expertria.com

This is so exciting !

As a Flex developer, I am more interested over Flex applications over other RIA that are built on AJAX. Flowgram is one that blow me away at its creativeness. It is most probably an application that you “won’t get it” when you first look at, something which you will relate to a slideshow or a video playback initially. However, once you start to play with it, you will realize it is a ‘flow of websites, audio and images in which you can interact with”. Confused? 

Ok, for example, I can do a flowgram of FUG, and while you can viewing the flowgram, you can interact with the page as it is actually being loaded. See the flowgram I made

As you can see, Flowgram allows the user to actually play with a particular website while looking at a presenting about the website, which is something that we have not see before.

Listen to what the CEO of flowgram got to say:

If you need an invite, ping me on Identi.ca, I got a few to give away.

Identi.ca, a new microblogging service, hit the Web 2.0 world this month. Running on microblogging software, Laconica, Identi.ca saw many signup, presumably fedup with Twitter constant downtime and service unavailability. This is especially true when Twitter limits call to its API per hour, and that directly cascade to usability issues to application utilizing it. While whether Identi.ca will take off is still to be seen, I really hope to see Identi.ca releasing its API soon.

Meanwhile, feel free to add me here

Looks like both Qik and Sendible uses the same SMS gateway to send out their sms. Sendible is a service that allows you to send out sms, email , facebook messages from 1 inteface. Its inteface and color scheme looks very much like Facebook. Sms sending works pretty good, the only pitfall is that users can’t reply. So it is largely confined to advertisement SMS. You will not want to send “Will you marry me?” through Sendible as you will never get the answer.

Wix, a website builder gets interviewed by FUG this week on how they manage to build the site and their future roadmap. 

View the interview here: FUG Interview with Wix Developers

And of course, my first Wix:

Singapore Flex Usergroup - July Usergroup Meeting Special - FUG’ Out 01

FUG’ Out (pronounced as ‘fun-out’, or up anything in your own creativity) is a special usergroup event in which we held the usergroup meeting out of Adobe office, into the base of different companies, places. Accompanied with FUG’ Out is contest and free goodies.

For the very first FUG’Out, we will hold our usergroup meeting at the international award-winning company, Tequila\ (http://www.tequila.com). In this meeting, Andrii Olefirenko will speak about Papervision 3D. We also invited Nico, the founder of FDT, Germany, to give us a remote presentation on the FDT IDE and how it can improve your development workflow.

Venue
TBWA\Tequila
T\Junction Building, 5 Kadayanallur Street 069183
Seminar Room

Time
7pm to 9.30pm (Registration starts at 6.30pm)

Price: FREE

Starhub, the internet service provider I am currently using, called me yesterday to ask if I want to continue their service as my 18 months subscription has finally ended. I replied with a flat ‘NO’ because Starhub decides to block away BitTorrent, which I think its outragous. They replied by saying “there are other website you can download things from” and said that if I subscribe to a 24 months plan for a 15% monthly discount. If they block a protocol without consulting the consumers for the sake of bandwidth,  they most probably they will do that again “for other websites too”.

Whatever, it is, I am switching Internet service provider.

Zenbe, the AJAX email client that promises to “enlighten your email”, comes out with a series of new features today including twitter integration and a new sidebar

I have looked at Zenbe a couple of weeks back but was not very compelled to switch from Gmail to Zenbe. The biggest reason for me not switching from Gmail to Zenbe is the sheer number of emails I received everyday and my personal habits. Everyday I will wake up and reply to urgent email first. I will starred other email that are under “read them later and reply if free” category. If I switch to Zenbe immediately, I lose these starred email immediate. On top of that, other than Facebook integration, I do not see much difference between Zenbe and Gmail.

Yesterday, Zenbe release a couple of useful features, that makes me go back for a quick look and I must say I am pretty impressed by what they have added over the last couple of weeks. I will cover some features I love in Zenbe , some might not be the latest one but still are something that is cool.

Nowadays, when we talk about email attachment, we will inevitablely think of Xobni and Xoopit. Xoopit is a Gmail extension that index your media in gmail. Personally I do not like the way Xoopit presents the media, as it is still not very easy for me to find a particular attachment I am looking for. Zenbe now does the same thing with your attachment in a List fashion

The image is blurred but you get the idea. As I rollover the filename, a small popup will appear indicating the file and a preview. I personally prefer this view over Xoopit’s view

Another feature I love is the sidebar, which has Twitter, Facebook and GTalk integration. While I cannot use the Gtalk integration as I am on MUC most of the time (Zenbe,hint..hint..) , the Facebook integration is pretty useful to take a quick peek at what your friends are talking about each morning while checking email

Sidebar with Facebook friends’ messages. And yes, FriendFeed is taking over Twitter

In the sidebar itself, you can also view all your contacts in one view, search for a particular one and then comes my favorite: The ability to view all the email exchanged with a particular contact. Sure I can do that in gmail too but it is not as straight forward. Whats more, some contacts even have photos for easy recognition.

Clicking on a contact shows you the emails exchanged

Clicking on a contact shows you his / her images

Overall, this release makes Zenbe more stable and more much appealling. With the email war that is brewing between MessageDance, Xobni and Xoopit, one has to be creative and bold enough to take email to the next level. Will Zenbe be the answer to our email overload? Or will a new application appear during Techcrunch 50 ?

But before that, I better go answer my emails before my phone starts ringing

SproutBuilder is a Widget Builder in which you can create customizable widgets in which you can embed on different places like myspace and your blog. The wide number of component it has in its drag-and-drop interface means that there is a great variety of widgets you can built. A good example will be to build a customize banner for marketing purpose, that pulls in the latest blog posts or twitter feeds.

I have create a Sprout above. You can reply to me by clicking on the reply button!

Seesmic release their Movable Type Plugin on Joi Ito’s blog. This is very exciting to see the CEO of creative commons using the plugin and support video comments!