mysiteonline™

It seems that the days of the librarian (as the field stands now) may be numbered. A new product dubbed "Wolfram Alpha", will be released in May (the Alpha) that intends to actually formulate answers to questions posed to it. They claim it's much more powerful than Google as it actually answers the questions, not finding possible pages that may have answers in it.

Source: http://www.twine.com/item/122mz8lst-4b/wolfram-alpha-is-coming-and-it-could-be-as-important-as-google

So it's been quite awhile since I've discussed anything about my little Adobe AIR project - with good reason, I'm a top-down programmer. If I don't know the language, I need to know enough to come up with a good plan of attack so that I'm not coding garbage that would have to be completely reprogrammed from scratch 2 months later (6 months? ...well...). In that end, I've been trying to find good documentation. The Adobe site had the v1.1 runtime documentation, but I couldn't find the newer v1.5 runtime docs. The library system had a book or two, so I took one out. It wasn't that great. Our library got one specifically for v1.5. It was better, but still not quite what I was looking for (though it made some more basic things easier to understand).

Eventually I found the v1.5 runtime documentation on Adobe's website. It was 433 pages long, in a compiled PDF. Yay. I fall asleep after reading two paragraphs. "This won't be easy," I thought to myself. Well, approximately 200 interruptions later, I finally finished the documentation and I've finished a basic mockup for the user interface. I intend for it to be (upon application instantiation) automatically positioned at the user's bottom right viewport. We'll probably set it in the Program's menu Startup folder.

Example mockup image:

Note: The hover property of the button is not set in this mockup (I rushed a little), and Safari's rounded corners (Adobe AIR uses a version of WebKit for it's HTML rendering engine) are much cleaner than Photoshop's.