New Universal Mind Web Site is Live!

We launched our new Universal Mind web site today. You can find the site at: www.universalmind.com.

As far as I know, we are the first major Flex centric services company to release a site using Flex technology.

This site was built to be search engine optimized even before the Flex search bots that Adobe developed for Google and Microsoft. This is achieved in two ways: one, by using a dynamic back-end that expands the same content in an HTML view for browsers that do not support the Flash Player... and.. two, the site SWFAddress for deep linking into content areas. Case in point, load the site on your iPhone or Blackberry and you'll see the same content and look-and-feel.

The site also features extensive use of Flex Modules. The use of modules allows deferred loading of many areas of the site that users would not want to otherwise wait to load.

[Update : Thanks to Andy Powell our UM Blog blog.universalmind.com has a new look-and-feel to match the new site.]

Flex Authority is Live

The first issue of Flex Authority is out! I was lucky enough to attend 360 Flex in San Jose last week and grabbed a pre-release copy there. In addition, Dave Meeker and I were lucky enough to be interviewed by Leif Wells. Leif was really great about coordinating this interview on Merapi. Thanks for your patience Leif.

So, pick up your copy or subscription at Flex-Authority.com and find out more about the Merapi Project direct from Dave and me via Leif.

Recap from 360 Flex | San Jose

Coming at you from sunny San Jose, California at the eBay campus...

Yesterday at 360 Flex I presented a session on Merapi and moderated a panel discussion on open source technology. At the Merapi session we discussed the focus of the project and show a lot of sample applications. Including a few demos that showed the ease of use when developing with Merapi.

Here's some sample code that shows how to do a simple echo of a string from a Flex UI to Java and back again:

Flex Source:


Java Source:


This simple application is an example of how easy it is to communicate from AIR to Java (and vice-versa) at the desktop.

I also walked through a bit of the source involved with creating the gyroscope demo shown in the video below:



Enter one Jordan Snyder.

Jordan is a friend of mine that has a keen interest in messing with hardware, amoung other things. So, we were hanging out one night at my place and she saw that I had a Lego Mindstorm robotics kit. I proceeded to tell her bout my plans to integrate Merapi with some of the Legos APIs... long story short, she took the Mindstorm home with her and did all the work. Here's a video of the robot that Jordan presented in the same talk:




So, what's up here? The AIR application is controlling the Robot in real time using Merapi via Bluetooth. Why is that cool? This a proof of concept, but it's not smoke and mirrors by any means. This means that Merapi has a huge potential to soon be a a cross platform solution for building device enabled Flex/AIR applications.

I submitted this talk for the Adobe MAX conference when they were asking for proposals, but unfortunately it was not selected. I will be at MAX though and would be happy to talk with anyone who is interested in Merapi at the Universal Mind booth. If there's enough interested in having a birds-of-a-feather-session on Merapi, I'd be happy to accommodate that as well.

The feedback from the folks here at 360 Flex and those of you digging into Merapi has been great. Keep the comments coming and we'll keep on adding features and stability to the framework.

[ Update: More view of "Nathan" the 360 Flex Robot ]