I created the graphics from flash and then screen captured the animation. I then added a little bit of blur and saturtion in after effects to produce the final composition. The format was really tricky to work with, a height of 32 pixels meant that I could never put enough vertical detail. The screen was also a bit average. It was amost impossible to view in daylight and at nigh there is a strange blue halo along the top and bottom of the scren.
It was an interesting experiment and I’d like to make another submission in the future.

Submission images:

This continues to gain traction and receives about 400 hits per day with an all time peak of 744 1407.

The update was because google keep on changing their tile reference and I don’t know when it will change again. I do however want to update the script to use either their official flash API or their staticmap api

Take a look, it’s at the bottom of the list.

Flash Players
Adobe has made the archived Flash Players available for download at the request of the Flash developer community. Adobe Technical Support does not provide support for the installation or use of the earlier versions. Refer to the readme.txt in each zipped file below for the description of files provided and platforms supported.
Archived Flash Players available for testing purposes

Release Notes
Read the Flash Player release notes for a full list of Windows and Macintosh issues that are still outstanding.
Adobe Flash Player Release Notes

I then found Twitterscript. The lack of documentation was a bit off-putting, however with a bit of googling I found a simple demo to get me rolling, and more importantly a simple workaround to the proxy issue.

Hope this helps - if anyone is out there.

It seems that, the original idea was for it to be used to let groups of friends and colleagues know what each other is up to using status updates. I couldn’t really see the benefit of this and quickly passed it off as nonsense. But it has matured from that point where it is now a fascinating informal communication channel. By following friends and people I’m interested in, I have found a lot of interesting links and opinions, passively by scanning through the feeds.

People’s opinions of twitter seem polarized - I don’t think the silly name helps. I also find the open nature of the system promotes a casual dialog to interesting/famous people who would otherwise be distant and unapproachable.

That is the good part. For a first-timer there is then a rather steep learning curve to get the site configured to your requirements and understanding how the framework can be manipulated. I quickly found some rather startling undocumented ‘features’ of the template files that really threw me. First, I found that the fla files had a rather obscure setting: “Automatically declare stage instances” unchecked in the publish settings. This is a setting I have never come across and took a while to discover. Secondly, the preloader was coded in such a way to cancel mouse events bubbling through to the Display Objects below. Again, bazaar and unexpected behavior that takes a while to resolve. In fact the live site has an issue with firefox where the initial entry-point swf loads twice. Gaia has a feedback forum but if you look closer a lot of queries are either left unanswered or are grossly lacking in detail.

So all these unexpected quirks probably took longer to debug than it would have taken to create my own navigation and page load model. In conclusion I might use it for some extremely quick-and-dirty builds but not for more comprehensive site builds. I’m quite happy with my own flavor of MVC which I have been refining.

I have added it as an experiment at robshearing.com

AMFPHP incompatibilty with PHP 5.2

I used the same css as this blog but updated the header swf feature. I also added a more information section to help explain how the calculations work. There is a links page too, but it’s a bit dry.

I built this in responce to a lack of a good, simple, accurate online tax calculator. During my research, I became a bit suspicious of the calculator on the ATO website, as the numbers just don’t add up! I think there is a rounding problem that causes the calculations to drift. Moreover, all their calculators are awkward to use and often not complete or out of date. Having said this e-Tax rocks.

I’m also thinking of building a google gadget for it. I have a resized version ready to go. Building a google gadget is a pain. During the build I found that their API documentation was out of date and I also get a “can’t publish” error without explanation for no logical reason. At that point I gave up.

Arithmetic

The next phase of development will involve building a fileshare component to allow files to be uploaded/downloaded and commented upon by an administrator and client.

I used a handy php JSON parser to encode the string. I’m not entirely convinced about JSON. Evangelists go on about it’s inherent readability, however characters have to be escaped and this results in some messy looking text. I see this notation best suited for code and not for humans to read. It’s best if it’s encoded by code and then decoded by code and never sees the light of day. In this respect it is a very readable notation, lightweight and easy to ingest.

For example:
encoding (using PHP JSON parser):
$output = $json->encode($json_feed);

decoding (using adobe’s AS3 JSON parser):
var myObject:Object = JSON.decode( jsonString );

I don’t think it’ll ever replace xml. If I have to manage the data myself I will opt for xml - I can add comments, I can add CDATA, I can waste time deciding whether to use attributes or text nodes and I can take pleasure in making it look nice. But if I just want to shift a big chunky object from one platform to another I’l be encoding with JSON.

Blog posts:
http://blog.robshearing.com/wp-rss2.php
or
http://blog.robshearing.com/feed
or
http://blog.robshearing.com/?feed=rss2

Actionscript experiments feed:
http://blog.robshearing.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=8

Work feed:
http://blog.robshearing.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=7

I am however finding flaws in this model. The problem is twofold - dealing with those custom fields and making my life easier when I parse the data in flash. I’m thinking of either adding the meta data to the rss feeds, making a custom feed, or make a bespoke JSON feed. I don’t want to add meta to the rss as it may start to break the feeds compliance, also I don’t want no trouble if I upgade WordPress. Making a custon rss fleed is boring, so I’m going to attempt to build a bespoke JSON feed…

Stage
Stage can only be accessed though a visible displayObject.
I discoved this when tying to build an AS3 stageManager class. I didn’t want to make the class extend a sprite and have to add it to the displayList. So I decided to pass it a displayList object as a reference that it uses to measure the stage size.

AS3 Singleton
You can’t make the constructor private! So the old singleton is broken. I googled this problem and found that many people pass the constructor a private variable or method so it can only be successfully implemented internally. Problem is that the class looks a bit messy. Then I discovered another implementation by Daniel Hai on http://www.onflex.org/code/


package
{
public class Singleton
{

public static function getInstance():Singleton
{
return instance;
}
}
}


E4X and namespace
I was attempting to read a feed from here: http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/get.cfm?listtype=rating
If you look closly the swatches are on nodes under a kuler namespace:
…
<kuler:themeItem>
…
<kuler:themeSwatches>
<kuler:swatch>
<kuler:swatchHexColor>468966</kuler:swatchHexColor>

</kuler:swatch>
</kuler:themeSwatches>
…
</kuler:themeItem>
…
I haven’t come accross this notation before. In AS2 I could just barge in and parse the nodes as “kuler:themeID”. So this led me to discover the namespace class. Whereby, if I understand it correctly, you target the nodes within a specific namespace. Combined with the beauty of E4X, my query became:

var kuler_ns:Namespace = xml.namespace("kuler");
var hexList:XMLList = xml..kuler_ns::swatchHexColor.text();

Isn’t that pretty.

A series of tag searches from flickr is done against lyrics to a song. Results are unexpected and amusing.

http://www.avoision.com/experiments/astronaut/

This has got me thinking. I might have a go at ths some time, afterall I’ve already built the engine:
flickr rss reader

Lee is great and he works at such a great company too. As for all this AIR, I really have to get started. The results are so much similar to ZINC, but with a much cleaner interface (and I presume more stable and less quirky)

I loved his swarms and ribbons. So I tried to replicate:
swarm_1
swarm_2
ribbon

Now, I’m not all that fussed about maintaining a blog, I doubt anyone will read it. Primarily, I just want to lean about the software. But more than that, I also want to use it as a CMS for my new site.
I’ll use the title and post for the heading and description, but I also need a link to the flash/image/flv/java file assets. For this I’ll use a custom field. When that is sorted I’ll need to add hidden categories for two of the features on the site - work and experiments. I can then get feeds of these categories that can be use to poulate the flash site. Nice.

I saw this mesh wave thing, and I thought it would be a good effect to replicate in AS3. I had a good idea that the wave used perlin noise mapped onto a 3D perspective. Check it.
I built it in AS2 to see the speed difference and it was remarkable. It was a good learning experience to learn AS3. With AS3, the language has finally matured to be in the same league as JAVA and C#.
Next on the list is papervision, Digg API and that Flex CMS…

http://video.onflex.org/2007/03/19/apollo-camp-keynote-from-kevin-lynch/

This font is made with my wife’s lovely handwriting:

www.fontify.com

Cool hunting have featured him.

Check out his website www.number27.org, he has done all sorts of stuff.

He also talks about his work at the TED conference