The first day of the onAIR Bus Tour was nothing short of an amazing experience. There’s nothing quite like spending the better part of twenty hours with some of the best developers I know, while cruising the West Coast on a bus fit for a rock star. I spent a good portion of that time working on my geocoding application, and found some interesting challenges with Yahoo! Maps in an occasionally connected environment (OCC).
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I’ve got a problem - I’m spending the next two weeks on a bus, packed with more electronics than should be legal, touring the country. Why is this a problem? Well, because while the bus is moving, and via GPS, knows exactly where it’s at, my camera doesn’t. I have a fairly old, yet entirely capable Canon 10D that I’ll be taking on the tour, but it doesn’t have one of those fancy new built-in GPS sensors. In need of a way to add GPS coordinates to the EXIF data in my photos, I came up with a project for the onAIR Bus Tour.
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I don’t know what it is about EXIF information in JPEG files that so interests me, but I find the related specifications irresistibly attractive. There’s something about being able to see “secret” information inside what most just view as an image file. In many cases, among those secrets is an actual JPEG thumbnail of the full-size image. For this exercise, I broke out my Drogan’s decoder ring and set out to extract that thumbnail.
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Jack and Brian over at Ext have been hard at work. They just put to bed Ext 1.2 and if that wasn’t enough, they’ve made good progress on Ext 2.0. While mainlining Red Bull, they’ve even opened up an Ext blog, and the first entry shows off Ext 2.0 support for Adobe AIR! Specifically there’s an Ext.air.MainWindow that puts Ext chrome on your AIR application, and an Ext.data.SqlDB which seamlessly integrates with SQLite regardless of AIR or Google Gears.
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