Chris Alexander
An Interns Tale of an Adobe AIR Project
22nd September, 2008
As some of you may or may not know (if you’re on my Twitter its highly likely you do), I spent 2 months and a bit of this summer working at a technology startup called Huddle in London.
Huddle’s product is an online collaboration and document sharing website with an emphasis on social working, and could be described as a cool cross between the best of Sharepoint and Facebook, after being cleaned up and made to look lovely. You can check out their site at Huddle.net.While I was there, one of the items on my (hugely long) list of things to do was to write an Adobe AIR desktop application to work with their shiny-shiny new API to provide cool functionality that the main website couldn’t - drag and drop file uploading for example.
So, about 4 weeks and a massively complicated pile of Javascript later, the end result was published and open sourced for the world to see.
I’m immensely pleased with what I managed to achieve; I managed to do some serious debugging of their API, and I learnt so much about Javascript (from Nick, one of the UI guys at huddle) and CSS (from Jenna, the other UI person at huddle - huge UI department there ;)
Check out a review of Huddle Desktop by a former MSP.
To those of you who don’t have a placement year in your degree, I would highly recommend trying to get something in the summer - mine came about by taking part in the Microsoft Imagine Cup competition, where I met Huddle’s founder and product director Andy, who I then harassed nudged quite often until he agreed to let me come and work for them! The experience is invaluable, I had a great time and met some truly amazing people.