Category: Central

Going off of <a href=”http://www.helpqlodhelp.com/blog/archives/000086.html”>Bokel’s post</a>, my comments were not getting through, so I’ll respond here in hopes to enlighten. Besides, his code has helped many beyond me in the past.

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—The data from the server is zipped and has to be unzipped on the client.

If you used server-side PHP, you could then forward the data to Central.

—The data has to be organized in different folders, which have to be created on the client

Do these folders need to be accessible by the user? If so, not yet. If not, then just make a fake structure utilizing shared objects. You can display it in the Tree, but the user doesn’t have to know where the folders are.

—The trayIcon (windows) has to be changed

Central runs in the Tray be default, but you cannot toggle directly to your application; it defaults to Central’s main screen.

—The app needs a config manager to allow for “autostart” on/off and “always in foreground” on/off

An agent, which is a SWF that runs in the background but has no GUI, has the ability to auto-start once Central is started, whether its associated application is started or not. You could provide a user the ability to toggle this via reading in the preferences from a local so. Central provides a Preferences accessible through it’s menu, and/or you can provide your own.

However, the always in foreground will not currently work.

—The whole app has to be designed after the clients cd

It’s technically a Flash movie; you could brand whatever you wanted, although, your encouraged to use the Central components for small filesize, consistant UI, and ease of application updatability.

Hope that helps.

An idea spawned from a user left wondering what I really sent them to install. I know what Central is, as well as the app that I want them to install… but do they?

Friend of mine who I worked on a minor contract job with late last year, and who I originally met in college is currently heading to Santa Cruz. Can’t remember where he started, but as of 2pm eastern time (GMT -5), he was in Texas bouncing emails with me. He is pretty stoked about Central, so…

I love this game, Starfox Adventures for Nintendo’s Gamecube. It was $20 bucks at BestBuy, and I have wanted it for awhile as he (Fox) is my favorite character in Super Smash Brothers. So, when I find the game’s algorithm is the back of the instruction booklet, I get a ton of ideas on how to translate it. I settled for text, and it turned out to be more complicated than I thought. I’m not a string meister, and wet myself when I view the commands for Regular Expressions, so maybe that’s it. At any rate, my algorithm was kind of lame. Low and behold, on the <a href=”http://www.starfox.com/”>game’s official website</a>, although some parts were broken, courtesy of <a href=”http://www.buraks.com/asv/”>ASV</a> from <a href=”http://www.asvguy.com/”>ASVGuy</a>, I managed to get my hands on the true algorithm. There is still a problem with y’s as they do not exist in Dino language, and names are supposed to remain unchanged… but I got the majority of the algorithm right with some mods of my own. I didn’t quote the mofo in my code… because he didn’t comment himself! So, whoever you are that wrote the Flash stuff for the Starfox Advetures website, thanks, you rock!

As far as Central apps go, it’s pretty useless, and really for a young audience to play with for about 20 seconds. However, I learned a lot about Central (like taking 40 minutes just to get my icon to work come to find out you can have multiple icon tags in your product.xml file…), and finally got my Dino Translator idea I had been wanting to do for weeks now done. Yay!

I guess if you give a regular Flash programmer crack and tell him to create a Central app, something like this might surface. Never know!

<a href=”https://www.jessewarden.com/dino/”>Starfox Adventures Dino Translator</a>

Source Files