This is a very late post, in facts the project I’m presenting has been developed months ago but, as you probably can see, I’ve been quite away for blogging recently

When I used to work in LBi we used intensively Eclipse to develop in ActionScript with FDT plugin. In FDT at that time wasn’t possible to debug the application a la Flex, so the main support was still the old trace in the log file. When the application gets bigger, though, the traces increase and gets difficult to differentiate visually one from each other. For this reason I created an Eclipse plugin which permits to log files assigning different styles to the traces, it has been named LBi Logger and it can be downloaded here.

The plugin has been developed mainly during my working hours there and also because it is very branded, I don’t see so many possibilities for me to develop it further (since I don’t work anymore for LBi). At least, different people found it already very useful and hopefully it can still be handy for many others.

It’s an open-source project part of an ambitious initiative at LBI called LBi Useful (unfortunately almost all the initial contributors left since then).

The plugin project page is here.

Our mobiles screens are getting everyday bigger and brighter, my Treo, for instance, is capable of transforming itself in a light in not daylight contexts. This made me think of many ideas around the context of using the mobile display as a short range communication tool. Quite interesting the fact that it is meant to be for very long range interactions.
There are also situations in public where speaking becomes odd and also shyness can be an obstacle. If we consider that nowadays our environment is getting crowded of flat screen / projectors, why not to use our own?

In this first implementation the user can use the display to show text messages he writes, not sms. The size of the text of course depends on the display size. The user can then change the text speed if necessary. As you can see it’s a pretty banal application, but it could be a good start to investigate on the usages we could do of those big displays.

Following two demo videos, unfortunately not a proper scenario, I’ll leave it to your imagination (someone trying to approach a gril in a club, for instance, or suggesting something private to a friend in public spaces).

Due for technical limitations of the platform I developed the first prototype, many of my ideas are not yet implemented, but hopefully I’ll be able to do it soon or later (if anyone is interested on helping me, it will be of course welcome).

At the moment it has been developed a PalmOS version, thanks to the fundamental work from Jagat N. Mahapatra, and a FlashLite 2.x version, that I did by myself. At the moment I’m considering the eventuality of developing a J2ME version (that would make it much more accessible).

Any feedback is welcome.

When this autumn began I decided as indoor spare time activity (everyone knows how sad winter in London is) to improve my poor C++ maybe applying it to hand held devices. I had some applications in mind that I wanted to create and as Palm Treo owner, and in need of multimedia functionalities, with J2ME it wouldn’t have been straight forward anyway.

After my computers have been stolen (and thus lost the source of many experiments) and found out that OOP in PalmOS is not that recommended, after many months of not exiting results I ended up looking for a technical partner for PalmOS development. At that speed I would have probably delivered the applications way after PalmOS was extinct.

Of course my interest was far from producing final and refined software, i wanted mainly to prototype some ideas and it’s clear C is not the most recommended platform for prototyping, but due to my learning interest and poor testing devices availability I gave it a go.

Luckily I recently bought a second hand Nokia N70 where I could easily install FlashLite 2.1 and very easily prototype the applications with limited hardware access. In the same device I will be probably be able to use in Java at least some multimedia functionalities for more complex prototypes.

I’ll post soon the first concept, stay tuned!

Few months ago I have been invited to partecipate to the beta testing for Wallop and, since it has been launched, now I can communicate it. Wallop is “another” social network website. Personally I’m not keen to this kind of applications, especially because at the end if you want to have interesting connections you end up using 10 of them, and since they are accurately not connected it becomes a too big commitment.

The particularity of Wallop, and the reason why I accepted, is that the front-end is entirely in Flash and the users can also design and develop Mod’s. These are Flash applets that can be even sold through a Marketplace between users. Personally, since I was busy on other sides, I only developed a fancy slideshow that I reckon easily fits with the free grid interface - it seems I did already $10 from it! .
Not sure about the future of this website but I’m definitely curious to see how it goes on, since the passion the creators are putting on it is definitely remarkable. I wish I will have time to develop more interesting Mod’s though.

For the 10th anniversary of formerly Macromedia Flash, Adobe have been involved in many interesting celebrations/initiatives (being very close to Flash I’m delighted to see Adobe taking so much care of it). In conjunction with FWA (Favorite Website Awards), they launched a public poll where for every year people could vote for the website they consider the most influential.

It was very emotional to have a further view to websites that impressed me so much the first time I saw them during the early years of my career. I could name yugop or neostream, but there were many others and you could easily see how with the time they were getting much more complex, due also to bigger budgets (ie. In Synch Challenge). After the winner for each year people were asked to vote for the decade winner between all of them. I thought it was a very nice initiative but the final result unfortunately really disappointed me.

I definitely don’t want to criticize the quality and the relevance of 2Advanced, that, for its merit, it has been taken as inspiration for too many ripoffs, so just because of this it could be easily defined as the most influential site. But it’s sad to notice that the winning website doesn’t offer so much more a part motion graphics, and of course graphics, the interactivity and the interface design is equals to any old html based website, when Flash in these last 10 years clearly demonstrated its ability on enhancing, in a more functional way, our browser experience with wonderful marriages between design and programming (an example that always fits could be Firstborn, which interface is basically unchanged from many years) .

A missed opportunity that should make Flash people reflects about who they are and what they stand for, or maybe just the end of the association between “annoying flash intro” and flash website.

I put on my download page the source files of some of the components (classes) I created for my blog. Unfortunately you can’t find the source file of the whole thing, it would have taken ages to do it both for cleaning the code and creating the documentation. I reckon the ones I selected are the ones that could be more easily reused, I hope you will find them useful somehow.

I usually don’t like to talk about mere technology but something really remarkable due to one technology is happening. The tecnology I’m talking is ActionScript 3, the most recent version of ECMAScript-standard object-oriented programming language for Adobe Flash. Althogh it is still a beta technology, and we know how Macromedia used to keep safe this kind of things, people can already put hand on it thanks to the looking forward initiative of Adobe Labs.

Nothing so impressive maybe so far if we don’t consider the impact that the Flash fanaticism, said in a good way, can have when it is given to fancy developers a much lower level programming language. “Fancy” because Flash’s nature as drawing tool (remember Future Splash?) always made Flash developers deal with aesthetic. So, considering the freshness of this technology, it is impressing the hear which and how many projects are already on the way based on it. Here, for instance, the ones I heard recently:

- FC64 (C64 Emulator) by Claus Wahlers and Darron Schall: probably you could think “how the hell could it come in their minds?”, but it should have been a very nice challenge and for sure it will be a helpful project for old skool and nostalgic video gamers. Can you imagine a new trend of C64 games development?

- Brevity by Keith Peters: it’s delcared like the Flash version of Processing. Because the new heavy IDE that AS3 will have, based on Eclipse, and the compexity of the language, could be handy a meta-language to make the sketch development faster, and maybe to be as competitor of Processing as teaching tool. If it wasn’t for the probability that Flash Virtual Machine, because AS3 will need one, will be more diffuse than the Java one I would have some doubts about the utility of this tool. But since the expansion Flash had these last years I think this can become really popular.

- Visual Brain Storms by Branden Hall: I heard about it in the linked interview. As far as I understood it will be an application modular based (like Max/MSP) that will make the prototyping of projects intuitive and quick. I look forward to see it! Compare to Brevity, it seems this will use more a visual approach, so useful also to non-programmers.

I just hope it is not already too late to start thinking about other interesting applications based on AS3

It’s getting even more common to deal with clients that need an accessible site (this happens in general with big corporates or government institutions). An HTML based solution is always the best choice for this, also because from the tests I did so far there are too many variables to permit to a screenreader to read and browse Flash content. The problem is when the client wants also something engaging and appealing, for this reason JavaScript can’t be compared to Flash: a solution like that would require much more time due to many compatibility issues.
Taking inspiration from the technique used by sIFR (Rich Accessible Typography for the Masses), I thought to replace a HTML chart with a Flash applet where I pass as data the code of the initial chart itself. We are defintely talking about much more complex data then simple text, and for this reason they have to be structured. XML, of course, is the best way, so I instantly decided that the initial chart should have to be in XHTML.

Not being an Accessibility expert, the first thing I did was to google for an accessible XHTML chart. I found then this example, wonderful for its semplicity but that, I have to admit, required small modifications, that I tried to fix as much as I could, to be as mush accessible that possible.
I thought it was enough to get the XHTML code with the innerHTML property of the element containing the chart and passing it straight to the SWF in its FlashVars parameter, but instead the typical browser issues came up. For instance, the innerHTML property, even if the page is in XHTML, returns always HTML code and — without closing tags like BR and IMG — it breaks unavoidably the XML formatting. Netscape based browsers embed a serializer (XMLSerializer class) that does a wonderful job, but we can’t renunce to IE compatibility, at least with Windows. The remaining solution is to convert the HTML coming from innerHTML to XHTML. To build this converter have been crucial the Regular Expressions (regexp). Being a very customized solution, so where the used tags are known, it has been enough a relatively simple regexp that so can’t be definitely considered very consistent, if we imagine, for instance, the eventual usage for new tags added later on.
This is the final result that, I want to clarify, rests an example of a possible technique and so very far from a final solution adaptable automatically to any context.

By the way I hope someone can take inspiration for this approach too and maybe investigate more on the potentialities. Here are the source files of all the experiment.

Funny news, after having express my opinion in a forum to one of the moderators (Miko) about the criteria of assignement of the BombShock Award I’ve been banned

I think I haven’t offended anyone saying that judging a website because the effort the creator put in his career is a bullshit, asking, of course, how do they get that information to all the sites that don’t win the award.

In anycase I don’t have any need to be part of a community where the moderators are not able to mantain a discussion and where you can’t express freely your opinion.

On October I will be judging a contest about games developed for Flash Lite platform. It is organized by the very active Italian Community Actionscript.it, and it is open to everyone, not just Italians.

Personally I would have prefered a more general contest, including thus applications, but it wasn’t possible since Macromedia did already one. But probably many of us would like to see applications more similar to games , especially the ones for children that is already a good target if we consider how many of them use already a mobile phone. So maybe I would add the category application for children that can’t be so far from a game

Today was published a part of a big work I created with my coworkers for KEMEN, the company we are collaborating with from October 2002. In particular I made all from my own the Making of section. Check them out HERE!

In the Italian MMUG, the great Jay Jam posted an OSM slideshow oriented to local presentations of big images… I changed it a little bit to create a nicer visual effect and to adapt it for the web…

here the code!