UPS Monitor made in Flex Hero

Hi, if you like me have a Mac and an APC UPS Backup 1200 No Break, then you have no UPS software compatible to run. APC says it does not support MacOSX and refused to give me the protocol specification so I could implement a version for MacOSX myself.

Well, the good news is I managed to sniff the communication between my Mac and the UPS and reversed engineered all I needed to build my own Power Manager Application. If you need it for your mac feel free to download and please consider a donation.

The software will show the status of the UPS, consuming power by month and by day, and will automatically shutdown the computer in case of a power failure and the UPS's battery is in critical level.

The communication with the UPS is through cua port. I've accomplished that through native call to "/bin/cat" capturing it's output.

From that on I just read the unsignedBytes and parse the information.

Simple uh?

Screenshot:

Dock Icon battery mode:

Dock Icon AC mode:

Tested on Lion and Snow Leopard.

UPS Monitor Download Link

Sd Card Speed Tester for Android made in Flex Hero

A few weeks ago I used Adobe Flex Hero to create a new version of the Android App SD Card Speed Tester.

It does the same as the older one plus a test of the written data and the option to choose where the test file will be written. Now if you have your Card mounted on a path different than the /sdcard you can just change it.

The new App is useful for testing the speed and also the capacity of the card as the user can now set the size of the test file and the application will write the data and read it back testing it's content. If the card is fake, it will write the data, the card will return OK but after when it reads the data written the card will not return the right data and an error will be displayed.

As the app is made in Air for Android using Adobe Flex Hero, it will need Adobe Air on the phone.

This is the link for the app on Android Market: SD Card Tester

Screenshots

SD Card Speed Tester for Android

Last week I bought a Google Nexus One and I gave my iPhone to my girlfriend. I can tell I don't miss my iPhone. Android is great. It's really everything people says. Fast, beautifull, smart, and OPEN.

Build applications for it is so much easy that even knowing nothing about Android development I built this little application called SD Speed Test.

Nexus One come with a 4GB MicroSD card so I decided to buy another one with bigger capacity. The problem is there are so much China made on the market and even stores don't know for sure if they are selling a fake or not. So I decided to build my SD Card Speed test application to test the true speed of the MicroSD card.

Here you can see some screenshots . I cared enough to make it compatible with older versions of android such as 1.5.

To install it search for "SD Card Speed Tester" or Just "SD Card" at Android's Marketplace on your android's phone.

Hope it can be useful to someone else.

Why HP's Slate device is better than iPad

I love apple but I have to admit, Hp's device look way better than iPad.
iPad is just a bigger iPhone.

See for yourself.



Steve Jobs don want any other way of building iPhone and iPad applications than the iPhone SDK and don't wanna let Adobe to put the Flash Player on the iPhone. Ye ye, I have an iPhone and I say that a browser with no flash capabilities is a piece of shit. My next phone will certainly be an Android enabled phone. And if I need, I will go with Hp's Slate or JooJoo.

Decorated Button

DecoratedButton is a Button with a flag on it.


See exemple bellow

Diagrammer Lib Updated

Diagrammer Lib Updated, bugs reported by users here were corrected.

Thanks everybody for solutions posted.

SLIDER - Flex Mobile Framework

Finally I will be able to build Flex applications for my iPhone.

Adobe is coming up with this promising framework called SLIDER. It is based on Flex 4 framework and will be optimized for mobile devices, will have components specially designed for use on these devices and guess what? Will export native applications for iPhone.

It is supposed to be released as a plugin for Flash Builder 4.

I'm looking forward to put my hands on it.

If you can't wait until Adobe releases SLIDER, try out this similar product from openplug at http://www.openplug.com

More information: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/mobile
FAQ about it: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flex/mobile/faq.html