Beer Near Here
Beer Near Here is a personal project that got it’s start after an excellent hike in the San Francisco Bay area. While making our way back to the car my wife said, “Man, I could really go for a nice, cold beer right now.” Fortunately we had a GPS in the car that listed points of interest by category and one of these categories was “brewpubs”, but the idea was planted in my head — I would build an application to find beer near a given location.
Fast forward a bit and you can now visit beernearhere.net, m.beernearhere.net if you’re on a mobile device or simply use Beer Near Here Desktop, an Adobe AIR desktop application for Mac and Windows. Since Beer Near Here is a personal project working on it granted me the opportunity to try some things I don’t get to do at my day job, specificially WAP and AIR.
Beer Near Here Mobile (m.beernearhere.net) is a WAP (XHTML-MP 1.0) site designed for mobile devices. Writing the site for XHTML-MP was a breeze, at least as near as I can tell. The only device I can test on is my iPhone, a device whose web browser is not representative of most mobile browsers, so if you have any problems please use the feedback form on beernearhere.net.
Beer Near Here Desktop (beernearhere.net/desktop) is an Adobe AIR application that runs on both Mac OS and Windows. Since I started developing with Flex I’ve been intrigued with the idea of AIR — essentially web apps that run on the desktop. Sure I could write a desktop application in .NET, but that won’t run on Mac OS. I could use Java to write a desktop app that would run cross-platform, but I don’t know Java. I do know Actionscript and Flex though, so Beer Near Here Desktop was a way for me to kick the wheels and take AIR for a test ride.
After finishing up the desktop version of Beer Near Here, I must say that I thoroughly enjoy using AIR — much more so that writing Flex apps that are run from a web browser. My only complaint about AIR is the need to digitally sign code with a certificate. Sure, I can create my own certificate and sign my code with that, but that raises all sorts of red flags during installation. To avoid all that I would need to purchase purchase a certificate from Verisign or the like and those start at $300 for a year. That’s just not really realistic for a guy writing AIR apps in the evening. Ah well, I guess you’ll just have to trust me if you decide to install it.
