Peter Moelgaard's Blog

CS4 Live Tour… another “free lunch”

Posted in Adobe, Adobe Creative Suite, Events by Peter Andreas Molgaard on October 14, 2009

Now, in these days of financial tough times its worth noting all the “free lunches” available out there… One such “free lunch” is to be had on the 22nd of October in CinemaxX when the Adobe Evangelist team visits Copenhagen to talk about Creative Suite 4.

cs4_nando_costa_badge

Check it out….
http://events.adobe.co.uk/cgi-bin/event.cgi?country=dk&eventid=8747

Cynergy Showcase Site… State of the Art – State Art – Art States

Posted in Arbitrary Thoughts, Inspiration by Peter Andreas Molgaard on October 12, 2009

Cynergy has recently released their most recent initiative for displaying their many impressive showcases… CynergyTV !

CynergyShowcaseApp

If you don’t know what or who Cynergy are, then you should definitely check out their normal website, its a great source of inspiration of how to instrument an organization to continuously and consistently be able to deliver great user experiences…
http://www.cynergysystems.com/

Check it out…
http://cynergytv.com/

Great achievement for the UX team at Hello

Posted in Events, HelloGroup by Peter Andreas Molgaard on October 12, 2009

A couple of weeks ago, the IA department at Hello won the esteemed IA-Jam at the EUROIA conference that took place in Copenhagen.

euroia

The decisive reason for the team winning was the recent work they had done leading to the release of UX-BASIS on which I have been blogging before.

Check it out…
http://www.euroia.org/

Introducing Oeredev 2009

Posted in Copenhagen, Events by Peter Andreas Molgaard on October 12, 2009

In the beginning of November, the Baltic region will have a huge conference entitled Oeredev.

Screendumb of the Oeredev site

Oeredev is the premier conference in Europe focused on the software development process.
Nearly 1000 programmers, developers, engineers, educators, testers and managers gather to share their knowledge and experience.

Check it out…
http://www.oredev.org/

DFUG #3 well over…

Posted in AUG, Adobe Community, DFUG by Peter Andreas Molgaard on September 24, 2009

Today we had the DFUG # 3, in addition to the great dialogue we ended up having about various aspects of our work and industry, we had two great presentations…

FlashForumLogo

Philip Tonboe talked about using pernilNoise maps as displacement maps and displayed some great applications of the output and how to configure the maps to obtain various results… really great stuff !!

Secondly we had one of the key developers on the Danish National Broadcasting’s game site to talk about the newest addition to their famous “Hundeparken”. He talked about how easy it was to get started writing 2D games using the BOX2D Physics Engine.

The next event will probably be on the 21st of October… stay tuned at FlashForum for more info…

UXBASIS released by Hello Group

Posted in HelloGroup, InteractionDesign, IxD, Process, UserExperience, UxD by Peter Andreas Molgaard on September 22, 2009

At Hello Group we have created a website explaining how and why we what we do when working with our clients… we have named it UXBASIS !

2009-09-22_1607

UXBASIS is way of combining the numerous tools available to us and forming a unified process that sits within a digital agency and it’s other important departments – creative, tech and client services. The beauty about the model is it is fully adaptive to any clients needs, can fit with tech’s agile process and incorporates creative and development at key stages in the creation process.

The model is based on the creative process of a four part cycle; plan, act, observe and refine. On top of that is Jesse James Garretts’ five layers model for web development. The added bonus is that it doesn’t need to be a website but it can be any interface. It is purely ux focused but acknowledges the necessary touch points of where we need to engage with other parts of the business.Of course it is not new in terms of tools but it is in terms of making this work in a digital agency. An important factor is that the UX team has this as a manifesto and we stick to it completely. By having an agreed approach we can engage others in a common language.

We are producing cards (and we know they are not a new idea, see IDEO and the IA summit cards) to help our client services team communicate our methods to customers. It gives them the language necessary and helps cost projects by seeing when to use them and what they are.

It helps the company become more efficient keeps the quality of our work high and ensures transparency with the client. These tools all are valid and are frequently used. There are many more but these we feel are at our core to produce the best results.

The website is here with each tool explained and a poster and cards have also been produced. UX BASIS gathers it all up and makes our process transparent and communicable. It provides anchorage along the way for the journeys our client projects take us on.

Check it out…
http://uxbasis.hellogroup.com/

DFUG Meeting in Copenhagen

Posted in AUG, Adobe Community, Copenhagen by Peter Andreas Molgaard on September 15, 2009

Its with great pleasure that I can announce that we on one of the upcoming Thursday will be having the 3rd meeting in our Adobe Flash User Group here in Copenhagen.
The first time we were so lucky to have James Ward here, speaking about Flash Catalyst and Flex 4… attracting more than 60 people…

The event will take place here at Hello Group in the center of Copenhagen.


2009-09-15_2002

If you are interested in presenting a topic, please don’t hesitate to contact me or send an email to the email on the address below…

Check it out…

http://flashforum.dk/events/dfug-cph-24-september-2009

Changing Diabetes Barometer is now an Adobe MAX Semifinalist

Posted in Adobe Flex, Adobe Max, WebORB by Peter Andreas Molgaard on September 2, 2009

After winning two awards last year for our “MyHome – Your Intelligent Home” and the “Nasdaq Market Replay”, it was with great interest we here at Hello Group were awaiting the email from Adobe telling us if our very cool application – “Changing Diabetes Barometer” had made it to the next level in the prestigious Adobe MAX Awards.

Today the email came, informing us that it had made it to the Semifinals… a great accomplishment thinking about some of the troubles the project had been undergoing from its inception to its transition into production, and then even some after that (as it most often is the case, I suppose).

Check it out…
http://www.changingdiabetesbarometer.com/

2009-09-02_1009

The system was build in Adobe Flex 3 with an architecture based on PureMVC MultiCore with a backend in .NET running a MS SQL Server 2005 and a WebORB tying it all together.

Save Image As… now as a separate tag

Posted in ActionScript 3.0, Adobe Flex, OpenSource by Peter Andreas Molgaard on August 13, 2009

James Ward created a clever way of adding a “Save Image As…” feature to an image in Flex.


SaveImageAs

However clever, in my case I really wanted to avoid having to subclass the Image class specifically, so I created an MXML tag which would take the Image instance as an argument instead.

The source code looks like this…

package org.hello.saveimageas
{
	import flash.events.ContextMenuEvent;
	import flash.net.FileReference;
	import flash.ui.ContextMenu;
	import flash.ui.ContextMenuItem;
	import flash.utils.ByteArray;

	import mx.controls.Image;
	import mx.core.IMXMLObject;

	public class SaveImageAs implements IMXMLObject
	{
		private var _target:Image;
		private var _label:String = "Save Image As...";

		public function SaveImageAs()
		{
			super();
		}

		public function initialized(document:Object, id:String):void
		{
			// empty for now
		}

		protected function saveImageAs( event:ContextMenuEvent ) : void
		{
			var tba:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
			this.target.content.loaderInfo.bytes.readBytes(tba, 0, ( this.target.content.loaderInfo.bytes.length - 17 ) );
			tba.position = 49;

			var ba:ByteArray = new ByteArray();
			while (tba.bytesAvailable)
			{
				ba.writeByte(tba.readUnsignedByte());
			}

			var fr:FileReference = new FileReference();
			fr.save( ba, this.target.source.toString() );
		}

		[Bindable]
		public function get target() : Image
		{
			return this._target;
		}

		public function set target( value:Image ) : void
		{
			this._target = value;

			if( this.target != null )
			{
				var targetContextMenu:ContextMenu = this.target.contextMenu != null ? this.target.contextMenu : new ContextMenu();
				targetContextMenu.hideBuiltInItems();

				var item:ContextMenuItem = new ContextMenuItem( this.label );
				targetContextMenu.customItems.push(item);

				item.addEventListener( ContextMenuEvent.MENU_ITEM_SELECT, saveImageAs );

				this.target.contextMenu = targetContextMenu;
			}
		}

		[Bindable]
		public function get label() : String
		{
			return this._label;
		}

		public function set label( value:String ) : void
		{
			this._label = value;
		}
	}
}

A basic usage of it could look something like this…

 <?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<s:Application xmlns:fx="http://ns.adobe.com/mxml/2009" xmlns:s="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/spark" xmlns:mx="library://ns.adobe.com/flex/halo" minWidth="1024" minHeight="768" xmlns:saveimageas="org.hello.saveimageas.*">

	<mx:Image id="image" source="http://www.motorscooterguide.net/Pictures/cy50jog_black.jpg" />

	<fx:Declarations>
		<saveimageas:SaveImageAs target="{ this.image }" />
	</fx:Declarations>

</s:Application>

Be sure to check out the original implementation by James Ward… it might suite your needs better…
http://www.jamesward.com/blog/2009/07/09/flex-example-right-click-save-image-as/

Thomas Burleson has already cornered this approach – as “Flex Behavior Injection”… check it out…
http://www.gridlinked.info/flex-behavior-injection/

The above modification to James Wards’ original contribution has been added to the “unsponsored” framework from where you can obtain it via SVN…
http://code.google.com/p/unsponsored/

EverythingFlex now on Adobe Wave

Posted in Adobe, AdobeWave by Peter Andreas Molgaard on July 23, 2009

Rich Tretola’s “EverythingFlex” is now publishing to Adobe Wave…

EverythingFlex WebSite

It’s one of the possible usages for the Adobe Wave, by signing up to this you will likely be getting notifications on your desktop the moment he publishes a post, and hence a fair chance to be the “first poster” in the commentary section… if that should be something you strive to do.

Check it out…
http://blog.everythingflex.com/2009/07/22/everythingflex-now-on-adobe-wave/