam says, in his blog post, “Peter Farrell quietly resigned stating he was too busy to keep up with the day-to-day activities of the board”. Peter’s actual words were “The demands on my time have increased in the past year and it has become increasingly difficult for me to contribute sufficiently to the CFML specification process.” I took Peter to mean that he simply felt he couldn’t do the committee justice in terms of providing input on the voting and process etc. As we’d seen over the previous eighteen months, it was a lot of hard work!

Adam picks up the story well at that point, writing on February 25th, 2010:

“Yesterday, the topic of a replacement was brought up and Sean Corfield and Matt Woodward both offered up worthy nominations. I chimed in and recommend we add Alan Williamson. The fact that this particular nomination came from me might shock you since he’s the driving force behind OpenBD. But let me digress… a few months ago Alan and I got on the phone to sort out some differences. We talked for 45-60 minutes about some of our perceptions of each other, our projects and our goals. It seemed as if we had really misunderstood each other and that we shared a ton of middle-ground. During this conversation I shared some of my frustration with the OpenCFML board and proclaimed he would be a great addition to the board. So fast forward to today, when the opportunity arose, I nominated him. I also made the recommendation to expand the group to include more community members. While it wouldn’t be prudent for an expanded group to have full voting rights, I wanted to increase the amount of friendly voices and visibility into the project.”

Before we could get into any real discussion on that, as Adam said, he withdrew from the committee with Alan Williamson’s “Conventional CFML Wisdom” group as the catalyst. Someone had alerted me to the group about a week earlier (the group had been created on February 15th, 2010) and I’d joined to explain the committee thinking on certain decisions. Adam joined that group the day he withdrew from the CFML Advisory Committee. The group has had just a dozen fairly brief discussions since it was formed, so whilst it is nice to have an open, public discussion group for CFML features, I wouldn’t consider it very significant or representative (there are under 100 members). Perhaps that will change over time? I hope so.

Where is the CFML Advisory Committee right now? Well, we’d had no discussions since Adam’s departure until two weeks ago when I tried to resurrect the CFSCRIPT spec. Per committee agreement based on my recommendations in February, I’d taken a copy of the committee’s voting document and removed all the votes and the open questions, in an attempt to get an actual spec that we could publish at CFUnited. I’d also adjusted the spec to match Adobe ColdFusion 9’s implementation, as we’d agreed in February. Ray and Rob helped me with wording, to better reflect a spec rather than the discussion document it grew from. I’d hoped that we could publish it for CFUnited and reignite interest in the committee and begin to move forward again. After all, when Adam withdrew, Ben said that our “initial objective is still valid and perhaps even more compelling than ever” and suggested we try to tighten our mission, in order to move forward.

I don’t know when Adam actually unsubscribed from the CFML Advisory Committee mailing list so I don’t know whether he’d seen my latest attempt to get the committee going again. Certainly the timing of his blog post means that publishing a spec at CFUnited is now a moot point.

What about the committee mailing list? I suggested a couple of times that we should open up the list archives to the community – including at the start of the process. Adobe expressed the concern that they were sharing future plans with the committee which they felt would be inappropriate to speak about publicly. It’s a difficult position for a corporation that has to be very careful about future disclosures. Whilst the committee was never under NDA with Adobe, it was made clear that there was a certain expectation of privacy.

Lessons learned? Well, specifying a language is inherently difficult. I spent eight years on the ANSI C++ Committee (three as X3J16 Secretary) and I represented the UK on the ISO C++ Committee for most of that time as well. There were a lot of vendors on the committee and discussions could get very contentious and even heated at times. That’s the nature of cross-vendor standardization. I think I was perhaps the only member of the CFML committee that really understood how difficult a true cross-vendor specification might be for CFML. For years, there was clearly no value to Allaire / Macromedia / Adobe in having a public specification (it came up several times over the years – and I was always a big advocate for such a spec while I worked there) but I had high hopes for the effort when it started in 2008. Adam says “The real beneficiaries were Railo and OpenBD who wanted a CFML standard that would allow ColdFusion customers to easily switch to their clone engines.” and that’s the reason the process had never been attempted before. Given that half of the people who fill out the information form on the Railo download page are not existing CFML users, that’s a disappointing attitude, in my opinion.

Adam says “Sean claimed that Railo wanted to wait a version (or two) to see how new Railo tags were accepted by the community before making a formal recommendation.” Here’s what I said to the committee in November: “Adobe have released ColdFusion 9 now and, due to schedule / timing issues, it includes syntax that is at odds with what the committee agreed as core CFSCRIPT. Railo have been holding off implementing the new syntax until we can get a clear sense of what is really going to happen around the committee.” … “Railo has been very conservative about core language changes, trying to follow Adobe’s lead as much as possible on details, whilst adding clearly non-core language features.” … “Railo believes the only sensible approach is to support Adobe’s syntax since that is what developers will expect. Supporting only the CFML2009 syntax lowers portability. Supporting both syntaxes only makes sense if Adobe are committed to adding the CFML2009 syntax as well – which won’t happen for at least a year.” More recently we’ve talked about adding closures to Railo and proposing that to the committee. I indicated that we wanted some experience with implementation and some community feedback on the feature before making a formal proposal. Given my experience with language standardization in the 90’s this seemed the most sensible approach to take – and it was usually how features were tested before being baked into the C++ standard. It’s not like we can’t change our implementation to match the committee’s consensus later – as we just did recently with for-in loops over arrays in CFSCRIPT.

Is the committee dead? Officially, no, but the lack of Adobe’s involvement makes it somewhat pointless – as several committee members had opined when Adam first withdrew in February. So, for all intents and purposes, it might as well be officially dead.

What happens next? Adam has said ColdFusion will be driven by the Adobe ColdFusion community and that the Adobe Community Professionals will act as their advisory committee. Railo and OpenBD will continue to be driven by the overall CFML community and will track Adobe’s developments for cross-engine compatibility. In other words, pretty much the status quo that we’ve had all along.

In closing, I’ll echo Adam’s words and “thank Ben, Rob and Ray for the work they put into the OpenCFML. Rob and Ray specifically donated a large amount of time to this effort”. I’ll also thank Gert, Matt and Peter for their contributions – as I’ve indicated above, Gert and Matt in particular helped pull together the working documents we used as a basis for voting. I’ll also thank Ben specifically for having the vision to get this started and for the encouragement he gave us all when things weren’t going well. As chair of the committee over the past two years, it’s been an interesting challenge but, ultimately, a disappointment that we weren’t able to move forward together with a public, open specification for the language we all love!