oooOOOOooh. nice. this adobe AIR app called Tour de Flex is probably now the clearing house of all things Adobe Flex as far as its capabilities, components and data integration. If you are a Flex developer and/ or are interested in Flex. you gotta git it!

Well i had issues trying to get the theme tab to work in my GMail account. I noticed that my GMail looked a bit differently this morning with more rounded corners and cleaner design, but the themes tab wasn’t rolled out to my account yet. So i went to another browser in my VMWare and the tab was there. I copied the URL in that browser, pasted it into my other browser and like magic, the tab appeared! URL is below

http://mail.google.com/mail/?shva=1#settings/themes

Its about time but Google has announced new themes (article courtesy of readwriteweb.com) for GMail. I often thought that although GMail rocks for email, it was a bit bland on the design. The one hope i have is that these themes don’t slow GMail down. We’ll have to see but as the article shows, there should be plenty of themes to choose from!

Technorati Tags: gmail themes email

I saw this post on a website that was sent to me that automated the note-carding process. Now i am a big fan of note carding during the planning phase of development projects. Its a great exercise to get
thoughts down an it encourages participation by even the most resistant team members. The Beauty of the process is that it gets you to think differently about the solution that you are trying to provide that solves the problem. Although this product seems worthy of praising as it saves time in digitizing the process later. I feel that in doing so, it short-circuits what the process is meant to do in the first place.

Note-carding is supposed to be a bit laborious. Its supposed to be messy and its supposed to encourage manually writing things down and pasting them up on a wall. Dis-engaging from our CPU’s to work together creatively to come up with elements to solve a problem is what the process is supposed to do. I would go as far as to make sure NO digital devices be allowed in the meeting room during this process save a figital camera to take a picture of the wall you may be stick-i-fying.

Maybe this product has applications beyond software development. But for my team, we will use the hand-spun 3M stickies so that our creative right brains get more involved in the process of what our left-brains like to dominate.

Wow, I’ve been a member of Facebook for some time and to be honest, haven’t updated my profile or cared too much about the technology. However, in the last few months i have been inundated with friend requests from EVERYWHERE. Most of my friend requests are coming from past High School alumni. Its a pretty amazing thing actually. I’ve had to break out the ol’ Year Book to find out who some of these folks are but it has been a pretty cool ride getting in touch with people that frankly, i forgot about.