Adobe Flex is a Flash-based user interface builder and scripting language, and Adobe’s contribution to Macromedia’s Flash technology. Adobe is faced with a problem, however; although many companies are buying in to Flex for creating web interfaces, people just aren’t as excited about the possibilities of Flex than they are, say, about AJAX. At present, most of the web applications that are making headlines are ones that aim to replace their desktop-based brethren. Most of these applications, such as all of the Google applications, are built on technologies like AJAX. Few are using Flex for these purposes, and because Flex, in conjunction with Adobe’s Integrated Runtime, is essentially positioned as the next generation of Flash. Adobe, of course, would like to change that.

Thus, they created Photoshop Express. Photoshop Express (or Px, as the favicon will tell you,) is actually an online-photo manager similar to Flickr or Picasa Web Albums. You upload your photos, organize them, touch them up, and then share them. Besides being built entirely on Flash, the major talking point of Px is the photo editing functionality, which provides a few nice features not found in other services. Though currently in beta, anyone who wishes may sign up for the service and start using it. Each user gets 2 GB of storage for photos and their own web address for their public galleries; I’ve set up mine at http://modusoperandi.photoshop.com.

Upon first logging in, the upload files dialog is displayed. Luckily, it allows selecting multiple files at once through…
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The problem is that the Locate Me feature works by detecting all WiFi hotspots (and cell towers on an iPhone) and running that against a list maintained on the servers of Skyhook Wireless. The process to build this database is essentially wardriving, and is a very time-consuming and location-limited process. Thus, if you happen to live in an area where the WiFi hotspots are all residential ones, the chances of being correctly located are slim. This issue is exacerbated for iPod touch users, who don’t have the luxury of cell towers, which have a much higher range than WiFi access points.

Someone at Skyhook evidently realized the problem. He probably asked, “Why pay for people to drive around and map hotspots when people will give us that information for free on the internet?” As a result, this page was created. You simply find your location, give it your MAC address, and you’re on your way. I myself, in keeping with the standards of kneejerk journalism, have just completed this page and received the email confirming that I have pressed the submit button correctly. I will update this posting when “up to a few weeks”…
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Earlier today Apple held an iPhone-oriented media event, covering topics including the iPhone in enterprise to the long-awaited SDK. Here are some of my initial thoughts on the announcements made today.

And yes, I wrote this as I followed the announcements, so they’re very, very early first impressions.

Enterprise

First of all, it seems strange to see Apple even discuss the enterprise market, considering their focus has been on the consumer for years and years. But considering almost every other smart phone out there is designed to be enterprise-friendly, it makes sense that Apple would do the same with the iPhone, especially since some corporate users are already using the iPhone.

Apple announced the addition of a good number of enterprise-friendly features for their next iPhone software, ranging from push email support and better calendar integration to better VPN support to the all-important Microsoft Exchange support. And as it turns out, Apple licensed the ActiveSync protocol for use on the iPhone. As Macworld reports, “With ActiveSync, the iPhone talks directly to Exchange. So the iPhone will get push e-mail, push calendaring, push contacts, global access lists, and remote wipe, all while talking to Exchange. And it’s built into the existing applications—mail goes into the same Mail program, calendar into the same Calendar, and so on.”

I’m not exactly an expert when it comes to the enterprise, but I think Apple just answered a lot of people’s prayers with these additions. Do I think this means we’ll see Apple making a more…
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It’s been two weeks since Toshiba, creators and primary backers of the nascent next-generation movie disc format called HD DVD, ceased production and marketing of the technology, ceding defeat in a bitter format war raged between it and Blu-ray Disc, championed by a Sony-led consortium.

This move was widely expected following January’s announcement by Warner Home Video that it will be supporting Blu-ray Disc exclusively going forward. As the number one movie studio in the world, Warner Bros. commanded immense weight in deciding the outcome of this war, and once their announcement was made, it took less than two months for companies at every level of the home video distribution ecosystem to fall in line behind it, abandoning HD DVD in the process and leaving Toshiba holding the bag.

So now that Blu-ray Disc is poised to become the dominant next-generation movie format, it’s time to look to the future. A future that, quite frankly, looks somewhat bleak for a number of reasons.

In a Blu-ray dominated future, expect high prices, because everything about Blu-ray is far more expensive than its HD DVD counterparts. The players will be expensive thanks to costly laser pickups, complicated hardware and an even more complicated software stack that will require extensive support from the manufacturers. The discs will be expensive thanks to the relatively high cost of manufacturing discs, and the sky-high costs of authoring them using BD-J.

Expect limited selection, in part because of the high costs of creating a commercial Blu-ray Disc, but…
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At this latest Macworld Expo, iPhone firmware 1.1.3 was announced, with features such as “customizable home screen,” “Webclips,” and a new interface for Maps. It was then announced that these enhancements, along with five applications previously only on the iPhone, would be coming to the iPod Touch in $20 “January Software Upgrade.”

Fast-forwarding past all the “it’s sooooooo unfair why Apple why?” aspects of the move, we must direct our attention to the applications themselves. In addition to the applications, the new features of iPhone firmware 1.1.3 (Webclips and Icon Layout on Springboard chiefly among them) were also included in the software upgrade. For iPhone users, the following rundown/review will say only what you already know. I’m providing this information for those of us who don’t have $60 to spend on phone service each month, no matter how functional and sexy and fingerprint covered the phone happens to be.

Mail and Maps

Mail is a light and decent email client, especially for a mobile device. With support for both POP3 and IMAP, Mail has preset configurations for several popular mail services, such as Gmail and Yahoo! Mail, as well as Apple’s own .Mac mail. Mail works with any other service supporting either of the two protocols mentioned above, of course, but settings will have to be obtained and entered manually.

Mail maintains the same folders you’d expect from an email client, like Inbox, Sent, Drafts, etc. Messages can be moved between folders, but new folders cannot be created directly in the…
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