Its really awesome to see community interest in OpenPyro, the Flex-lite framework that I have been working on for the last few months. The latest news on that front is an effort to port OpenPyro to HaXe, an open source programming language that can be compiled to a variety of languages like Flash, Javascript, PHP etc by Don-Duong Quach. Don evaluated OpenPyro and has started a Git repository on the porting effort. He was even able to compile a previous example I had built with OpenPyro to a Haxe version which you can find here.

Its really exciting to see this work. My own knowledge of Haxe is minimal so I can’t be as helpful as I would like to be, but if there are other HaXe developers out there, your help in the effort would be really appreciated. The conversation around the port is happening at the OpenPyro mailing list.

In other news, OpenPyro finally has an official home at OpenPyro.org. I am going to start posting architecture documents and examples there. The latest can be found at the OpenPyro wiki and the OpenPyro asdocs page.

Off late I have become pretty involved in a local (Philadelphia) user group called RefreshPhilly. The group meets the first Monday of every month and hosts a couple of talks by some local new-media professionals, designers or developers. The event is hosted at the new Comcast building where I work.
However like a lot of big corporate buildings, the Comcast building only allows registered guests into the building. This meant that all attendees had to be registered with building security to allow them to enter. Since our attendee list often reaches 100 odd people, I needed to get the names to security in chunks, so that I didnt have to get all of them at the last second. Unfortunately the Facebook events page only shows the total number of people who have confirmed their attendence. What I really needed was “How many new people have confirmed since the last time I looked”. So I whipped this little app that uses the Facebook API to take snapshots of the attendee lists from any Facebook event (using a valid event id) at any time and show the number of new people who have confirmed attending or maybe attending status by comparing the snapshot to the previous snapshot saved on a local file.

I am almost sure this app will only ever have one user (me) but hey, if you ever need it, you can download it from here. Feel free to comment if you would like to see any additional functionality here, or if you have an idea for this being a more practical app

I am excited to finally announce the alpha release of EspressoReader. EspressoReader, in its current incarnation, is a desktop app for Google Reader. However the goal is to create an application for managing all the information streams you read on a daily basis, and providing user interfaces that help sifting through all of that. For example, this release includes a PhotoView that lays out all the images in different feeds one below the other, which works out really well if you are subscribed to image heavy feeds like web comics.

You can download the application from here.
Update: I am removing the link to the installer as more and more people keep having a broken experience with version 1. Please get on the alpha list for version 2 at EspressoReader.com. The new system should be a lot more stable since it uses a different authentication system that seems to be working much better.

Features:
Multiple view support like Text, Images and Browser (more coming soon)
FullScreen support
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Features coming soon (almost done but couldn’t finish for this release):
Offline support / Prefetch support (allowing you to load all subscriptions for a category when reading an entry for more useful Related Feeds functionality)
Improved Related Feeds Algorithm

Other list of proposed features can be found here. Feel free to add to that list.

Also the application is completely charityware. Please consider donating to Unicef if you find this application useful.

EspressoReader was built completely with OpenPyro.