Moca's Blog

Adobe Photoshop Express

It has been a while since my last post but this one is hot!
Adobe has just launched Photoshop Express Beta:
https://www.photoshop.com/express

It is a free mini Photoshop for basic photo editing and you get to store up to 2GB of photos on their server or load images from facebook, Photobucket or Picassa. You can also create galleries to share your photos with your own url:

http://mocaloca.photoshop.com

I did not work on this product but heard all the noise around it and this is very exciting news. I think it is a great time for Adobe to enter the web applications world and this tool will be very useful for lots of people.

The team has been working so hard on it and they were able to put together a great product in record time. Congrats!

Remix Nelly!

Same deal as Kelly but this past week we launched the Remixer for Nelly Furtado. The winner for Kelly's contest will be announced soon and showed on MTV US. Go on, give Nelly a try!

Remix Kelly!

This week we launched Premiere Express on mtv.com promoting a contest for best Kelly Clarkson remix. A bunch of Kelly's videos and photos are provided along with her latest single. Go on, give it a try to win something. While testing I get to create some of my own and feel like a teenager again:

http://remix.mtv.com/remix.aspx?key=F31BE8D6D19615DF
http://remix.mtv.com/remix.aspx?key=16E7F9FB7188DEB4&ctx=myclips

Charles: Web Debugging Proxy

I just got my hands on this very handy tool:
"Charles is an HTTP proxy / HTTP monitor / Reverse Proxy that enables a developer to view all of the HTTP traffic between their machine and the Internet. This includes requests, responses and the HTTP headers (which contain the cookies and caching information).

Charles can act as a man-in-the-middle for HTTP/SSL communication, enabling you to debug the content of your HTTPS sessions."

read more

Adobe Premiere Express

For the past few months I have been working as a QE for Adobe with a great group of developers on a product called ADOBE Premiere Express. It is basically a web-based video remix and editing tool using photos and videos posted to Photobucket. Users can trim clips, add transitions, overlays, captions, music and publish their remixes which they can share on MySpace and other places...

It is a great tool and we are working hard to make it even better. Check it out. Create a free account with Photobucket, upload some stuff and click on "Create a Remix". Hey, if you do create one, make sure to post a link here fr me ;P

Read More About Express

My Unfinished Road to Tasmania Remix

Joost is hot!

I finally got into the Joost Beta and this beta looks to be pretty open. I did not find (yet) any restrictions on what we can say or not about the program since their blog is pretty public about their plans.

I can only say I am bloody impressed.
* The installation experience was very smooth.
* The UI is so intuitive and easy to use.
* The playback performance is amazing. I am on wireless, downloading a huge file on the other machine and the playback did not freak at all. Oh and yes I forgot I am in Australia..
* The video quality, well that was not the best.. but for full screen video with this sort of playback performance I can compromise. Many pixel blocks specially for fast moving images.
* Channel selection is great, they have quite a few good quality shows
* Ads. They did not bug me. A quick "brought you by" Eclipse before the show. No big deal.

I can totally see myself a big user of this platform specially once they start signing  up with more content providers.

4/30/07: I received a few emails asking for an invite to Joost but unfortunately they only gave me 3 invites and I already gave them away :(

WebDU Day 2

Honestly today my head was a big mash potato container. WebDU had a nice banquet after the sessions and Microsoft sponsored an open bar after that. Enough said...

I missed Ted Patrick's keynote on Flex which is a bummer but attended a few sessions in the afternoon including Greg Rewis which was great. The conference is over but we went to a Bavarian Pub in Sydney that was very good until about 11pm when the management decided not to serve us anymore. We are not sure if it was the number of Schnapps shots we had or the Twitter exchange on the table between Mike D., Chambers and Ted...

WebDU Day 1

After Melbourne I left John alone on the road back home and got on the plane to Sydney for the Aussie Web Conference WebDU. The conference is on its 5th year and this is my second. It looks much more mature this year, the venue is much better and everything is running really smoothly.

Mike Chambers and Mike Downey opened with their keynots on Apollo and some sneak preview on Flash CS3. I watched Ted Patrick's session so far. He showed how to build a simple flex app from scratch good enough to convince me that I need to get my mind around Flex soon enough.

webDU March22th - Sydney

If you are anywhere near Australia ;) at the end of March and are a geek like me you must check out webDU conference. It is organized by a very nice ausie of the name of Geoff Bowers (not the 24 Geoff unfortunately) and Julie Steadman.

I attended last year and they do such a great job bringing really quality people to speak and incorporate lots of fun during the 2 days.

Looks like this year besides the usual CF focus, there is a lot of talk on Apollo, Flex and Flash Lite. So what are you waiting for? This is your excuse to get your boss to pay for your OZ trip! Register now
See you there.

Nike Plus

Continuing with the sucker festival and trying to get off my butt, I purchased the Nike Plus deal. First of all, the product itself has a decent price AUD 49.00, but the shoes are totally overpriced. Yes I could have made a hole on my older pair...but once you are at the store it is hard to resist.

Anyway, this is the deal:
* You register @ the Nike Plus website
* You plug a receiver into your nano, stick the chip inside the shoes. It gives you an option to calibrate your walk and run.
* You can set what type of workout you want to do, Distance or Time.
* You can set the gender of the voice that talks to you and finally
* you can set a "power song", you know the one that gets you going when your heart is coming out of your mouth. I downloaded this mix by The Crystal Method that was very solid!

During your run, the voice tells you how far and how long you have run. When you get back home, as soon as you connect you nano, it uploads the data to their website. Of course this is a setting and can be turned off. Some guys were saying that there are some security risks, blah blah blah. On the website you can set up goals, create challenges with other people and see the score board of ALL the run logged into the system. In OZ it says there were 25000 logs within the past 24 hours (including my mini run).

I am not sure if this is going to get me off my butt but it is a good motivation. It is a great move by both companies and the website is just FANTASTIC. I do have my goal set for the next month, let's see how it goes.