I'm happy to finally be able to tell the world that Tapper, Nimer & Associates and Digital Primates have decided to join forces. Now that the lawyers are done the merger is complete.

The new company will be keeping the name Digital Primates. If you'd like to learn more about Digital Primates check out our web site at http://www.digitalprimates.net

It's an exciting time in the RIA world and for us it just got a lot more exciting!

P.S. We are looking for a few great flex developers and flash video experts. If you're interested send me your resume.

"A vast swath of the Pacific, twice the size of Texas, is full of a plastic stew that is entering the food chain. Scientists say these toxins are causing obesity, infertility...and worse"

There is everything wrong with the fact that this pile of trash exists. And even worse, there is more than one in the world.

I don't even know where to begin with a solution. But cutting back on the use of plastic seems like a good place to start. Everything doesn't need to be made out of plastic, I know I prefer the glass coke bottles to the plastic ones. Maybe some mandatory recycling programs are needed. I just hope something changes other wise the world 20 years from now could be a nasty place to live.

Read article

Late last year, to late to tell everyone, I gave to what has become a favorite charity of mine. So this year I'm telling everyone about it.

Childs Play Charity

What makes this one different? They way you donate, instead of sending in a check you go shopping on Amazon. Volunteers from dozens of children's hospitals around the world have worked with Amazon to build wish lists for the kids. This means that not only does 100% of your money go to the kids toys, but, the exact toys you pick out do too. Amazon will then ship your toys directly to the hospital(s).

So head over to childs play and pick a hospital (or 2,3...), then imagine kids who have to spend christmas at the hospital, and start picking out toys you would want to play with if you were stuck in a hospital too.

Merry Christmas!

I've written 2 versions of this app myself and now Flickr has done it. This week Flickr added support for geo tagging photos.

There are still some things I don't like about the Flickr version. For instance I hate that all of the photos are broken into pages of 250 photos. My current count is 4000+ geo tagged photos, which means 20+ pages. And I'd love to add a time line so I can see photos taken by a date range. Perhaps a little animation so I can watch photos of my travels - I went there, then there, then there.

But, this is Flickr. The company with a simple api. And with the new support for Geo data in the api building an application like this will be even easier.

My last version took 1 http request to get the photos and 1-2 more http requests per photo to get the geo data, depending on if it was stored in the EXIF data or as a Tag. As you can guess that could result in hundreds of http requests for 1 search. The updates the Flickr Api, should let me consolidate this down to 1 http request.

Guess it's time to start on the 3rd version of my Flickr/Flex2/Map Mashup.

Check it out. My World, according to Flickr. http://www.flickr.com/photos/nimer/map/

One thing that keeps driving me nuts is the lack of a "FieldSet" component, like the html tag of the same name, in Flex. So I wrote one.

This component is based on the base VBox component so all of the properties and methods of the VBox apply. Here is an example of using the component.

Note: I've added this new component to the same .swc file as my DebugPanel component. Considering that the .swc now has more then one component, I've also renamed the .swc too. So, if you are already using the DebugPanel.swc you'll want to remove the link to that .swc file and create a new link to this nimerComponents.swc in your project.

Some of you might have heard this already; I'm both happy and sad to admit it's true. After 8 great years at Adobe/Macromedia/Allaire I've decided it's time to move on and start my own consulting business with Jeff Tapper. What can I say the entrepreneurial itch needed to be scratched. Jeff, Angie, and I will be focusing on ColdFusion, Flex2, and other Adobe products.

You might think this is no big deal, perhaps you are thinking what the F$@%, or maybe it?s how can I use this to my advantage. ;)

However, don't worry I've left the ColdFusion team in good shape. There are some exciting things planned for Scorpio, but you'll need to wait and see, I still can't tell you what is planned. ;)

So if you are looking for some expert help drop me or Jeff an email. My new email is "mikenimer at yahoo dot com".

I thought I would share this photo/map application that I've been working on for a few a few weekends now. It's my buzzword bingo app, a Flex2, Flickr, Gooogle mashup.

Snoopy in the desert
download the flex 2 beta 2 player

Some of you might remember a photo/map application I did a few years back. (Yes I'm a sucker for maps.) However, that was before the flick api and google maps were released. Not to mention it was very slow. With Flex2 and the flickr/google apis that are out there now, this was a lot easier to do. Thanks to flex2 I had a working prototype in just a few hours. And the experience is a lot better too. The first time around just finding and displaying a map was a pain, this time it was the easy part. And with the flickr api I didn't have to write any back end code to parse thousands of photos. Instead I just needed to spend many nights uploading them all to flickr (I still have more to upload but I reached my flickr monthly limit already, I need to wait for May to finish).

I'm not done yet, some of my future plans include:

• Allow others to link to this app, to show their own geotagged flickr photos. (I need to speed it up, and document the url params)
• Speed up the flickr http calls with some server side threading. (flickr wants you to make a separate request for each photo to get the exif/tag data = SLOW)
• Add support for Yahoo and ESRI maps too.
• Add a regular flickr photo browser
• Make a better looking slideshow popup (anyone have one already?)
• Add some kind of timeline slider, like the one on google finance. (anyone have one already?)

Thinking of starting a company? Trying to figure out why some fail and some work before you start one? Well Joel Spolsky has an idea. He just posted an good essay on what makes a company work.

Development Abstraction

I just found this presentation on eclipsezone.com. It's a presentation from JavaPolis 2005, presented by Josh Bloch and Neal Gafter of Google. These puzzles look simple but can you get them right, or will these "simple" things trip you up? These is technically a java presentation, but I believe that some of these carry over to other language too, so if you code you should watch this. Who knows you might learn something :)

Java Puzzles Presentation
Java Puzzles Book

It's finally happened, my first article in a magazine. This month's MXDJ has published the Article I wrote that covered an overview of the new Rich Form features in ColdFusion 7, as well as a little background as to why we built it and what problems we wanted to solve with the new form features.