The Oglivy Center building in Singapore

When I first decided to include Singapore on this trip I thought it would be fun to meet some fellow web developers. In NY I belong to a Flash user group called Flash Coders NY and I did a little search online to see if a similar group could be found in Singapore. Sure enough, I found A-SFUG which stands for Another Singapore Flash User Group (apparently they even have more than one!).

By the time I visited Singapore I was already in contact with Shang, one of the organizers of the group, and we arranged to meet for lunch. Shang works at Ogilvy, an award-winning, global advertising agency (based in NY) with nearly 500 offices throughout the world. I met him at the Ogilvy Center a very nice rounded building on a busy corner in downtown Singapore. Shang brought along his co-workers, Ed, Yulun and Danny all of whom are web developers working in either Flash or .Net.

Area near Oglivy where we ate lunch

We walked about a couple blocks away to Telok Ayer Street. The place Shang had in mind for lunch was closed but we found another option on the corner which offered outdoor tables, shade and fish head curry! There was no need for menus since the ordering was simple. We just ordered one big fish head curry which was enough to feed five hungry developers at the table. The curry came out in a big bowl and included veggies, curry sauce and other good stuff all topped off with a big fish head. I don’t know what kind of fish that was but the head was big enough to have a full set of teeth! The dish was served with white rice, some sauteed green leafy vegetable and something that looked like an egg omlette. I picked up my chopsticks but was a bit unsure of how to begin to tackle that dish especially since the fish was staring at me the whole time.

Fish head curry dish

However, Shang put a stop to that fish’s staring! He reached for his spoon, dug out the fish’s eyeball brought it up to his mouth and ate the whole eyeball, spitting out only the eye socket which, of course, everybody knows is not edible. Mr. fish head then got flipped over and I was sure to get my camera out for round two. Same thing…spoon, scoop, gulp, spit, but this time with my camera snapping away creating a stop-motion animation of the whole sequence. Apparently, people say that the eyeball is the most delicious part. I wonder who the brave person was to first make that discovery!

How to, step by step: Shang eats the fish eye from the fish head curry

While the rest of us picked at the flesh of the fish’s cheek we did manage to talk some shop. Shang and the team work on a lot of full-on Flash websites or microsites for their clients. It turns out that most of the development on the team is done on PC and the IDE (for non-techies, that’s just the software we use to do our coding work) of choice is FlashDevelop. Flex is catching on but for advertising work, which still involves a lot of creative graphics and even animation, it’s not necessarily the most appropriate technology compared with straight-up Flash. It seems as though clients in Singapore get Flash and Flex confused just like they do in the US. Clients request Flex since they’ve heard from the Adobe marketing guys that Flex is the latest and greatest thing out there but they really only need their ad banner or micro-site to be built using Flash and ActionScript. For developers in Singapore, there’s no need to pay extra shipping charges for international Amazon orders since all of the latest technical books are readily available at Borders in Singapore. I was happy to see that the dress code for developers in Singapore is casual just like in NY or Tel Aviv and that’s very practical for such a hot country like Singapore.

Developers from the team at Ogilvy. From left: Yulun, Shang, Ed, Danny

A-SFUG is a fairly new group and they’ve only had a couple of meeting so far. But the organizers are enthusiastic and they’re already using tools like their A-SFUG group on Facebook (140 members so far) to manage participation including events with RSVPs for attendance and other announcements and photos of meetings. I know that many FCNY members are on Facebook and I think it would be a great idea for the NY folks to create a FB group to leverage the organizational tools already in place there too.

I asked about the name A-SFUG and the developers explained that there are a couple of other groups in existence in Singapore. But instead of always waiting to see what kind of meetings those groups would organize they decided to just move forward and create their own group. I have the feeling that Shang and his colleagues will be able to really grow the interest and participation of A-SFUG by the time Adobe releases the next version of the Flash Player Plug-in!

Asia Steps looks bad in the Camino web browser

Hi folks. We’ve recently discovered that the Camino web browser does not play nicely with the layout of AsiaSteps.com, particularly the new features we’ve recently added in the blog’s sidebar. If you’re currently viewing our blog using Camino, please revisit us in either Firefox, Safari or Internet Explorer to see how the blog should really look.

Christmas Party in HCMC

The Vietnamese sure do know how to party! My company’s Christmas party included a whole lot of singing, dancing, drinking and….texting! Since MSS is a mobile content company, there were lots of games that involved sending text messages. Those messages were then displayed on a big screen as a long thread. It was a lot of fun!

This is just a test of the AirPress application. Ok, what’s that? AirPress is a software program that you can download and use for free on a PC or Mac, allowing you to post to your blog directly from your computer’s desktop. AirPress is so called because it runs on Adobe AIR, a new technology created by Adobe Systems (the makers of Photoshop and also Flash), based in CA. AIR combines the Adobe Flash Player and also Webkit (the HTML engine used in Apple’s Safari browser) to run programs that were developed by Web developers like us.

So, why are we using AirPress? We’ll be blogging from the road, trail or river much of the time so we won’t always have a reliable internet connection. Many AIR applications can be used when your computer is both online or offline and just having a way to compose blog posts from our laptop will be very helpful. At this time it’s not sure if AirPress supports online/offline synchronization but we’ll be testing that out between now and our trip.

For more information about how you can also use this AIR application for your own blog, visit www.airpress.org

(Adobe AIR is currently in Beta but many initial applications have already been created and are available here).