We can all see the value of creating a flex application that behaves as a flex application but has benefit of accessing certain parts of the desktop, or just being a desktop application. But not many people are talking about the "addon" value. Hey maybe I made a new web 3.0 term.

On todays episode of WTF we take a look at a Javascript raytracer engine. I was over at Ajaxian and noticed that a guy named Adam Burmister (who just happens to be a fellow Kiwi - good on ya mate!) wrote a Javascript 3D raytracer so as to learn more about bowser elements. Well hey why not. It may be as he calls it "The Worst Application of JavaScript Ever" but damn cool effort none the less. The raytracer can be found HERE. Increase the quality setting to punish your processor for being bad.

Go on, you know you want to come. Head on over to http://www.fxug.org.nz/meetings.html and sort yourself out to come one down and meet some new people. Its what all the cool kids are doing. If your not in the city/country we will be doing our best to organise a remote session so you can see some of the cool things being shown. I will also post updates after the meeting of anything to note. But really thers nothing like being there in person.

Yep not to be outdone by Nokia and their web server I took my IMate smartphone and installed a webserver on it. ON THE PHONE. And now flash lite apps can access any .net functionality that it wants like turning on the GPRS, accessing contacts, dialing numbers, sending text messages…. Its all completely hacked and I wouldn't recommend it for production, but it is pretty cool. If I really wanted I could write remote control for the phone too.

Freakin cool if its true! Adobe Giving Away Free Flex Books? If it is true I bet it took balls to talk management into doing this. P.S.

How do we do things down this end of the planet? We go hard. I even had to look up the word "piste" to check it had no reference to alcohol Web on the piste is: "is a web technology conference with a focus on rich internet technologies. It is aimed at web developers and designers of all levels and anyone who is interested in learning about building rich internet applications and how they are revolutionizing the internet.

I cant wait to play!!!! mind you that means it will be the 17th here for us shy kiwi's but hey,one extra day wont hurt. I have many things planned to play with and no doubt many people out there do to.

A mate hinted this to me earlier today. Im not sure if it was already out but hey share and share alike I say. Sorry this may be posted somewhere else but Ive not seen it. Oreilly have printed the Apollo for flex developers pocket book writen by Mike Chambers, Robert and Jeff (sorry could read last names off the small image. Great you even notice there is a link to a sample chapter titled:  Chapter 4: Using the File System API (PDF Format). "var stream:FileStream = new FileStream( )stream.

Yep heres the working swf from my previous post…..I could chuck random wind etc in but now I have a new project I will outline in a new post.  WARNING: this probably will make you machine chug I tried to make it a small fire so it would step slowly but you can make smoke clouds 10x the size…haha you could blow on your mic and the cloud get bigger!  http://blog.xsive.co.

Have you played with Ruby on Rails? if not well theres no helping you….. (just jokes). But there are alot of nice features. Today lets take a look at ActiveRecord. What it does is on startup of the website it maps database tables to the Class objects (Models in MVC) in its code. From there on in you have methods like Cat.find(:all) which will go find all the cat rows in the Cats table database and return them. Thats it no more code!!  How about matching to sql conditions?  Well, Cat.