File this one in the case of ‘why didn’t i think of that’. Swoopo.com is a mix of ebay/woot and gambling all rolled into one.

The site employs an auction model for a select set of goods where each bid on an item costs $.75. Each time a bid is placed (bid increments are anywhere between $.01 and $.15) the auction is extended however the item usually ends up selling for a fraction of the retail price.

It’s a crazy addictive model and it looks like it’s working (items end up accumulating enough bids such that swoopo’s take is greater than the suggested retail price for the item). Definetly one to keep an eye on. Why didn’t I think of that!

This video (below) made me remember my first computer, it was the The 1987 Mac Plus (pictured above) which I used to create choose your own adventure style video games on.

My favorite part of the video is the people’s reaction to the text2voice of simpletext.

It seems silly today, but that must have been truly awe inspiring back then. (more…)

I stumbled across this article that has some good tips for developing rich web based mobile apps for the iPhone and other devices using just html,css and javascript. These tools look like they could be pretty useful if you want to ‘mobilize’ the content of your existing website but don’t want to go through the hastle of developing a new app for each new platform in C or Java.

What is PhoneGap?

PhoneGap is a development tool that allows web developers to take advantage of the core features in the iPhone, Android, and Blackberry SDK using JavaScript.

iui

Based on Joe Hewitt’s iPhone navigation work, iui has the following features:

* Create Navigational Menus and iPhone interfaces from standard HTML

* Use or knowledge of JavaScript is not required to create basic iPhone pages

* Ability to handle phone orientation changes

* Provide a more “iPhone-like” experience to Web apps (on or off the iPhone)

While the ‘apps’ that you craft with these tools won’t be quite as fully featured as those that are native to the phone’s OS…they are certainly a great time saver and are relatively simple to update and maintain.

Recently I had to find a method to include external images in a flex project.
After much searching I found the following which was the simplest:

First, you must check the domain you are pulling images from to make sure
that they allow access in their crossdomain.xml file:

<cross-domain-policy>
<allow-access-from domain="*"/>
</cross-domain-policy>

Now the code…

	[Bindable]
	var loaderContext:LoaderContext;
	private function imageInit():void {
    	 loaderContext = new LoaderContext();
     	 loaderContext.checkPolicyFile = true;
	}

and the mxml for the image…

<mx:Image source="{your-picture-here}"
initialize="imageInit()" loaderContext="{loaderContext}"/>