Scott Spendolini's Blog

Apple updated the iPhone to 1.1.1 today. While most of the buzz is around the new iTunes Store, there is a small new feature that makes all the sense in the world: double-tapping the space bar will insert a "." followed by a space. So simple, yet so brilliant. This is a classic example of taking a use case - a user wants to compose a message - watching users actually do that - and then improving upon it. Previous to this release, they would have to type a sentence, and then tap the ".?123" key to then have to type a period, then switch back. Three taps plus one more for the trailing space just for a period. With the 1.1.1 update, all a user needs to do is hit space two times, an a period followed by a trailing space instantly appear. How does this relate to APEX? Simple - once you design an application, you're not done. There are several improvements still to be made, none of which you will be able to identify. Watch your users use your application. You...

Next week, I will be presenting at the Virginia Oracle Users Group conference in Charlottesville, VA. It's a much smaller conference than the ODTUGs & IOUGs of the world, but that makes it better in some sense, as you get a better chance to meet and talk to people. I'm going to present an Intro to APEX (The ABCs of APEX) presentation, in favor or something more advanced, as there are no other APEX presentations on the agenda. If you plan on attending, look for me on Thurday afternoon and possibly at the reception.

First of off, consider my recent absence a summer vacation of sorts, without the vacation part. It's been hectic since my last post, which was about, wow - ODTUG. We had over 100 people in our training sessions there, and most of the feedback was great! We hope to do it again next year, if not sooner. The reason for my absence was largely due to the fact that we recently moved, and pretty much everything that you can think of and then some, went horribly awry. In any case, I was recently asked how to make an entire row in a report "clickable", so that when anywhere in a row is clicked, the user will be taken to a form to edit that record. In order to achieve this, you need to create a new Named Column Report Template. This means that you will have to define each column that you want to have manually in the template itself. Hardly a scalable solution, but it's not too difficult to implement and expand on. I am only going to use one Row Template to keep things s...

Well, we're all off to ODTUG this weekend in Daytona. We're put together what I think is a solid Advanced Track of APEX training , as well as our standard, proven Beginner material.  From what the folks at ODTUG are telling me, we're going to be playing host to a sold out crowd! I look forward to putting some names with faces at the APEX Meetup , as well as the various other events scheduled for next week. Safe travels everyone!

No, this is not some post about how we should all just get along... I've been a Parallels user since day 1 of owning a Mac, more or less. I've tried the nw VMWare Fusion Beta, and although it seemed to work OK, I had no real reason to switch. Until perhaps now. Unity is VMWare's answer to Coherence - the technology which Parallels employs to display a PC window as if it were a Mac window. However, Unity takes it up a notch or two. It also works with odd-shaped windows, such as Windows Media Player. You can use Expose and have all of your PC windows behave just like Mac ones. There is direct access to the Start bar from the Mac OS X menu. And my favorite - you can permanently dock a PC application in the Mac toolbar! I'll be interested to see how this all plays out, as I suspect some sort of announcement will be coming at WWDC next week.

In keeping with their promise, Apple has finally announced the availability date of the iPhone - June 29th. Yes, there are a full 28 other days which are both also in June and earlier than June 29th, but at least it's not June 30th... I watched the new ads this morning to catch a glimpse of what will hopefully soon be mine. Unfortunately for me, my Q was nearby, and saw the glean in my eye as I was watching them. Out of a combination of jealously and fear, it promptly froze - which I'll admit it had not done in a good solid week. Upon trying to revive it the traditional way, it quietly refused. Three or four attempts later, it finally relented and re-booted itself with one small difference - every last bit of my data was gone. Fortunately, I keep everything synced on my Mac, so nothing except for the list of recent calls was truly lost. Your time is limited, Q...

Lewis Cunningham @ IT Toolbox has posted a new podcast, where he interviews Oracle APEX Product Manager David Peake and Peter Martin from RL Polk & Co . The overall focus of the podcast is how APEX has provided a variety of customers with a tool which is not only fast & easy to use, but also scales up to meet enterprise-class requirements. APEX is also compared to other RAD development environments, such as PHP & Ruby on Rails. Peter also did a perfect job in pronouncing my last name - a feat which most telemarketers struggle with. You can listen to the podcast here .

Seems like AppsHosting is just getting started, as they contacted me to state that some of the information on their site was inaccurate. Some corrections as to the information in my previous post: - You DO get a private workspace with 250MB of space - a significant increase from the 5 or so that Oracle gives out and secure and isolated from any other developers. - You DO NOT need an Oracle CSI with their paid plan. The $199/month price does include the license fees to use Oracle. In speaking with them, they also said that SQL*Plus access is a very real possibility, even with the free accounts. Something to keep an eye on, to say the least!

Well, you get what you pay for. It seems as if there is a single public workspace that you're account will be tied to when you create a free account with AppsHosting. Hardly secure! Any other user is free to wreak havoc on what you build, unless you meticulously lock each and every page. Unfortunately, that won't stop anyone from seeing (and altering) your database objects, as those are all shared among all users as well. Guess I'll keep the account to use in a bind, but won't ever put anything in there that I don't want anyone else to see or that I may want to see again...

Looks like AppsHosting is getting into the business of hosting APEX applications. And they will do it for free , too - provided its for development only. If you want your own dedicated APEX environment, that will run you $199/month. And you'll also need an Oracle CSI# for production applications, which is interesting, as it would seem that you would have to license Oracle for their servers, which could be way more or less than you need...

There's been some discussion on the OTN Forums about APEX 3.0 training. Well, Sumner Technologies, LLC is pleased to announce that it will begin offering APEX Training to the general public this July in the Washington, DC area. We're going to start with a 3-day APEX 3.0 Intro class, and then add a 2-day Advanced Concepts class shortly after. Classes will be held just north of Dulles International Airport , about 20 miles outside of DC, in a brand new state-of-the-art training facility. We're shooting for the week of July 9th for the first session, and based on how many people we get, will be looking to do this on a somewhat regular basis. I'll post more concrete details once they are available. Also, if you have any thoughts of ideas on what you would like to see in an Advanced Class, I'd be interested in hearing about them.

Shay Shmeltzer has a must-read blog entry on the 10 Commandments of Posting on OTN . This should be required reading for anyone posting to any forum anywhere!

Following the release of APEX 3.0, a few media sites have picked up the story: IT Business Application Development Trends TechNewsWorld

In less than a day, the 3-week early DST change in the US will occur. Airplanes will fall from the sky, your bank account will be reduced to nothing, ATMs will run out of cash, nuclear missiles will launch and your Tivo will be hurled into a wolrd of recording the show after the one you wanted it to. Actually, you'll probably just lose an hour of sleep tomorrow morning. Unless you have kids. Then you will lose two. The media has really hyped this problem up, in a style reminiscient to the Y2K bug. Sure, there may be a few missed appointments on Monday, people may have some issues with Outlook (I got 6 invites from a client for the same meeting last week.) But by and large, the impact of this change will be less than that of realizing it's 8:00, not 7:00 and still light out. Verizon Wirelss is doing all they can to get their customers ready. They sent a text message to my phone the other day, which conveniently had a link embedded in it to its DST Resource Page. What they fail...

We've posted the session titles & abstracts for the 2007 APEX Conference to the ODTUG Kaleidoscope site. There will be two tracks - one for beginners and one for experienced users. The Beginners Track will be more hands-on sessions and will assume no or little knowledge of APEX, whereas the Experienced Track will be more lecture and assume working knowledge of APEX. Also, the Early Bird registration deadline has been extended until March 20th. Hope to see you in Daytona this June!

Recently, I was asked how to right-justify text in user-editable fields. It seemed like a simple enough requirement, as most number-based fields are right-justified so that you can perform quick calculations in your head, or just have them look pretty if you're not so good at math. In any case, there are two different ways to accomplish this in Apex, depending on what type of object you are trying to modify. For a Page Item , you may be tempted to change the Horizontal/Vertical alignment option under the Elements section. Close, but that won't quite do the trick, as that parameter controls ALL of the HTML for a specific item, not the Form component. In the same Element , section, you will need to enter the following for the HTML Form Element Attributes : style="text-align: right;" If you are working with a Tabular Form , there aren't any page items which to change. Thus, you have to modify the Column Attributes for the text item that you want to be right-justi...

Looks like Oracle has released the Apex 3.0 public beta. You can sign up here . I created a quick report and then set it to export to PDF & Word - all of it worked as advertised! I was also able to quickly create a new Flash-based chart with little effort. Very impressive!

Yes .

On the eve of the MacWorld keynote, I thought it would be appropriate to highlight the single application which enabled me to complete my "switch" from a PC to a Mac: Parallels . For those who may not know, Parallels is a virtualization environment for the Intel Macs. It enables you to run an operating system - from Windows to Linux to DOS - within Mac OS X. The entire guest operating system is stored in a single file, which can easily be backed up and/or moved around easily. I first saw Parallels at a client, where Ben Rudolph from the Parallels team was getting ready to demo it. He turned on his MacBook Pro, fired up Parallels, and then stared up a pre-release version of Vista. He looked at me and said, "Pretty cool, eh?" My only reply was "Why?" He chuckled, but went on to claim that even a pre-release version of Vista worked with their software. From a tecnical point of view, it was quite impressive, as having Vista gives you access to all of it...

My experiences flying have always been, well, unique is a good word. I don't know exactly what it is, but I tend to have the out of the ordinary trip every so often. Fortunately, most of these events have had little or nothing to do with the overall safety of the aircraft, but they tend to be so ridiculous, that they are amusing to me, and even more so to others. Some examples: I once flew from Hartford, CT to BWI next to a man with no stomach or spleen. He spent most of the 1 hour flight telling me of his woes that weekend, from his obvious health issues to his father pouring gasoline all over his car and threatening to light it on fire. Flying out of LaGuardia, we had several members of the same family from some African country on the plane, all with the same name. The gate agents were ready to hold the flight because they couldn't tell who was who, and it didn't help much that their guide was Japanese and spoke less English than his group. I saw a little old man punc...