Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Community Voices, UI vs. Meat Goats, Breakin’ Goths, and Al Qaeda Raver

    My favorite posts from this week.

    Tariq Ahmed from Flexcoders linked to the this MXDJ Article about The Voices of the Community, where they asked a bunch of homeskillets industry related questions. Answers are interesting; more interesting when compared. I’m on page 1; pimp!

    If you are going to raise livestock, I’d prefer Alpacas so you can saturate the knitting market with Alpaca fur, and thus lower the price of it’s fur. I have Alpaca thread coming out of the woodwork in this house because of my wife’s yarn obsession. I balled out laughing reading this post by Dynamic Flash, not just because of the text-book example of bad UI design, but the suggested career change for someone unsuccessful in the web design world just seemed… well, a 180 with a z-index. Anyway, I’ve never heard of meat goats, and I’m glad I did; now I have a random, weird statement to issue forth in times of frustration! Moo goo gai pan was getting old anyway.

    Viewing the 1st video from Playfool’s post, I learned Goth’s could dance; I had no idea! Every 90’s movie I saw growing up had them head banging, and the paid goth dancers that dance on the platforms at clubs aren’t real goths. Anyway, some really really phat moves. Apparently, even Voltron can break it down; can you imagine the event model it took to code that shiz? Awesome…

    Finally, making al Qaeda happy and then having them rave… dude (er, so, sorry JD) off the chain, yo!

  • eHatchery 2.0?

    Regarding this O’Reilly post. There was a place called eHatchery here in Atlanta that was basically a big building full of offices, supplies, and connectivity. It’s goal was to help dot-com startups get on their way. On the way out, I hear you could get Aeron chairs for a steal.

    When her majesty’s laptop was working, she played Second Life every so often; it was more like a large virtual chatroom where she could play dressup, and socialize en-masse.

    Her friend would make models that did stuff; the most notable being Final Fantasy 7 ‘esque “big gun” that this girl would carry around, and it lobbed kittens out of it; because of the physics of the game, they’d bounce around; pretty decent range too taking into account wind resistance.

    Anyway, I’ve brainstormed with friends many times in the past on how can we integrate some of Flashcom‘s features into a Flash panel to allow us to collaboratively code; like pair programming, only done remotely.

    I apparently have been approaching it from the wrong angle, as Second Life appears to be an eHatchery 2.0; taking the approach that focuses on the most important thing; digital communication. Once you get that down pat, and provide a digital medium that most matches the real-world, you can actually get some real work done, and collab with friends on creating things. You pay rent by uploading your creations vs. paying for office space. (See comments here)

    One of the nice things about Director was, the .dir was not only the source file, but the runtime file; you can have to do stuff via the Message Window; much like Flash’s Output Window, but you could run actual Lingo (Director’s ActionScript) in the Message Window and get results. Second Life helps foster that immediate results to your efforts as well as allowing you to easily share with friends abroad.

  • Flex on the Desktop

    This is how I want to deploy Flex apps! Imagine if Central could do what the below shows!?

    I used mProjector, a 3rd party Flash Projector creator, to make the exe from the Flex swf. Only took 2 lines of ActionScript to get it to size & position correctly; no changes were needed to the Flex code to get it to act like this (although, background-alpha: 0 in your css helps, hehe!).

    I so can’t wait till Zorn…

    *** Warning! The below uses a lot of RAM; save your work. ***
    Flex on the Desktop

  • Flex Panel Management JXL Style

    Panels are the main container you utilize in Flex to help layout your application. Combined with the control bar on the bottom, they make a nice little module for interactive content in Flex applications. They are challenging to skin, but not so hard to extend (inheritance in Flex is too easy).

    For my ever-growing Multiuser D&D application, I’ve already run out of screen real-estate. I’m constantly adding new panels to house multi-user content, and managing all of the Panels via simple drag and drop isn’t very useable. So, I got my wife, the Information Architect and Usability expert involved. In the 40 seconds she could spare, she gave me a lot of ideas, and what you’ll see is the implementations of them.

    You can expand and collapse Panels, much like you can on a Mac with windows. Collapsing helps by significantly reducing the amount of screen real-estate the Panel takes up and still allows it to retain state. This is important because since this application is sharing real-time data via Flashcom.

    Additionally, you can minimize & maximize the Panels themselves. This reduces their size further, puts the at the bottom of the application out of your way, and if you maximize them they’ll return to their original position, automatically re-adjusting those Panels left minimized at the bottom.

    I need to add the ability for the minimized Panels to re-adjust their position when you resize the browser; trivial to do, just haven’t had the free time yet.

    This 5th iteration of this app will be available with full source and documentation within Flex by Example in the comming weeks. I’ll post the customized Panel code here later in the week after I get it cleaned up and implement any new ideas I get, either from you all or from me.

    See Flex Panel Management JXL Style in action.

    What do you think?