The first thing I noticed about Mogio’s was that it felt cozier and was lit better than the usual establishments around my area.  I live in Wylie, Texas;  a small town about 45 minutes away from Dallas.  Mogio’s is in Murphy, just next door to Wylie.  Most of the privately owned restaurants in the area lack atmosphere.  This looked nice, if not a little Italian-crafty.  Mogio’s isn’t very big and looked like it might hold a dozen and a half, unless there was a back room I didn’t notice.

The menu has a good variety of pizzas.  Spinach is obviously a house favorite and probably adds to the “gourmetness” of the pizza at Mogio’s.  I’m not a big fan of spinach, but I’ll take it here and there if it’s buried in cheese and sauce.

We decided to order to small pizzas and split them between us.  We got the Jack Daniel’s BBQ chicken pizza and the Grecian alfredo.  Both came very quickly and were quite hot.  Both pizza’s had a thin and somewhat crips crunch, done just the way I like it.  Both had lots of flavor.  The BBQ pizza was maybe a little to heavy on the sauce, but overall very good.  The Grecian was a great counterpart to the BBQ.  Both would have done me quite well.

One small pizza was just the right amount of food.  I didn’t feel stuffed at all, thanks to the thin crust.  I’ve grown less found of overly thick pizza crusts were each slice is a meal (I guess the dieting has shrunk my stomach capacity down).  We liked the pizzas enough to go back again sometime and try two new menu items.  I know my wife would like to try the Mediterranean and I have my I on Susan’s Favorites (on whole-wheat crust).

If you’re in Murphy, Texas, stop by Mogio’s Gourmet Pizza.  The staff is friendly and the owner pays you just the right amount of attention.  The food is great and the price is pretty good as well.

Immediately I was struck by the title Flash & Flex; two of my favorite development platforms.  At first I balked at the price of $14.99, but then I saw some articles on interesting looking technologies I only new of by name. There were also a couple of articles that would be great to pass on to my fellow workers who are ActionScript 3.0 initiates.  I was sold and slapped down the money for the magazine.

Being a busy man at work the magazine sat on my desk for a weekend and a day before I had a chance to look it over.  Really, I didn’t have the time, but I wanted a diversion at that moment.  I decided to look over the article on building a Pong game in ActionScript 3.0 for Flash.

Going straight to the code in the Pong tutorial, I saw a few things I would have done differently, but I was struck by the lack of professional coding style.  For a magazine that’s going to be sold to the masses, you’d want to pass along clean and standardized code.  None of that here.  I was also struck by the horrible job on formatting.  The code examples are overly deep in their indentation and the white spacing is inconsistent.  Don’t even get me started on the coding convention (not that any was used).

There must have been no proof checking of the articles or examples.  The Pong game example has three class files.  Mistakenly, Listing 2 is titled ‘Ball class’ when it’s the ‘Paddle class’ and Listing 3 is called ‘Paddle class’ when it is indeed the ‘Ball class.’

Even the main article text has issues.  For example, right away in the first paragraph you have a parenthetical statement that says:

(www.mochiads.com who is great for all kind of development skills)

Yikes.  Now, I’m not the best person to be talking about syntax, grammar, punctuation or anything English related. At the same time I’m not attempting to produce a professional magazine for developers.  Put some polish on it or readers aren’t going to take you seriously.

Needless to say, my hope for this magazine had dropped severely and I could feel the fact that my wallet was now $14.99 lighter.  Moving on to other articles I found similar issues.  The article on creating a banner was so simplistic for a magazine that claims to be a developer’s magazine as to be ridiculous.

On my last look at the magazine, I saw an article on Flash remoting with WebOrb. I’m very familiar with this topic and I’ll just say this: check online for some tutorials. You’ll find more useful advice and better thought-out assistance.

Instead of continuing to beat this dead horse, let me sum up the magazine for you. It’s not dead on arrival, but it’s close. It just doesn’t have the professionalism to be taken seriously and it’s tutorials and advice are too simplistic. Hopefully we’ll see better in the future.

Immediately I was attracted to the idea that I could blog without resorting to draconian website mechanics and use an application that would streamline the blog posting process. Granted, on an iPhone, this is a relative statment. Fortunately, WordPress for iPhone serves up exactly what I needed. It’s very short on features right now, but the main items are there: multiple blog support, compose/modify blog, add pictures, set blog status, add tags and set a category.

What WordPress for iPhone does need is a landscape mode, the ability to delete blog entries, page support and comment moderation; all of which have been identified by the people at WordPress. Further down the road, hopefully we’ll see some of the more advanced blog writing and administration features appear, but I personally don’t need this application to do absolutely everything it’s web-based cousin does. It’s a great start and I’ll be looking forward to the next features update.