Amethyst is a Flash/Flex/AIR/ActionScript visual design, coding and debugging environment for Visual Studio 2008 and 2010. It has all the things you’d expect from a VS IDE - drag+drop, click+code, IntelliSense, drilldown debugging, customizable code formatting, refactoring and so on.

Anyway, if you want to find out more or download the release candidate, head over to the SapphireSteel Software web site: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Blog/article/amethyst-release-candidate-1

I guess I might as well pulp all the waste paper that’s cluttering up my bookshelves. It’s old technology, outmoded, yesterday’s dross. From now on, my life will be lived vicariously on a screen. Here I sit at my computer all day, reading words on a screen. In the evening I’ll turn on the TV and look at people on a screen. If I want entertainment, I can play games on a screen. I can phone people and play ‘apps’ on a screen. And finally, the last piece in the jigsaw, I can read books on a screen!

OK, let me be honest here. I don’t own a Kindle, I don’t own an iPhone and I rarely watch TV. But I do like, love, adore, roll over on my back and kick my little paws in the air for the sheer joy of reading books. Books to me are not disposable items - browsed today, forgotten tomorrow. They are doorways into other people’s imaginations, repositories of knowledge and ideas, a means both of blotting out and illuminating the good, the bad and the hitherto unknown in life, the universe and everything. I give to a book far more attention than I give to the vast majority of the text that floats into and out of my vision each day on the screen of my PC. Books, in summary, are special. And I really, really don’t want to read them on a Kindle.

Electronic readers have their uses and I can imagine the day when I may even be tempted to buy one. I have no great desire to carry around a library of dictionaries, programming books and other reference works when I’m travelling. And a Kindle would be a wonderful way of taking masses of information without lugging around a trunk full of books. I can also imagine reading newspapers, magazines and (just about) short stories on a Kindle. But can I imagine settling down to enjoy a substantial novel by Dostoyevsky, Stieg Larsson or Stephen King? No I can’t. I can’t even imagine reading a shortish Ed McBain or P G Wodehouse novel on the thing.

To some extent, my prejudices have a practical basis: books are easier to read in the bath and they come in all different shapes and sizes appropriate to their content (a small pocket dictionary, a big glossy photographic guide to the plants of Madagascar etc.). But there is more than that. Books are a departure from the digital world in which I otherwise live. I take out a book when all the screens in my house are dimmed. I sit in an armchair, I find the place where I placed my bookmark, I carefully open to that page and I slowly sink myself into a world where only ink on paper stands between me and someone else’s version of reality.

In short, I love the medium as well as the message.

It’s significant that Amazon claims its Kindle eBooks are now outselling hardbacks. I suspect they have a long way to go before they outsell paperbacks. Hardbacks are, on the whole, rather expensive. And there are, to be frank, some pretty poorly made hardbacks around which are, to all intents and purposes, just paperbacks stuck between thick cardboard covers.

If only more hardbacks were properly bound and printed on good quality paper and sold at a reasonable price, maybe more people would buy them. If you want to enjoy a good hardback, I recommend that you try one from the Everyman series. You have a broad choice of authors - everyone from Dostoyevsky and Dickens to P G Wodehouse and Cormac McCarthy. I honestly find it very hard to believe that given the choice between one of those beautiful Everyman hardbacks and the Kindle version anyone would choose the Kindle one.

But blogs are limited to, well, blogging. If you don’t want to blog, you don’t want to write HTML and you don’t want to pay a company for the privilege of hosting your site, what are your alternatives? One is called Jimdo. You can sign up for a free Jimdo account at http://www.jimdo.com and start creating a real web site with separate sections for pages of text, pictures or videos, a contact submission form, a guestbook - even an online shop. And yes, of course, a blog too if you wish...

The nice thing about Jimdo is that the site design tools are all ‘live’ in the user interface - that is, once you log in, you can add or delete sections, enter text and restyle pages right there in the web site. You don’t have to log into an ‘administration’ back-end to make changes and then preview them. The site shows you the changes live as they happen. For example, to add a YouTube video you just click a menu, select the ‘YouTube’ icon then paste in a video’s URL.

It’s a nice system. There are also paid-for versions if you need more features and don’t want any ads on your pages. My main criticism is that far too many names for potential sites are already taken. A site name takes the form of a word followed by .jimdo.com. I wanted to set up a site about writing. When I was picking a name for the site, I tried all the following: scribbler, writer, writers, writing, word, words, pen, author, write, ink, inkwell then I tried a few random names such as abc, xyz, ooo, xxx and even jimdo. They were all taken. Most of these names had been registered but the sites never used. People (or maybe software robots?) register the names then just leave the site empty so that new users, frustratingly, are left with a very limited choice of site names. Incidentally, in the end I chose the name ‘inkblot’ - so my site is http://inkblot.jimdo.com/. There is nothing much there yet - just a brief ‘hello’ message, a Twitter feed and a photo of my dog and cat. But that is already more than many other Jimdo users have added to their sites!

I contacted the Jimdo team and asked if they had any plans to address the problem of ‘name squatting’ by all their inactive users. I was told “We’re actually in the process — started around two weeks ago — of contacting and notifying inactive users that their accounts will be deactivated if they don’t log in in the near future.”

Once they free up a few of these inactive names Jimdo will, I’m sure, be of more interest to people who want to be able to create a complete web site as easily as a blog. It remains to be seen whether services such as Jimdo will be the Bloggers and WordPresses of the future. I guess it all depends on whether enough people - like me - who sign up for an account in a burst of enthusiasm, really have the stamina to produce enough content to attract regular readers.

Let me say right up front that I won’t. The Times was, until recently, one of the online news sources which I read fairly often. Others includes British newspapers such as The Guardian and The Telegraph, American papers such as The New York Times and Washington Post, broadcasters such as CNN and The BBC - and a whole bunch of bloggers.

When The Times announced, a couple of months ago, that it would soon be charging, I stopped reading it. That is, I stopped when it was still free. The reason being that I asked myself whether I thought the Times was so much better than all the free sources of news that I’d be prepared to pay. The answer I came up with was a decisive No. So, like the habitual smoker who finally decides to quit, I did it there and then rather than deferring the pain.

Maybe other Times readers will be less ready to give up the habit. I’d be frankly amazed, however, if very many of them get into the habit of paying for the pleasure. In the old days, the character of a newspaper was often defined by its columnists. these days some of the best columnists don’t write for newspapers. They write their own Blogs, unfettered by the requirements of the editor and proprietor.

I’ll keep my eye on The Times’ bold experiment. But I can’t say I’ll miss it.

More from the BBC:
http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/business/10480666.stm.

Or, if you wish to support The Times financially, you can read it online at the usual place:
http://www.thetimes.co.uk.

This is a high quality, free PDF-format magazine published monthly and available from: http://ffdmag.com/.

I’ve contributed an article to this issue, explaining some of the differences between Flex 3 and Flex 4, particularly in reference to the parent/child relationships between containers and the controls they contain. This has been one of the problems we’ve had to solve in order to make the drag-and-drop designer in my company’s Flash Platform IDE work with both Flash 3 (’Halo’) and Flash 4 (’Spark’) controls. If you have any plans to use Flex 4, the article may save you some time and grief...

So this week, here are a few videos which, for one reason or another have helped to while away the time....

First, a funny one...

Then a banned one...

One for fans of ‘60s music (and Petra the Blue Peter Dog)...

One for fans of Bollywood....

And finally, one for fans of British comedy...

YouTube never ceases to amaze me. Until a few years ago, most of the clips above would have been almost impossible for most people to track down. Their presence on YouTube is largely thanks to enthusiasts who find, record and archive video clips and make them available to the rest of us. Wonderful!

I’ve uploaded a video of my own to YouTube this week. As it is by no means as entertaining as any of the clips above, however, I’ll omit it from today’s list. Maybe I’ll get around to my YouTube exploits on some other occasion...

Yesterday, I finally gave in. It turns out that even my older and (I had always thought!) less trendy brother (I believe he still wears elastic-sided winkle-picker shoes) is on Twitter. So I decide the time had finally come to throw in the towel and get tweeting.

No idea what I’ll tweet about. The restriction to 140 characters per tweet seems rather onerous. As regular readers of my ramblings here and elsewhere will no doubt know, once I get started, there ain’t no stopping me.

A Facebook friend reminded me that I have already had good practice at writing in bite-sized chunks as I have been a long-time contributor to a couple of Facebook story-writing apps which limit authors to contributing three words at a time; then another writer has to write another three words and so on.

Ah well, just in case you should be so thrill-starved that you feel inclined to read my twitterings, you can find me here: http://twitter.com/huwcol

In fact, most of the last two and a half years have been taken up with my company’s development of a Visual Studio IDE for the Adobe Flash Platform (including the Flex framework). Well, we just put out our first pre-release version for VS2010. More news here: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Flex-In-Visual-Studio-2010.

The Beaver, alas, is no more. Canada’s venerable history magazine will henceforth be known by the altogether less memorable (and really rather dull) name, “Canada’s History”. And all because spam filters object to its previous name!

I have heard before that some spam filters have problems with the names of English towns, due to certain substrings which they contain (the BBC mentions ‘Scunthorpe’ as being particularly problematic) but I had not previously realised the dangers of names derived from the animal world.

Spam is an ongoing problem for all of us. I personally have Spam filters set on my PC up in Outlook and a couple of Spam-blockers also set up on the server - one of which requires emailers to respond to an automated message before their email will be delivered. I also have various ‘comment spam’ and ‘forum’ spam tools installed here on Bitwise and on the site of my software company. They work pretty well most of the time but they neither completely block spam nor do they always succeed in letting legitimate emails, comments and forum posts get through. So no matter how many spam measures I have in place the final measure still comes down to human intervention - that is, I personally block spammers and remove legitimate email addresses from the automated blacklist.

It seems to me that at present the spammers are winning this game. Anti-spam measures are still in their infancy. The fact that a well known Canadian history magazine has been forced to change its name is just one sad indication of that fact.

It’s still in beta but getting ever closer to the full final version now. This new release has a ’live mode’ in the visual Design workspace which lets you ’activate’ all the controls. That means that radio buttons can be checked, text entry fields can have text entered into them and rollover buttons change colour (etc.) when the mouse hovers over them. This is pretty darn’ cool, if I do say so myself!

Anyway, more information over on the SapphireSteel Software blog: http://www.sapphiresteel.com/Live-Flex-Design-Amethyst-update