I’ve been very eager to write this blog entry for a while. I’m really happy to say that Josh Dura is joining our growing ranks of Flash developers at Yahoo!

Josh is joining our our Dallas office working with a group that has done some amazing things with Flash Communications Server. With Josh now on the team, I’m sure they will be better still. The group he is joining won the MAX award for “Advertising Experience” two years ago for their work on Yahoo! AdVision, a great system for putting Flash Video into our high-end advertisements in the Yahoo! network. One of my favorite projects though is still Messenger Live, Where Chris Mancini and his team built a Messenger viewer in FCS that would allows online audiences to watch contestants using messenger and rate the IMers that people found the most interesting.

While Josh is the latest of our Flash hires, we still have Flash and Flex job opportunities throughout Yahoo! Take a look at http://join.yahoo.com to find a Flash job that might suit you

Like eight-legged swallows to Capistrano, the Yahoo! Spiders have returned (shudder). Every year since I’ve been here, the end of July brings back massive numbers of really big spiders. Sitting on their many webs they are about the size of a quarter, maybe a bit bigger. By the time the population really explodes though, they are going to be big suckers.

Already there are two or three of them on every window I’ve passed on the first floor. They hang from the trees over the sidewalk, and make the in-building courtyards look like something from a bad, made for sci-fi channel movie. “They arrogantly invoked the name the great and powerful king spider ghost when they created the new web spidering system. Now they will PAY!”

For now I’m just going to be grateful that I haven’t seen them inside. Once I get past some revulsion and get close enough to one I’ll add the photo.

woo! I’m so excited that Yahoo! acquired Konfabulator. It is a neat product that brings all sorts of beautiful widgets to the desktop. Ray uses a lot of them to check RSS feeds, the weather and ping rates to our servers (like this one).

Konfabulator, now Yahoo! Widgets, are rich, beautiful and now free! Man… this is a dilemma. Just as I start getting back into doing some personal Flash development this happens. Well, Flash will still probably win out for now, but this will go pretty high on the ever expanding list of things I want to play with.

Now we just need to get Flash working spectacularly with them, and I can kill two bids with one stone!

EDIT: just read the O’Reilly radar post about the acquisition. It calls out the fact that Yahoo! is acquiring a desktop client applications as interesting and noteworthy since we are a web company. Yahoo! is certainly a web company, but we are also a BIG company.

Personally, I see Yahoo! widgets as a welcome additition to our existing destop clients like Yahoo! Messenger, Yahoo! Desktop Search, Yahoo! Toolbar, and Yahoo! Music Engine. This isn’t new for us, just a continuation on bringing content to users in many different ways.

Mike Davidson wrote a really great article about how to use PHP to make a mobile site processor. I want to give that a try on my blog and see how it goes (it is however going towards the end on a fairly long to-do list). This approach has you set up a subdomain like mobile. for your site that hits a PHP page to process each HTML page and reformat the page to some more mobile friendly content.

I think this is going to fit in well with my current plans on how to make my site mobile friendly. My original thought was to make a Flash Lite file that has a fully stylized view of my site and the just screw the non-Flash Lite users. >:) Heck, I’m writing to a niche audience, and not respecting of the current WAP experience enough to care (if you want to read my blog that badly you should have your head examined).

Now, I think I am going to make a landing page that lets you opt for the Flash Lite file or to go on though the processed page. I know a few of you Flash Lite folks are thinking “but I don’t have a phone that supports Flash Lite in the browser.” However If you access a SWF in your browser it will be downloaded and launch the local player (muahaha).

To the user, the experience of changing from the WAP browser to the Flash Lite Player is very smooth. The first time I tried it, I thought somehow I was still in the browser. I thought this because I run my Flash File fullscreen and there was no chrome to give away the change. When I was done with the application, I quit and was immediately back in the browser.

Macromedia sent out a promotional email yesterday inviting folks to register for the MAX conference, and introducing several of the presenters. I checked my mail yesterday and there was my grinning face staring back at me (the pict above was the header of the email). I hope to goodness the email was opt-in. I’m very pleased to be MAX, I just hope I’m not also spam.

Justin Everett-Church is the award-winning mobile and devices developer behind NYC Traffic, a Macromedia Flash application that delivers real-time images of Manhattan intersections to cellular phones. He’s one of thousands of leading designers and developers who will gather at MAX 2005 this October to learn new skills, explore emerging technologies, share techniques with peers, and put exciting new ideas in motion.

So that was a very exciting way to announce that I will be presenting at the MAX conference in Anaheim this October. I’m presenting on Advanced Flash Lite 1.1 development in the 90 minute hands on track. I’m actually going to be presenting the session three times, so if you are going, sign up for one and also the other Mobile and Devices sessions.

I’m actually pretty impressed with how on-the-ball Macromedia is with this conference. To make sure that the session will be up to their standards, I have a lot of due dates for outlines, rough drafts and final presentation. While it will probably keep me a bit stressed for the next month or so, I think it will make for a better presentation.

EDIT: Thanks to Grant’s trackback, I see that he is also MAX. As for the logic “MAX == me and MAX == Grant, therefore me==Grant,” I wouldn’t want to give away the Macromedia announcement at MAX for Macromedia BrainWeaver.

When going to pay for dinner tonight I noticed a ring around the reserve bank symbol on the dollar bill I had put down. It was a URL for wheresgeorge.com stamped on the bill for a money tracking site. I’ve seen messages on money in a much more low-tech way since I was a kid, but this was pretty funny. I entered the serial number but unfortunately somebody stamped the bill but didn’t enter the bill into the system.

Hopefully someone else will eventually give this a try and see that I transferred planes in Salt Lake City the other day. I *think* that is where I got it.

The really funny part of the site though is that they must sell a stamp that made the interesting mark on the bill. look on the site. Do you see it? no? Well if you dig around, you can find the fact that it is discontinued in their store. If you don’t mark the bills then what is the point. According to the FAQ we are supposed to go get our own made. This snippet from the site’s FAQ though was amusing:

#8 Is it legal to write on or mark currency?
Where’s George? does not encourage the defacement of U.S. Currency. The law defines ‘illegal’ defacement as defacement that renders bills unfit to be re-issued. For the legal details from the U.S. Bureau of Engraving and Printing, please Click Here

#9 What happened to the official Where’s George? Rubber stamps?
We no longer sell any Where’s George? rubber stamps. We apologize for any inconvenience this may cause.

#10 So, where can I get a rubber stamp?
We really can’t help you there. Sorry. But any local office supply store may make one for you. There are also many online custom stamp makers on the Internet.

I’m sure those questions were completely randomly ordered and have nothing to do with each other. I wonder how much trouble they got in.