Blog

  • Movement Mystique & Meetings are Bad for You

    I go to pay for my sandwhich in Subway wearing my “wasd” shirt with shoulder length hair, and the cashier, a petite, older teen asks, “Are you a hacker?”.

    I smile and reply, “I try.”

    Apparently the console has a stranglehold on the gaming market vs. the pc if “wasd” isn’t widely known. The gender card is bs because when I spoke at a middle-school 3 years ago for career day, every girl in every class I spoke to raised their hand when I asked who played video games.

    Also, my man Steven Sacks, the deep house DJ, pointed me to this article briefly describing a study showing that meetings are bad for your health. The article has a sarcastic feel, I don’t know the authenticity of the researchers, nor if this is an accurate portrayal of their research methodology, so much of it I question. Still, like most studies, while they usually result in a unified, “Duh!” from most of us, at least you have “scientific study & research” to point to now.

  • DrawingPad for Flex 2

    A simple drawing pad for Flex 2, beta 2. Someone had asked on the Flexcoders list if there was a drawing component in Flex 2. This has been done countless times in Flash, so I wanted to use this as a reason to learn about some of the chagnes to UIComponent. There aren’t as many as I thought; easy to get up to speed if you’ve ever built a component in Flash MX 2004, Flash 8, or Flex 1.5.

    There are a ton of things I could add to this, but I wanted to keep it simple for others to easily dive into the code. It took 4 hours to do, and while it uses next to no MXML, I am reminded how enjoyable it is to code ActionScript in Flex Builder 2.

    Requires Flash Player 8.5 beta.

    DrawingPad – App | Source | ZIP

    Creative Commons License

    This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution 2.5 License.

  • Adobe’s Untapped Goldmine

    What if you could push any .exe file to the millions of computers worldwide that have the Flash Player installed? With one click, a user can install Central, Breeze Presenter, or even upgrade Flash Player 8 on their machine from any web browser with the Flash Player, assuming they have administrator rights.

    My boss is excited about combining the Flash Platform & PDF on the client (a.k.a. Apollo). I used to be excited about desktop Flash development, but because of market demand, it’s been relegated to PHP & Flash Lite work; a fun hobby.

    I think of the 2 clients who paid me to find out a way to tap into Flash Player’s ability to install applications. I was unsuccessful. Only apps residing at https://www.macromedia.com can be installed using System.Product.install, although, you can manually install your own EXE’s into the unique folder and interact with them using Flash Player in a browser. Still, this requires you to somehow get the user to install an EXE on their machine; not an easy feat. If we could do that easily, then Flash Player’s ubiquity wouldn’t matter.

    There are uses for this such as remotely controlling apps like AjaxAMP, and interfacing with lower level code using Flash Player as the GUI, like FlashMidi does.

    If you could push an EXE to millions of users around the world, what would it be?