Monthly Archives: October 2008

Oct 30 2008
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The CDB Team in India

Having returned from my visit to India, I still have to absorb all the many impressions that follow any trip to this land of diversity, contrast and what seems to be indefinite complexity.

This is the team working on the CDB project (sorry, details are under NDA so can’t get into details about it, despite it being quite interesting)… very talented people, all working on Flex… and the up and coming rock-stars of Indian Flex Development… once we have had a couple of projects run through the pipeline.

In case you think the geeky looking white guy in the background wearing a blue button-down looks familiar… he is not in fact Indian – but is in fact Sam Rivello, who has been doing the architecture of the project on contract by Hello.

Left to Right & Bottom to Top: Nehal Patel, Bharat Patel, Sam Rivello, Parag Shah, Mandar Mukadam, Sunil Ratada, Peter Andreas Molgaard (me), Nayan Paregi, Amit Patel, Sebastien Cugny, Ritesh Newal, Virat Patel, Dilip Yava and Vipul Shah.

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Oct 28 2008
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FOTB Miami 2009, open for registration!

Flash on the Beach Miami 2009 is now open for registration…

This will be the first time that FOTB will take place on a venue outside of the south shore of England, namely the sleepy town of Brighton.

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Oct 27 2008
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Adobe Flex

RIA Architecture, the technology agnostic perspective

In the midst of the ongoing (and escalating) technology war between Adobe Flex and Microsoft Silverlight, it’s nice to see that foes can get together and solve common problems for the greater benefit.

It has managed James Ward and Josh Holmes to get together during JAOO in the Danish city of Aarhus (Søren, as you are reading this, are you regretful because you didn’t go and instead decided to go to TechEd in Barcelona? I guess not, hugh? )

Anyways… check it out…

http://www.jamesward.com/wordpress/2008/10/27/architecture-of-ria-from-jaoo/

http://www.joshholmes.com/2008/10/27/ArchitectureOfRIAFromJAOO.aspx

This might be a groundbreaking event… you should probably make a note of it.

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Oct 27 2008
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Why Max – 30 on Max

Having decided to post a video for the “30 on MAX” campaign only because it was a chance to get a chance to experiment with some video… I decided that it should be posted to YouTube despite certain factual errors in the initial text (I apologize in advance, I’m off course not only one of 21 Adobe Flex experts in the world, but the writers in the video got a couple of details wrong).

Anyways… here it is… watch it and laugh and/or weep, whatever suits you the best…

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Oct 26 2008
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ActionScript 3.0

ActionScript Enums

I found myself almost posting an article about how to fake Enum’s in ActionScript, when Sam Rivello pointed me to an existing and very lightweight implementation by Scott Bilas.

http://scottbilas.com/2008/06/01/faking-enums-in-as3/

Browsing around a little bit more, I found a couple of more details relating to Scott’s implementation and things that could be added to the lightweight implementation by Scott.

One is Barney Boisvert’s addition of having the static constructor to prohibit the construction of instances other than the static constants instantiated at class loading time.

http://www.barneyb.com/barneyblog/2007/11/02/enums-and-actionscripts-static-initializers/

Both of these suggestions definitely beat the default implementations for Enums which involve using value types such as string and numeric values… so check it out if you are tired of using string literals in place of Enums.

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Oct 26 2008
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Temporal Aliasing – a funny example

Reading various blogs upon returning from India this afternoon, by incident I browsed to this rather funny sample of Temporal Aliasing.

Temporal aliasing is the term applied to a visual phenomenon also known as the stroboscopic effect. It also accounts for the “wagon-wheel effect”, so called because in video or motion pictures, spoked wheels on horse-drawn wagons sometimes appear to be turning backwards. Temporal aliasing is one example of a range of phenomena called aliasing that occur when continuous motion is represented by a series of short or instantaneous samples. It occurs when (a) the view of a moving object is represented by a series of short samples as distinct from a continuous view, and (b) the moving object is in rotational or other cyclic motion at a rate close to the sampling rate.

Temporal Aliasing is something which we in marginal instances have to deal with when playing animations in the Flash Player.

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Oct 14 2008
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Microsoft TechEd Barcelona 2008 : Session Planner

I get to see my share of Session Planners, some are good, some excellent, most are not so good and a few are crappy… one of the really crappy ones is this year’s Session Planner for Microsoft TechEd Barcelona 2008.

I’m surprised that we didn’t see a Silverlight application making it an easy and cool experience to do the session planning… however, it would be a likely separation of concerns if Microsoft would do the square and grid-like experiences liked by accountants and likeminded invididuals, and Adobe will do the truly engaging and interactive experiences with focus on user-friendliness… we will see…

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Oct 14 2008
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User Experience Guidelines

Both Apple and Microsoft are offering user Experience Guidelines resources for developing applications targeting their respective platforms.

In addition to the non-product specific ones, such as the previously mentioned Yahoo Design Patterns, these are essential when designing User Experiences and can save both Client Application developers and Information Architects a lot of time both defining, but eventually also defending and explaining their ideas and decisions… as well as eventually making more successful user interfaces giving a more fluent and positive Human-Computer-Interaction altogether.

Apple Human Interface Guidelines
http://developer.apple.com/documentation/UserExperience/Conceptual/AppleHIGuidelines/XHIGIntro/chapter_1_section_1.html

Microsoft Vista User Experience Guidelines
http://msdn.microsoft.com/en-us/library/aa511258.aspx

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Oct 14 2008
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Yahoo Design Pattern Library

Yahoo has decided to share their design patterns with the developer community… it’s important to note that it’s not GRASP patterns, but patterns for establishing Information Architecture (IA) and designing User Experience (UX).

The patterns are to be found here
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/

…and if you like what you see, Yahoo are even offering stencils for creating wireframes based on their patterns in formats such as Microsoft Office Visio and OmniGraffle as well as directly in PDF, PNG and SVG.
http://developer.yahoo.com/ypatterns/wireframes/

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Oct 13 2008
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Introducing IANA

At the core of application development are protocols and standards… which without both we would all just be a bunch of hackers and cowboys.

I find myself browsing the IANA website often when I am defining an API – because as you will find out once you start using the IANA catalogue, there is a standard for everything and there is no need to break the standards if it can be avoided.

Some parts of the IANA catalogue are more useful than others… among the high-ranking sub-sites are the following…

MIME-types
http://www.iana.org/assignments/media-types/application/

Port-numbers
http://www.iana.org/assignments/port-numbers

…and among the more curious is the Operating-System-Names… which has not been updated for more than 6½ years…
http://www.iana.org/assignments/operating-system-names

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