That’s right, the Flex SDK is going to be licensed under the Mozilla Public License – this means the compiler, debugger, the huge libraries – it’s all going to be open source when Flex 3 “Moxie” is going to be released.

This news was not so surprising to me because I’ve heard there have been lots and lots of discussions before on how to make Flex “open”. You have to keep in mind that a big company like Adobe is making transition from being a fully closed company to being more open – from the introduction of Adobe Labs to getting more open culture infused from Macromedia, to donating the ActionScript3 VM as open source to Mozilla, and now Flex. You can clearly see how this evolution is happening. Even the PDF format is going from a de-facto standard to a de-jure standard by the ISO organization.

Coming back to Flex, just some time ago I had noted how open Flex is, even source-open but not “open source”, we’re now taking the next big step and making even the code free. Awesome stuff.

I personally still think there’s one issue that needs to be addressed. There are two parts to the story – the production and consumption, which is, the creation and the playback. The creation part is now not just open but open source! Why not make the playback part open? If we can allow anyone to create a player that plays SWF formats, that would be great. Of course, if we make the Flash Player itself open source, that would be mind-blowing, but I think the minimum that should be done is to allow other SWF players in the market. Not that anybody can beat Flash Player (it’s very very hard)…

The news is still sinking in (it was announced just an hour ago, as of this writing). So, more coverage here:

• Official Adobe Press release
• Official FAQ
• Video interviews by Scoble
• Why now by Sho
• Podcast interview of Greg DeMichillie on Adobe vs Microsoft
• Writeup by Josh Tynjala

Note: I no longer work with IonLab since Nov 12 of 2009.

This incident happened about three weeks ago when the preparations for ion were in full swing, and Vikram and myself worked all day long to create the posters for ion as well as the website itself. At one point, we realized that we were spending most of our time in choosing just the color and placement of text, and we spent some 20+ min just to decide the font of the apostrophe in “plug ‘n play”!

At around 6 o’ clock, we were dead tired (at least I was, Vikram said he had never seen so lazy before) and decided to go get the posters printed but I didn’t want to, so he suggested instead to go for the new place that he went for cycling to recently. We went by bike through a zig-zag maze of roads and after 3-4 km, suddenly ended up in a place which seemed to be deserted! It was a new layout being formed by destroying the hill and the greenery, the signs of urbanization marked by destruction, the green being replaced by the grey (concrete).

We climbed up the rocks, just sat down there in the darkness and we had a long discussion about random things and sometimes deep things. Then, we noticed there was a huge reddish moon in the sky. Simply beautiful. I was taking photographs.

(more…)

For the past couple of months, I’ve had very busy weekends because I’ve been helping out a couple of friends launch a product.

Why talk about it today? Because today is launch day!

I’m talking about “the ion” – a charger for your iPod. Get the ion, plug in the iPod and connect the other end to the electric socket, and your iPod gets charged. No PC, no fuss, no muss.

In fact, it works with any device that charges through USB, whether it is your iRiver, or any mp3 player, or your mobile phone!

Some more cool features:

• The ion is portable, you can carry it around anywhere, especially to places where you will not have access to a computer.
• Do you really need to switch on your computer the whole night just to charge your iPod?
• You can listen to your music when your iPod is getting charged by the ion, instead of staring at the ‘Do not disconnect’ message.
• An awesome looking product. A great companion for the iPod.

All this for just Rs.399 only. As a bonus, you get solid reliability because the ion has a voltage regulator circuit that protects your device from power surges. Most existing charger products out there do not have such protection.

We’re going to get the product out in the stores soon, but^* the quickest way to get an ion is to buy it online right now!

We’ll also be trying to get the posters put up in all the IT companies so that more people get to know about the ion. If you can help us with this, please do drop us a line, we’d be glad to hear from you. If you want to grab the posters yourself, you can get the digital version and set it as your wallpaper and help us spread the word about ion

If you are curious about how the ion was born and how it was transformed into a real product that we are holding in our hand today, you can read about the interesting history of the ion.

Last but not the least, if you have any sorts of questions, doubts, queries or feedback, please do write to us.

^* Due to various circumstances, ion will not be available in stores, it will only be available online!

Long ago, I had seen Nat Friedman show off a small Mono app that displayed the amount of time you spent on each application, and updated the chart in real time – so that you could clearly make out how much time you’re spending in the browser and how much time you’re actually spending on work.

I couldn’t locate that app, so I had been wanting to write my own version for a long time and finally got around to doing it today.

It turned out to be easier than I thought. First, I had to figure out how to find out what application has the current focus at any point in time, and I was trying to see if I can do it from Python (using the Win32 extensions, and yes, this hack is Windows-only). After a lot of searching, I finally found out that it boils down to just one line: win32gui.GetWindowText(win32gui.GetForegroundWindow()) and this would fetch the title of the application that the user is using at that moment.

After this, all I had to was record the window title every 5 seconds and increment the time spent for each window, and voila, the data is ready. I was quite satisfied with just a command line output, but Raghu egged me on to create a Flex chart frontend for it as well, and when Harish joined in, the fun really got started. The first problem was how to push the data from Python to Flex, and we use the oldest trick in the book – write it to a file. Next, Flex can read the same file as long as the file is in the same directory as the SWF (i.e. the Flash file) location. Then we parse the text to get back the original data, create a pie chart and point it to this data, and voila we have a beautiful chart:

Now I can finally track what I actually end up doing the whole day, heh. You can download the files if you want to use it as well:

• The Python script called “BigBrother.py”
• The MXML file called “BigBrotherGUI.mxml”
• The compiled SWF file for those who don’t want to go through the hassle of compiling the MXML to SWF.
• Just run/open both BigBrother.py and BigBrotherGUI.swf at the same time and watch the statistics.

And who said meetings aren’t productive

Update:

1. Chris J Andrews made a JavaScript GUI frontend.

2. Theyagarajan modified the Python script to make it work on Linux.

Looks like someone sure loves email!