Koali blog

Work sent us to Sydney for a ‘team day’. It was a lot of fun and great to meet the rest of the team.

This looks like a lot of fun:
StreetWars is a 3 week long, 24/7, watergun assassination tournament
http://www.streetwars.net/

A friend and I explored JamJar yesterday and it is a very nice example of the power of flex2.

JamJar is a collaborative online workspace for small groups that allows people to share files, ideas, events and other information. When you load into JamJar you can create a workspace (either from a template or from scratch). To this workspace you can add components such as a slideshow, discussion thread and message box. You can customise the size, colours and transperency of each instance of a component and even add drop shadows and rounded borders.

You can then invite other users to the workspace as either another author, participant or guest. Another author has full control of the workspace and can add and edit components. I don’t know the limitations of the other two. There did not seem to be a lot of lag but we did not really test timing.

You can zoom in and out of the interface and also place viewpoints at key places. This means you could set it up to just click on a viewpoint to drop down to the bottom of a large workspace where there is a collection of files for reference and then click a discussion viewpoint to jump back up to the discussion. This saves you to zooming in and out or scrolling across to relevant information.

All items on the stage are tracked and you can see the item, and when and who by it was last modified.

There are some really nice UI thought processes that you notice and many that you don’t, because nobody ever really appreciates a nice UI. One of the features is that you can easily drag an item of the workspace and the workspace expands instantly as you drag.

There are some other nice things about it.

– There is a google search bar.
– It links into a flick gallery though I don’t have one so couldn’t test
– You can upload files and then others just double click them to download/open them.
– The slideshow lets you upload pictures from your desktop and creates a slideshow. (I think a great idea for demonstrating interface ideas)
– The interface sounds are cute

You are allowed to have multiple workspaces. You can also log in later and your workspace still exists.

It is still only a technology demonstration and so has a couple of errors every now and again but it is definitely worth checking out. You will need flash 9 to view it.

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/jamjar/

I have not got into flex as much as I thought I would. Everytime I have tried to do something I usually ran across a bug that I did not have time to investigate. The major one that was bothering me was how to get external assets into flash.

While looking at other tutorials I came across Grant Skinners tutorial on BitmapData.loadBitmap gone in Actionscript 3.

This is what I had seemed to try last time but I thought it was worth a shot and I came across a similar error as last time.

“The definition of base class BitmapAsset was not found”. I read the two comments on the tutorial and there was the error I had in beta 2 but no solution. Luckily google came to my rescue. One site written in another language had a wonderful picture

So it looks like you must add some libraries to your project file to get this to work. You can either do this when setting up your project or by right clicking and selecting properties on your current project.

The path to these files for me using the default install was

C:\Program Files\Adobe\Flex Builder 2.0 Plug-in Beta 3\Flex SDK 2.0\frameworks\libs

I still have a couple of warnings and one runtime error but thought I would post this in case I don’t get a change to go back and look into the issues.

Today I was impressed with a really nice total solution put together by Nike and Apple. You can now buy a running shoe and sports kit (little sensor thingy) that talks with your Ipod. You can then program your ipod with the schedule of your workout, the songs you want to play etc.

When getting home you can then connect your ipon with the flash website that has graphs and details of all your runs and your goals. You can even challenge others and watch the progress as a group.

Check it out:
http://www.nike.com/nikeplus/

At the webdu conference this year I learnt about scripting in the flash IDE. It is basically like macros in word but different :p. There were some really neat examples but I have actually found it very useful for those repetitive tasks you need to perform.

Maybe when I’m not so tired I will post what I have created with it and also some more resources but for now the one I mainly use it the Flash Jacascript dictionary.