Adobe Flex is an open-source framework that is used to create rich Internet applications (RIA’s) for the web. There are many misconceptions about Flex. One of the biggest misconception is that Flex is very expensive – both to develop with and to run on a server. Although Adobe offers the Flex Builder IDE for $499USD and Enterprise Servers that cost thousands of dollars, you can run and build and deploy Flex applications for free.

Adobe offers the Flex Software Development Kit (SDK) as a free download from their website. The Flex SDK includes the Flex framework (component class library) and Flex compiler, enabling you to freely develop and deploy Flex applications using an IDE of your choice. Meaning that armed with only Notepad and a command-line interface, you can create your own Flex RIA’s. To publish and deploy your Flex applications, you can upload them to ANY web server.

Another important myth about Flex is that it can only exchange data with special servers. Flex is capable of communicating with any HTTP/HTTP based server, and can receive and send data in many formats such as XML, ACSII text, SOAP and many others. In our example that we create today, we will be communicating with a web server to request RSS data.

The final misconception to get out of the way is that Flex is hard to learn. This is simply not true. If you have experience writing XML, CSS and some JavaScript, you will be right at home writing Flex applications. Flex uses many standards-based technologies to build applications on. As a foundation, Flex GUI elements (Adobe calls them controls) can be added to a Flex project by using tags/elements much like the ones you use when writing HTML. To change the appearance of the controls, you can style them using Cascading Style Sheets (CSS). When you want to add interactivity to your controls, you use ActionScript with is a standards based implementation of ECMAScript (the formal name of JavaScript). So as you can see, Flex is using many of the same technologies used by traditional web developers and designers.

In this tutorial we are going to learn how to create an widget that displays the headlines of an RSS feed. The widget can then be placed onto any page within your website and will provide your viewers with news headlines from any new service or agency you like. The tutorial will show the inherent power of the Flex framework as the code for this project will take up less than 40 lines of code.

To follow the tutorial, please visit http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/howto/rssflex

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
Adobe Flex
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/

Adobe Flex SDK
http://www.adobe.com/products/flex/downloads/

RSS Example Download
http://www.digitalmediaminute.com/howto/rssflex

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If you feel like getting up and dancing, why shouldn’t your iPod speaker join you? The Wassup speaker hooks up to your iPod (or other music player) via the headphone jack, and when you start pumping music into it, its ears wiggle, its legs shimmy, and it spins in place. If you don’t always want the tunes cranking, it can also respond to noise in the local area and move accordingly.

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Sometimes it’s not enough to just listen to your favourite tunes — sometimes you just have to play along with your own beats, sound effects and scratches. Plug the miJam Mini into your MP3 player’s headphone jack, and then you can add your own effects to your favourite tunes…or you can unplug and just make your very own beats. If you don’t want to use the headphones, there’s a small speaker included for annoying your friends, family and coworkers.

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The biggest problem with most protective iPod cases is that that they have very little in the way of beverage-opening capabilities. That’s not the case with the Mophie Bevy, which not only protects your iPod Shuffle from nicks and dings, it also has a key ring built in…and when you pop the iPod out for a second, you can use the case to open up a couple of cold ones.

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Students, workers and anyone else who winds up walking or riding transit to work knows how annoying it can be when you want to change the track on your iPod when it’s buried in your backpack (away from the grabbing fingers of thieves). The G-Tech line of bags is the latest to use Eleksen’s flexible high-tech fabric controllers for iPod control — just press the fabric button on the strap of one of these bags to change tracks or change your volume. The G-Tech line has one other bonus: built-in speakers, so you can turn your backpack into a boompack.

Talk about as many ways to build website traffic as time will allow. Some of the points I want to get across includes:

Traffic starts with great content
Linking strategies
News releases
Working the social media sites like Digg

RELATED WEBSITE LINKS
http://www.johnchow.com/book/make-money-online.pdf
http://www.johnchow.com/evil-blog-promotion-ideas/
http://www.johnchow.com/six-top-linking-strategies/
http://www.johnchow.com/the-art-of-link-baiting/
http://www.johnchow.com/commenting-your-way-to-the-top/
http://www.digg.com/
http://www.stumbleupon.com/
http://del.icio.us/