Nouvelles Solutions

Update March 6 8:85: Zillabyte still is in first place with $851K, now Jawfish Games is in 2nd place with $741K, and AdStage got relegated to third place with $661K

See the whole list below:

At the Office Hour stage Jonathon Triest (@jtriest) was interviewed. What was interesting is that at the end of the interview they asked the crowd to pitch and the best pitch would have a meeting with Jonathon. I was surprised how many people went for it. Here is the moment.

The demo pit is pretty crowed and tons of good demos

And at the Official Pace Car of Justice is that the Carbon E7:

A quick walk through to the demo pit down to the main stage. Lighting is not the best, but hey, that will give you a feel of the place

Yesterday 18 startup lanched. Today they beat that, and what a batch it was. Including one internet connected coffee machinge that brews the perfect coffee. Here are my notes on the launched apps. As the presentation where really fast passed I certainly missed some obvious facts. I’ll correct them as I find out. Again the day was organized in three launch sessions.

While at the Launch Festival I thought I give Uber a try.

Round 1: airport

Coming out from the airport there was a long line of Taxi waiting, so I didn’t need to try Uber yet. First Taxi in line is a minivan. I ask the driver he takes credit cards and he says of course. Well, often it’s not the case. So I jumped in, he had a backseat TV and the rider was great. He was also named Daniel. Arriving at the hotel he accepted credit cards wit Square. Got my receipt per email. Perfect.

Taxi:1 Über:0

Round 2: ride to the launch conference

Coming out of the hotel, again two taxis where waiting, so I went to the first in line and asked if he can drive me to the Design Center Concourse. He didn’t know where it was. I told him that I have the address and asked him if he accepts credit cards. Nope. Well, I launched the Uber app, clicked “Reserve black car” and two minutes later a black limo picked me up. Via the app I entered my destination so the driver knew already where to go. The funny part is that he picked me up right in front of the other taxi, came out of the car with a great smile and opened my door. The drivers name was also Daniel. Note the experience was just great.

Taxi:1 Über:1

Round 3: 9pm Pickup

Day 1 of the conference is over and I need a ride to get back to the hotel. Walking out of the Design Center Concourse no taxi was in view. Started the Über app and clicked “Reserve black car” and less that 30 seconds later a brand new Lexus RX 450 stopped in front of me. Wow.

Taxi:1 Über:2

Final Round: 2nd day at the launch conference

This morning there was just no taxi visible and I noticed the Uber limmo waiting on the other side of the street. Click on the app and the car picked me up.

Taxi:1 Über:3

Game over. The fares where correct and the convenience is unbeatable.

Before I realized that the Hackaton was conflicting with some long term ski vacation we had planned I signed up and was excited to have a more active part at the Launch Conference. By meeting tonight some of the participants I don’t know if I could have programmed several days in a row with little sleep like many did. Great job ‘guys’!

The winner of the Hackaton will get a $75k investment or $30k in cash.

They where 123 projects…here are the top 12 select tonight in no specific order:

Day 1 of the Launch festival is not finished yet as the Hackaton finalist will be revelead in a while.

There where three launch sessions where a serie of startup pitched their idea followed by a question and answer session by the judges. Everything was recorded so I’m sure you can find these sessions online. I will add the links when I find them. I took a few notes, but each session is very fast paced, so I may have skiped a few keypoints. But I like to keep track of what I saw, so here we go. Note a few pitches where for new ideas from exsiting startups and these are marked as Version 2.0

So here we go, 18 hot startups…

Jasmine is a behavior-driven development framework for testing JavaScript and CoffeeScript code. I wanted to use it to test CoffeeScript for a Rails Engine I am working on. Enters Jasminerice a gem that let’s you add Jasmine tests to your Rails application. From it’s website Jasminerice takes “full advantage of the Rails 3.1 asset pipeline. Jasminerice removes any excuse YOU have for not testing your out of control sprawl of CoffeeScript files.”. This said out of the box the Jasminerice gem does not support Rails Engines. It’s a Rails Engine itself, but from their website they say “Unfortunately this is currently not working when used in a mountable engine.”.

So I looked under the hood of the gem and found that with a couple of fixes you can get it working with a Rails Engine. Ideally I will create a pull request and have Jasminerice work for plain Rails apps and for Rails Engine. For now you can follow these instructions to get it working with your Engine. Please let me know if you find a nicer/simpler way to test your Rails Engines with Jasmine.

The main difference is that in a Rails Engine all your Rails classes and Java/CoffeeScript are namespaced and you need to tell Jasminerice to look in a few different places.

Flex has been really good to me for many years. In fact I moved to the US in 2002 and started working on a Flash project and we jumped on Flex before it was 1.0 with Royal which was the beta code name of Flex. Flex had a long road since and I delivered many fun and successful customer projects. Many of which were internal enterprise projects and I also worked on a few pretty visible public ones like the Australian Open Tennis Vault, the NCAA Vault. I even co-authored a “Flex on Rails” book.

You would think I would leave Flex based on the flux it is in right now after the catastrophic public relation announcement from Adobe in November. That’s not it, as I actually believe Flex has a bright future and is in great hands with the Apache Flex Team. My realization happened a couple of weeks ago with the announcement of Rubymotion. The cheer fact of being able to build iOS apps with the iOS SDK in Ruby was that moment for me and it opened my eyes and pointed to a turning point in my career. I’m going mobile full steam ahead. This is the future. Note just RubyMotion, just the mobile sector in general. And many mobile apps need to be backed by great server side services. So mobile and the cloud are really an exciting combination.

So what do I mean by “I leave Flex”. Actually it already started, I’m not taking on new Flex Desktop Project, I cancelled of few customer Flex projects that where on my radar and I’m canceling several internal project I was working on. In addition I will not attend Flex user groups or conferences and I’m not giving Flex speaking engagements or trainings. That’s it, done!

So what about my current engagements with Flex? I currently have two great customer for which I provide product development, mentoring and consulting services and I would like to continue working with them for the foreseeable future. In fact these two customers have many Ruby on Rails projects and will start doing more mobile development. So it seems to be a good match.

And what about Flex mobile which is pretty awesome and is a great way to build iOS and Android apps for the enterprise? You may not know this, but I have been an Objective-C developer in the mid-90 on NeXTStep and followed the WWDC conference since many years before the iOS SDK was announced. Again I love Ruby and the iOS SDK, I just wasn’t very fond of Objective-C anymore as Ruby spoiled me. RubyMotion is my gateway drug to iOS and I’m just ready to dive fully into iOS. Mentally I don’t want to master two different environments and the iOS ecosystem is large enough to sustain me professionally.

Now will I still recommend Flex to anyone? The answer is clearly yes as there are still many situations and projects where Flex is a great match. At least until a good HTML5/JavaScript framework can provide the same productivity than with the Flex SDK. All the current HTML frameworks will evolve and morph drastically over the coming years. Which is a good reason to choose Flex if you want stability. These HTML frameworks will take several years to mature. This said I really enjoy Backbonejs, Spinejs, Ember-js and how they try to make development of Rich HTML Applications easier.

So, here we go. Good bye Flex!

• Daniel Wanja

Thanks to all the attendees, I had fun giving this talk. Please find the video of the talk here

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And here are the slides

This is the description of the talk:

Join us for a session on building incredible iPad apps with Flex. Too good to be true? Actually the Flex SDK has a whole set of components and classes suited to easily build iPad apps. I would even say it’s the fastest and easiest way to build iPad apps out there. Don’t believe me? Then come and see how I unravel the hidden gems of the Flex SDK and build 10 application in less than 60 minutes. You will learn how easy it is to build powerful view navigation with little code. You will explore all the different components that the Flex SDK provides you. Additionally you will learn in this code intense talk how to build effective custom item renders. Wait, there is even more, we’ll throw in tips and tricks how to use Swiz to complement the SDKs built in mechanism to pass data among views, how to integrate google maps and Mapquest, and how to communicate effectively with a server using XML and JSON. You will acquire all the secret to build kick-ass applications that can be deployed on Apple App Store.

All my talks are on my Github account. You can find the source of the example in the iPadAppsWithFlex/src folder You can also down the PDF from Github

Enjoy! Daniel

I just downloaded the latest AIR 3.3 and it supports running your Flex mobile apps in the iOS Emulator. If you look at Air Developer Tool help (adt -help) you get the syntax of all the commands that adt support…part of which is the following description:

For my app this translates into:

This generate the app01_ViewNavigatorApp.ipa iOS app ready to be launched in the Emulator.

Then you can install the app on the emulator as follows:

Finally to run it:

Hope this will help you out. To find more on iOS development with Flex come see my Building iPad apps with Flex next week.