Registered for 360Flex!

Just finished registering to attend 360Flex in San Jose. I was at the first one and can’t wait to go again. The conference hold warm memories for me, since that is were I got the call about joining Qualcomm (and I won a copy of Flex Builder Pro). Hope to see you there! Register here!

Reminder: SDFUG meeting tonight!

Just a quick reminder to let everyone know that the July SDFUG meeting will be held tonight from 7-9PM at Veoh Network (location and other information available at http://www.sdfug.org/san-diego-flash-users-group/events/july-meeting/).

Tonights topics will include design patterns, frameworks to help you implement these patterns, as well as development processes. Woody Zuill has offered to lead a discussion on the Agile development process as well as Extreme Programming, and from there we will dive a bit deeper into specific patterns that people have found useful, where they have used them, and information they have found useful while learning about design patterns.

MATE: Event Driven Framework for Flex

Sean Moore (aka Sean the Flex Guy) has just written a review of Mate. I took a look at Mate a few weeks back and it looks to be an attractive solution. The review is post at flashmagazine.com

Embedding Flash with SWFObject 2.0

Lee Brimelow, Adobe’s Flash Platform evangelist, has just posted a video on how to use SWFObject to embed Flash content into HTML pages. Since this is the solution that will be used in CS4, you can get a leg up on it.

Introductory Flash Lite eSeminars

Adobe APAC is holding a series of “Introductory Flash Lite eSeminars” with Dale Rankine as speaker.

Here’s the schedule for the upcoming eSeminars:

• June 25th - Flash Lite and the Nokia Web Runtime (WRT) platform (recording here - http://pacific.adobe.acrobat.com/p60815573/ )
• July 9th - Adobe Flash Lite Widgets for the Chumby
• July 23rd - Reactive Mobile Content with Adobe Flash Lite
• Aug 6th - Persistent Data in Adobe Flash Lite
• Aug 20 - Tips and Tricks for Effective Adobe Flash Lite development

Each of the sessions can be accessed by visiting ( http://pacific.adobe.acrobat.com/mobile ), and start at 2pm (AEST - +10 GMT).

Shantanu Narayen is the keynote speaker @ CTIA Wireless 2008

via Scott Janousek:

I’m sure Shantanu (President and CEO, Adobe Systems) will be talking about Adobe’s Open Screen Project and hopefully about the BREW Mobile Platform at CTIA. Not sure if anyone from Qualcomm will be speaking with him. 

Google Map Project update

Been thinking about the various issues that I had with the first release of the Google Map API for Flash. In the latest release, 1.4, the team fixed one of my issues. Mucho Thanks!. That was the issue of not being able to center a marker in both the vertical and horizontal. I folded the update into the code (I still need to merge back some mods from the Yahoo! version), and the overlays appeared exactly as I wanted them too. So good bye all that fun math I had been using!

So, I started thinking of solutions to the issue that markers pop to the top of the z-order when you rollover them. I understand the behaviour for this, I just wish it was a setting you could easily change. My first thought was to use the BitmapData class to create a composite graphic from the PNGs I was currently using. I played with this solution for a while. Then I had an AHA moment. 

While I was changing the application to use RSL to keep the file size down, I started thinking about linking in the PNGs for the overlay. Then something hit me and said, “They are fraking circles, just draw them in code” So I wrote a quick test and it worked great. Here a preview of the app.

So now I need to rebuild the engine that calculates the blast distances to create the single image. 

More prototyping resources….

A PRACTITIONER’S GUIDE TO PROTOTYPING  is a book in progress by Todd Zaki Warfel. The anticipated publication date is late 2008.

From the website,

A Practitioner’s Guide to Prototyping will take a hands-on approach, enabling you to develop prototypes with minimal muss and fuss. The book will discuss how prototypes are more than just a design tool by demonstrating how they can help you market a product, gain internal buy-in, and test feasibility with your development team.

 

The 5 elements of great signup experiences

Robert Hoekman, jr. was written a series of articles on the signup process. I always carefully look at how I join the latest social network or killer Web 2.0 application.

You might want to take a look at the sign up/login screens for Apple’s new mobileMe service and Adobe’s Share. Ed Krimen has some thoughts on these sign up screens as well.

Sketching in Code: the Magic of Prototyping

David Verba has written a great article about the use of prototyping in developing web applications on A List Part. Having been developing prototypes for the past 12 years, it is always great to see this topic brought to the forefront. 

In the article he talks about the fact that “Prototyping is the magic”, a fact that I recently witnessed on project. We were building a prototype of the new website. The main purpose of the site was to conduct some usability studies of the purchase process (it was a web to mobile site). Since I was able to get a nice functioning site up with some Flash components in it, the client really understood what this was all for.