Professional

I have been working on some widgets that will enhance the user experience for www.landed.at they should be getting released soon and I hope that from a release into the website it should not take too much to get a facebook application from them too. Of course social networking is the place to be right now. What is the next social networking ? I have some theories on that one. Also I have started to notice an increase in traffic and revenue for the website. This is most encouraging and has finally proven the validity of my efforts, but more importantly with such a site the lid is up there and the challenge is to get it higher with the minimum of time and investment, but it can be done. I am focusing on quality and depth of unique information for the site and in giving the user a different travel website. There are hundreds and thousands of travel websites but no one knows travel for everyone its a unique experience for us all. And I want to provide inspiration to travel as much as anything- it keeps me inspired to travel too.

Posted by calvin crane

I was trying to access the flashVars as if I was creating a flash movie and this is a gotcha afaik.
It semi kind of works if you do get a ref to stage, but there are some strange things that happen and with flex it is better to use the " Application " Instance for doing most things.

Here is my revamped flashVarsVo class for your dissection

Continue reading "Flex Value Object Script"

Posted by calvin crane

Quite amusing disturbing the fact that my Coventry University sent me a letter asking if I would donate to them. "There's never been a better time to give" was one thing they said, I think not but there is a better cause ! Have you been asked for money by your university ?

Coventry were the stingiest body I have ever had the misfortune of being associated with, anything we designed they also got us to sign the rights away to anything we designed while doing our product design degrees, to them.

There was never any money available for materials or anything come to think about it, and I think that there are many more deserving bodies available. I did notice that there are a great many hard working talented individuals working for the benefit of the students at the university but it is undermined by the business first attitude prevalent. And this letter reminded me of that fact.

Continue reading "Coventry University Donations"

Posted by calvin crane

Was wondering why my flash movie appeared to be scaling within its fixed size even though the html surrounding element may have been different depending on browser- platform.

After probing the myriad of possibilities it was not the flash scaling it was the browser zoom. Another thing to check next time. Restarting the browser would have reset this value possibly, though who knows what settings get saved etc... hundreds and thousands of things to remember. I have been doing the browser wars a bit too much with css for the past couple of days.
The product is looking good so far

http://landed.at/europe/greece.html

Posted by calvin crane

I have finished to a point the flickr thumbnail application which was stage 1. A MVC frame was used and today refactored to add the google maps api into the same swf. So the results can be seen with landed.at if you have navigated to a specific country then the url passes in the country to the swf. Flickr does a search on thumbs and the google api geo-codes the country (not so much of an address) address and returns the position of the map. What was fun NOT was that having a latitude and logitude and trying to get the offset in full screen mode with the image to the left was a bit of applied trial and error, coming up with a coefficient for the particular zoom. It kind of works well with i.e. being a bit unstable in the full screen but it bloody well usually is with something. What have they done.

I'm glad bing is getting a big push hope it wakes google out of its dollar PR rubbish. Well please check out the following link and let me know and others too if you like it, thanks

http://landed.at/africa/kenya.html

Posted by calvin crane

My old colleague Jake Brindle let me in on a cool package called bulk loader for as3.

http://code.google.com/p/bulk-loader/

I'm just checking out its usefulness here. Its a bit bulky for banners but for microsites and my portfolio should be ideal to centralise my loading of external assets.

EXAMPLE USEAGE

package at.landed.view.components
{
import flash.display.Sprite;
import br.com.stimuli.loading.BulkLoader;
import flash.events.Event;
import flash.display.Bitmap;
import flash.display.BitmapData;

public class Image00 extends Sprite
{

var loader : BulkLoader = new BulkLoader("main-site"); // creates a BulkLoader instance with a name of "main-site", that can be used to retrieve items without having a reference to this instance

public function Image00()
{
loader.add("images/me.png", { id:"me" } );
loader.get("me").addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, onBackgroundLoaded)
loader.start();
}
private function onBackgroundLoaded(e:Event):void
{
addChild(loader.getBitmap("me"))
}
}

}

Posted by calvin crane