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It is a week of software and web goodness as I got involved in a lot of activities this week. First off, I managed to hold the FUG CS4 launch party at Adobe where we have sessions on CS4, and give aways of tshirts, stickers and book. I also managed to meet up with Grant Straker of Shadow CMS who is very kind to come to our usergroup and present on Cairngorm Extensions. Ryan, the web master of Flashmove and manager of the Flash Usergroup Group also dropped by on the event.

On Friday, I meet up with Ben Metcalfe and his wife Sofia for lunch, together with many of the FUG regulars include @satish, @flashmech, @kennethteo, @mrsteel at Clark Quay. It is a great meetup where we discuss on web 2.0, social networking, and share our experience in Singapore. We also distribute seesmic stickers and I managed to get myself a new cap and many tshirts.

Next up in October, I will be heading for Open Web Asia at Seoul and of course, involve in the execution of  The Actionscript Conference. Will be busy times to come and glad that things are falling in place!

Image via Wikipedia

Creativecrew, Singapore Photoshop and AfterEffects usergroup just have its September usergroup meeting 2 days ago and I am honored to be helping them to record the sessions.

Below is the first presentation by Stefano, the creativecrew usergroup manager, demonstrating how to use brushes techniques to create clouds and birds in your photo. I am always astonish at how these professionals can create such realistic effects. Watch the 20mins video below to see it yourself.

Get the Flash Player to see this player.

There is also demos on showing how to create “tourist removal” for photos as well as expressions for After Effects. I will put up the videos after I convert them to FLV during the weekend.

I realize what is taught at creative crew are very useful for photographers (especially amateurs like me), as well as video enthusiast (which is again, me). I hope they can continue to help support from the local creative communtity and grow strong!

About Creative Crew:
Creative Crew is the official Adobe User Group for Photoshop and After Effects. Based in Singapore, Creative Crew has the aim to share and spread techniques and tutorials for both Print and Video.

The User Group meets every second Tuesday of the month in a Live Meeting. Most of the time the venue is Adobe office in Suntec City Tower 3, Level 6, Temasek Boulevard, Singapore.

Creative Crew also organizes OnLine Meeting using the powerful tool Acrobat Connect. OnLine Meeting are normally held the week before the Live Meeting.

The Manager and Administrator of the User Group is Stefano Virgilli, Adobe Video Specialist, Adobe Certified Instructor and Expert in 8 versions of 4 Adobe softwares.

They also have a Facebook page

I have been using Amiando to host events for the Singapore Flex Usergroup for the month of August and September and it works great. No registration for end users, reminder services, simple non-cluttered interface. However, what impressed me most is their service. And here is why:

At Amiando, you can upload banner for your events, change the CSS, to meet your event styles. I uploaded an image yesterday and coincidentally, it is covered by the tabs below:

I dismissed the issue, as I believe most users will actually saw my email newsletter first before heading to the page. However, when I woke up today, I revisited the website and see this:

What is the difference? Basically it is being FIXED! And I got a personal email from Amiando stating:

I have seen you set up a new fug meeting http://www.amiando.com/fugsg-sept.html which looks great. We can do some adjustments via CSS so that the text in the left corner can be seen as well as the Yahoo logo. I will talk to our frontend developer Patrick and will let you know.

Best,
Boris

What does that mean? That means that Boris Barreck from Amiando, actually takes the time to go through every single event hosted on Amiando, checked whether there is any problem. Even a small CSS issue as above, is identified and fixed within a few hours. Note that Amiando host major events like LeWeb and I deeply appreciate them to actually notice issues I am having on their website and help me within a day.

Web 2.0 Customer Service

Web 2.0 has cause significant changes to customer service and support. On top of Get Satisfaction, we see companies tracking Twitter for keywords to bash their competitors or to provide support, as well as in my own case, tracking blog post for relevant questions on your product (see the comments in the link)

With high competition and low barrier to entries to the Web 2.0 world, it is not difficult to understand how good customer service like Amiando will play a big part in the success of a company.

Today, Facebook announced that they will be shifting the Application Bar to the bottom left corner of the page, together with the chat bar.

So I was happily coding halfway today, when the Application Bar on the top disappeared and I was thinking it is due to me not drinking enough coffee. Then bang, it appear on the bottom on the second look

For those who do not know what Application Bar it, it consist of all your applications on Facebook, including Events, Photos, Videos and the other application you have installed. Previously, it can be access as a drop down list on the top. The new bar also means that bookmarked applications will now be visible always in the bottom.

Does the new Facebook profile really sucks ?

I started doing Facebook application development before the New Profile and things are pretty simple. 1 cached FBML for the profile page and the rest of the application is pretty much up to your own creativity. With the New Profile, you can have your application in the main Wall, OR it can be under Boxes, AND it COULD be under Application Tabs.

For end users, most of the first reaction from people I met is “It sucks”.  In fact, that is my first reaction too. Plus, designers will curse and swear too since now they have to design 2 more UI for Boxes and Application Tab. However, that also means that every Application gets the chances to have more exposure. Having a user putting your application to his / her application tab will be like winning a lottery, that means they love your application. You can now design a wide FBML  for Boxes Tab, and also a narrow FBML for Wall Tab, in which both can have radically different design, at the discreet of the developer.

Another tread we will see if that developers will now focus more on User’s stories to have their application noticed. Unless a user place their application under Wall Tab, it is unlikely that their friends will go the Boxes Tab to see “what application their friends have”. By focusing on User’s Stories, they will have information of their application to appear under the users’ Feeds, which is right on top on the user profile page. Applications not doing that yet will have to do that, to keep their applications competitive.

On the overall, while during the transition period, many might throw curses at Facebook New Profile design, I believe they will come to like it as they get used to it. Afterall, we get a less cluttered profile page now.

The problem.

You are doing a small/proof of concept project. You want to have a centralized database, but do not want to hassle of creating another mySQL database on your live server. You know just need a simple datastore, but you do not want to write codes to read/write from an XML file. You need a flexible datastore that just works, you know you do not need much scalability for this simple application, or the overhead of Simpledb. You want it to be REST possible but installing phprestsql is too much of an overkill.

Stuck?

Enter Google SpreadSheet.

If the above is the problem you are facing, you might want to take a look at Google SpreadSheet. The first reaction might be “what?!?, I wrote 1000 lines stored procedure and you want to me to code with SpreadSheet??”. But if you are just doing a small application, something that just requires an online datastore, what is better than an API that lets you do queried search, allows you to do CRUD on your records, with a ready API for .NET, PHP, Java and it is hosted by Google?

Not Google Apps Engine.

Google SpreadSheets are essentially..spread sheets. SpreadSheets consist of Worksheets, and each worksheets consist of ROWS and COLUMNS. Effectively, each Worksheet is like a Table in your database. The first ROW of the Worksheet will be the column names. Take a look at the worksheet below.

Essential ,  username, gender, contact_no and gender will be the column name. Since Google SpreadSheet allow us to do queried search on the spreadsheets, we can think of username as the primary key and we can base the query on it. If you need more tables, simply create more worksheet. If you need another database, create another spreadsheet. Thus, we can use a Spreadsheet to simulate a database. In the nutshell:

Spreadsheet -> Database
Worksheet -> Tables in Database
1st Row in Worksheet -> Defines the column names
Subsequent Rows in Worksheet -> Defines the rows in tables.

Queries Search -> Select Statements
Add Rows -> Insert Statment
Delete Rows -> Delete Statement
Update Rows -> Update Statement

The Good

Google SpreadSheet, as what Google mentioned, has the following features:

Essentially, it means that the hosted “database” will be free, secure, and you will not need to install any client application except for your browser to access it. You can even create it on an excel sheet first, and then upload it online and transform it into your database.

You can access the spreadsheets via code by HTTP, as well as .NET, PHP, Java or Python API

The Bad

As this is not a real RDBMS, there is no real constrain. Unique keys has to be handled by code and constrains has to be verified at the code level. For simple applications like a simple Book-Ordering form, or Contact-Management form, this will work great. However, Google SpreadSheet will not be the way to go for larger CMS systems.

On top of that, you can easily change a column name on Google Spreadsheet. The ease of change also increase the changes of the developer mistakenly changing the columns in the main spreadsheet and thus breaking the application.

Security

Google SpreadSheet is not shared by default, so only you can edit it. You can also share it to other users as Collaborator or Viewers. This also means that your ‘database’ can be shared with our users for collaboration, but you can limit them to View-only so they cannot mess up your application by accident.

API Website

For documentation, code samples and how-to, visit http://code.google.com/apis/spreadsheets/overview.html

Summary

In short, Google SpreadSheet provides us with a simple and easy datastore for simple applications that needs a hosted database. Other formal alternatives includes Amazon’s SimpleDB, Google Apps Engine Datastore API, and Apache's CouchDB. Which one do you prefer and which one do you think is the more scalable solution? Do chip in!

Related Article: Top 10 Reasons to Avoid the SimpleDB Hype