Adobe is having a Launching Party for Adobe Creative Suite 3 (also known as Adobe CS3) today at 3:30PM. According to leaked intel prior to the launch, there are six all-new configurations of Adobe CS3, which include Adobe CS3 Design Premium and Design Standard editions; Adobe CS3 Web Premium and Web Standard editions; and Adobe CS3 Production Premium. Rounding out the product line is Adobe CS3 Master Collection, which combines 12 of Adobe’s new design and development applications in a single box.

Pricing is still unknown, and it’s also unknown when the software will be available to buy. I can’t wait to find out.

Yesterday, I went over to Adobe’s website to check up on their progress on CS3 (Creative Suite 3). I’ve been waiting a long time to be able to get the new version and am very excited for it’s arrival.

Adobe is having a screencast to launch the new product, which is highly anticipated, especially by owners of the new Intel based Macs. I’m currently a PC owner, but am in a contest to win a MacBook Pro at Rankaroo. Now, I’ve got to decide whether to buy the Mac or the PC version. I hope (a fool’s hope) that the new CS3 doesn’t make you pick between platforms. Doubtful, but I can still hope.

The official launch of Adobe® Creative Suite® 3 will take place on Tuesday, March 27, 2007, at 3:30 p.m. Eastern time.

I’m still trying to keep straight who is who. Cingular, AT&T, SBC, …

Here’s an article that gives some history (though not the recent name changes of cingular back to AT&T). It’s from 2005, but it’s still interesting.

After many months of hard labor, I am emerging victorious with my first large-scale web application called Rankaroo. Rankaroo helps you organize your interests, share them with others, and connect with like-minded people. Everyone is a guru at something. Whether it’s that you know about ski lodges in the Alps or Greek Mythology or Hip Hop, whatever it is you have something to keep organized and share with the world. As we each share our interests we all benefit from mutual discovery.

In the traditional browser way of storing your favorites, you would put your favorites in a hierarchical set of folders and hope that you can remember where you put them later. A few years ago, some sites like del.icio.us introduced the idea of eliminating the hierarchy and using tags instead (basically words). But while this makes it easier to find things later, it’s relatively difficult to find a cross section of these tags, plus you basically throw out your normal grammar in favor of an alphabet soup of words.

Rankaroo is based strongly on the Connect-by-Clicks technology. Connect-by-Clicks is a system that turns simple language into connective tissue. It works as following.

You want to categorize the following web site. http://espn.go.com
Just type a simple phrase. For instance. espn sports news and scores

What Connect-by-Clicks does is creates interconnections between these words. So, later you could find this favorite by going to sports -> scores or espn -> news or espn -> sports -> scores.

While this is cool in itself, it’s not nearly as cool as when hundred of people are all doing the same. If my friend, Joe, enters a favorite on his basketball team and categorizes it by the phrase knicks basketball team scores, if I was searching for scores, I would find out about his basketball team.

You’ll have to experience the power of Connect-by-Clicks yourself to see what I mean.

A while back I ran across a toolbar for Mozilla Firefox that helps you look up the availability of domain names. It’s a very handy tool, however it was taking too much space on my browser, so I tried uninstalling to no avail. Months went by and I still couldn’t figure it out until today.

Here’s how you do it.

Go to C:\program files\Mozilla Firefox\chrome and find xpinstall.manifest

This is where the toolbar is loaded in. If you want to remove the toolbar, remove these lines:

overlay chrome://navigator/content/navigator.xul chrome://whoisbar/content/whoisbar.xul
overlay chrome://browser/content/browser.xul chrome://whoisbar/content/whoisbar.xul
content whoisbar jar:file:///C:/Documents%20and%20Settings/your.name/Application%20Data
/Mozilla/Firefox/Profiles/av318bvz.name/Chrome/whoisbar.jar!/content/

Follow the path on this last line to delete the .jar file. I hope this helps. I couldn’t for the life of me figure this one out for a while. The name.net bar can be uninstalled in the same way

An alternative domain name lookup is Whois.ws Quick Search by David McBreen. You can find it here.

Rails 1.1

Rails, the web application framework we all love so much, is now on to version 1.1.

So, What’s new in Rails 1.1? Scott Raymond wrote an incredible article outlining the new features/changes.

Also, the up-and-coming Rails Recipes (well, actually it’s already released as a beta book on pdf) has a number of recipes that use Rails 1.1. I would say that I’ve read this entire book, but that means beta version 1. Since then Chad Fowler has released a ton of new chapters.

This is a must-buy for the newby railer, which is half of the rails audience. You can order the beta book from the Pragamtic Programmers. I need to buy stock in their company, because I like their books so much.

It’s true. We launched CruCommons.com. After much hard work and long hours, this site, linking thousands of college students together, is underway. In the first 48 hours, 750 people already added their picture to the community. I’ve never seen a site grow so fast.

Perhaps the sucess of the site is linked to the way we adapted our database to make it happen. The site is prepopulated from the thousands of people who already registered for summer projects and conferences. Then, it just took a little bit of marketing to tell people about the site and get them involved. Having a prepopulated site does a ton of good in making a site grow fast. It becomes epidemic.

Andy Fish, my director, wrote about the site too.

Ah, here’s a backstage pass to the API of Form Helpers in Rails