In these last years I’ve been lucky enough to be manager of teams of RIA Developers for big and ambitious agencies, in the UK, which in theory should be the perfect candidates to offer both platforms (AND). My managers definitely agreed with that, we are big, we should offer solutions at 360º. In reality the factor which determines how the theory differs from the practice is the quality of the work that you want to offer. To offer top quality solutions, like any top agency would like, you need to master in the chosen platform. To master means that all the team involved, from Technical Architect and User Experience Designer during the planning to Graphic Designer and Developer during the production, should know the platform potentialities/limits inside out. The reality is that there are so many people in the process which don’t actually know the differences between Ajax and Flash, a part of course the developers. This is also one of the reasons why hybrid people, which can apply creativity to technology potentialities/limits, are more likely to be able to push the boundaries and create something innovative. But of course in big organizations there is not so much space for hybrids.

Obviously it would be much easier for a company to use both if they don’t have to push the limits, but if you end up doing the same things with both the platforms, why not using only one in the first place? Or why don’t you try to find a more cost-effective way to develop with Ajax and rid of the plugins?

On “The Gadget Show” on Channel 5, one of the major TV channels here in UK, this Monday (24th Nov ‘08) they reviewed 3 online music stores competitors of Apple iTunes, including Tesco Digital where I worked on and off on its Flash applets for the last year at Conchango. The review can be watched here, and Tesco Digital is after 4:30 min. What really hit me is that probably half of the footage shown is focused on the Tilt Viewer in the homepage and that they noticed some details, like the animated preloading, which in general you wouldn’t expect it to receive so much credit. Evidently in this occasion I successfully managed to show my love, and of course I found other people who appreciated it.

I can hardly say that it is an original and innovative applet, that Tilt Viewer, but I can definitely say that in the short time frame given I did my best to have high standards in the code (MVC) and good attention to details keeping the quality of the Flash work from Conchango at the best standards, also to better show the potential of this technology compared to others (Ajax, SilverLight).

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.

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.

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!

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.

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.

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

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.