Daniel Todd

Hurrah! My one-man web app, Timetoast, just got featured over on the 37Signals product blog. Their book ‘Getting Real‘ was a great guide while building my web app and I highly suggest you check it out before you start building your own!

Timetoast is a Flash / Flex based app that easily allows people to create and share interactive timelines on the web.

Insoshi is an open source social site with everything you would expect; messaging, blogging, connections and much more. If you download the source (writen in Rails), you’ll already have a fully operational social software platform to kick start your idea. To top it off, things can only get better; Insoshi is under active development.

If you’ve used Ruby on Rails before, you should feel very comfortable browsing the source, it is written in a concise and professional manner. For the novice Rails developer, Insoshi provides a great opportunity to understand the architecture of a fully functional Rails site. You’ll learn a lot from browsing the source of a complete application, something I found difficult to find when first embarking on my own Rails adventures.

Head on over to the Insoshi site to get started on your own adventure.

I just purchased an amazing video camera capable of shooting some pretty impressive HD footage. It’s the Panasonic HVX200 and it’s a pretty gnarly camera. Among other things, it can shoot variable frame rates which means great timelapse and slo-mo capabilities. I’m also really impressed by Panasonic’s P2 solid-state card system, the workflow is great with the P2CMS program.

The Panasonic HVX200.

Now that Adobe Premiere and After Effects CS3 can handle the P2 system, and Flash can display h.264 footage, it seemed like a perfect time to up my cinematography game and get a decent camera to document, among other things, my ski-bum season in Whistler B.C.
I’ll be posting some footage as soon as I get to grips with the camera, but you can already check out some beautiful HVX shots in Lakai’s Fully Flared (John Nack recently posted about this) and even feature films like Cloverfield use the HVX extensively.
Watch this space… 

Into classic gaming? Beer? Arcades? I suspected so much so here’s a neat tip if you’re ever in the Portland, Oregon area. Go check out Ground Kontrol; it’s a bar-slash-arcade filled to the brim with classic arcade machines. They also have a pinball section upstairs if you’re into that.

I played my first ever game of Missile Command and loved it to bits. It just goes to show that fancy graphics and cinematographic story-lines don’t make games great. Among the gems found at Ground Kontrol are such classics as Asteroids, Star Wars (1983 Atari Version),  Pac Man, Ms. Pac Man, TMNT, Track & Field, Gauntlet II, Ghouls & Ghosts, Tron, Discs of Tron, Frogger, Battlezone, Mario Bros., 720 skateboarding and of course Missile Command. Here’s a list of all their arcades. By the way, Tuesday is Rock Band night, which could be quite interesting too… 

The latest version of the web application framework Ruby on Rails has just been released. Check out David’s post to see what some of the changes are.You can download the new release at www.rubyonrails.com 

A new version of the Adobe Flash Player 9, MovieStar, for Mac just touched down on Adobe Labs today. The new version is 9.0.98.0, so go get it now…

Mine were.

You see, my integer typed variables were, quite literally, flipping out: positive numbers became negative numbers for no apparent reason and I was pretty sure the logic I was coding wasn’t flawed. After a few hours of tearing my hair out I remembered reading something about there being a limit on the size of an integer in ActionScript 3, could this be my problem? I never thought I’d need to know what those limits were until today.

Here’s some useful information on the range of the int, uint and Number datatypes in Actionscript 3.

If you are dealing with very large numbers, and funky stuff starts happening, remember this:

“The range of values represented by the int class is
-2,147,483,648 to 2,147,483,647″

If you know your number will be an unsigned (non-negative value) you probably want to use the uint datatype (uint) as its maximum is twice that of an int, but only in the positive direction (yep, that makes sense doesn’t it?)

“The range of values represented by the uint class is 0 to 4,294,967,295″

If you can’t make up your mind, just go for the Number datatype as it can take up to 53 bits to represent it, instead of the 32 bits available to the int and uint data types.

“Number is useful in situations where the range of values required exceeds the valid range of the int and uint data types. The Number class can be used to represent integer values well beyond the valid range of the int and uint data types. The Number data type can use up to 53 bits to represent integer values, compared to the 32 bits available to int and uint.”

(all text in quotes comes from the Flash livedocs)

p.s. if anyone has done some tests on the performance of large numbers in ActionScript 3, I’d love to know, so leave me a comment.

Today was the day I wanted to log my first Flex bug on the Flex Bug and Issue Management System (crikey, that’s a mouthful). However, I got beaten to it by Ryan Gardner who posted it yesterday. (ahh, the power of open source!) Anyhoo, I started browsing the new devnet trying to find the ADC desktop so I could see how handy it would be in watching the progression of the bug (Mike Potter mentioned the new ADC desktop app during his recent talk at the London Flex User Group)

While trying to find the app I stumbled on the ADC introNetwork, a social network for members of the Adobe Developer Connection. I decided to check it out. This is when I discovered the profile editor while setting up my account. It’s a great use of Flex and Im sure we’ll be seeing this type of thing start to appear in other more “traditional” social networks. It lets you drag certain keywords to an area at the top of the screen and order them according to how important they are to you. It’s a great way of creating a custom profile that matches you with people who have the same type of skills or interests. Here’s a screenshot for your viewing pleasure:

The ADC profile editor (click for large version)

I had initally written a rather extensive write-up of the conference and proceeded to lose the whole thing while saving it. Great.

Here’s the slightly-late-and-rather-short-version instead:

RailsConf Europe was a completely different type of conference for me as I usually just go to Flash and Flex related conferences and events. One thing I can say up-front is these guys don’t know how to party; on the other hand the Flash community hits the spot pretty much every time.
You Flash peeps can give yourself a pat on the back for that, if you so please. It’s fine, nobody is looking.

This being a Ruby on Rails centered conference I was prepared to get a bit of stick for being a passionate Flash/Flex developer, but this wasn’t the case (well, except one guy who I’m pretty sure was still stuck in 2002, his hair certainly was.) Most people there were pretty interested in what Flex had to offer. I also blew a couple of minds with my 1 minute AIR demo’s. Flex 3 really does make it incredibly easy to create a simple AIR app in no time whatsoever.

The back of the conference T-shirt.

There were a couple of Flex sessions at RailsConf. One of them was during the tutorial days and was a half day session about using Flex and Ruby on Rails together. I must admit I was slightly dissapointed in this session as it only dealt with xml-rpc REST calls, something I’ve already been using for quite a while. I was hoping that the session would also show some examples of the other data-exchange possibilities such as RubyAMF and WebOrb which both use the Flash Player native ActionScript Message Format (AMF).

I almost didn’t go to Simeon Bateman’s Flex session which, in contrast, was a lot shorter weighing in at just an hour. I was pretty pleased I did eventually go as he gave an excellent overview of the different data exchange methods and even managed to sneak in a couple of examples for our viewing pleasure. Simeon did a good job of walking through the different options available to Flex and Rails developers covering RubyAMF, WebOrb and XML-rpc calls. The Flash Platform introduction could have been a little shorter, but I think he wanted to make sure everyone knew about the new AVM2 and the advancements the Flash Platform has made over the last year or two.

I’m not going to go into any of the other sessions. I think I’ll let Stuart Eccles take over from here as he has been a rather busy bunny indeed!

In some other related news, it looks like there is an early alpha version of RubySWX for you to play around with. It’s not ready for production and has some security issues, so you may want to wait a little while before you hop onto that boat. Aral’s SWX demos have been quite impressive, so I’m sure this will become a method you may want to evaluate in the future.

Some random yet slighty relevant trivia for you:

Did you know that Flash is the highest village in England?

Well you do now!

Flash on Google Maps