webqem blog

The team at webqem are in the midst of a fitness make over. Twice a week Suzette from Straight Ahead Fitness puts us through our paces. It’s nice to get out of the office and into the fresh air but it’s not all fun and games… with one participant tweeting “I can barely type this message. #webqembootcamp has kicked my arse… and back, shoulders, stomach… etc”.  Everyone looks forward to the end of our six week program where we will be able to see our progress from sloths to superhumans.

webqem have long been supporters of the Sydney Breast Cancer Foundation, and several staff attended the 2009 Pink Ribbon Ball on Saturday 26th September in the ballroom of the Westin Hotel, Sydney.

The theme was black tie with a touch of crystal, and the event was MC’d by Charlotte Dawson, with entertainment from comedian Julia Morris, Diesel, dancers from The Australian Ballet and the dance band Suite Az.

Aragon was the raffle winner of $1000 worth of Jimmy Choo shoes, and was swamped by female admirers soon after. Chris and Les had the winning auction bid for the Marrakesh Date Night.

Luckily there is no footage available of the moves on the dance floor, but the following photos show a great time was had by all.

13 of us formed the inaugural webqem city2surf team and tackled the 14km course yesterday. The sun was pumping and spirits were high at the start line. We made it through the course walking, jogging, running, pushing strollers and dodging a million other people along the way.

It was with great relief that we greeted the hive of activity that was Bondi. Gatorade and water were smashed, sausage sambos were inhaled and a few beverages were consumed at the beach road hotel to celebrate crossing the finish line in one piece.

Congrats to everyone who got involved, and hopefully we have an even bigger team next year! (Maybe even a tent with a masseuse at the finish?)

There are a few happy snaps here.

As developers at webqem we are encouraged to stay abreast of new and upcoming technologies. In May 2009 at Google I/O, their annual developer conference, Google announced Google Wave.

Google Wave is in its early days and it will be some months before it is available to the general public, however Google knows that in order to drive adoption of Wave once it is released it will need the support of third-party developers. With this in mind, Google have built a set of APIs in order allow Wave to be extended.

To help introduce Australian developers to the APIs, Google held a Wave API Developer Day at the Sydney Google office on 19 June 2009, which I attended. The day involved learning about the available APIs and then working with them to build something cool to show off at the end of the day. There was last minute “audience favourite” voting added, and I was pleasantly surprised to find that my demo, the Napkin Gadget was voted the favourite!

The Napkin Gadget is an implementation of the idea of a quick sketch on the back of a napkin. With the Napkin Gadget you can do quick freeform sketches in a Wave. The Napkin Gadget is an Adobe Flash based Gadget, implemented using Flex – the only example of a Flash Gadget on the night!

The Gadget has been open sourced at Google Code, and as part of the informal “prize” it is currently the Featured Sample on the Google Wave API Samples Gallery.

An example of the Napkin Gadget embedded in a wave

Adobe released their innovative new desktop runtime, Adobe AIR (Adobe Integrated Runtime) last week and webqem was part of the launch activities at the Powerhouse Museum.

Webqem and four other developers were invited to demonstrate their AIR skills by participating in AIR Jam, a competition where participants were each given three minutes to get up and demo AIR applications that they had built – the audience then selected their favourite by an SMS vote.

We showed a prototype of a travel companion application inspired by tripit.com. Especially built for the Sydney AIR launch, travelAIR gives users the ability to manage travel itineraries through a single program.

Users can add activities to their itineraries by dragging domestic airline PDFs or manually entering details using a variety of activity specific forms. Activities that include addresses have the ability to display their locations via Google Maps. Images can be associated with an itinerary by dragging them into it. Itinerary events can be dragged out of travelAir into calendars that support the ICS open standard; Apple’s iCal for example.

Our presentation of travelAIR received the highest amount of votes for the competition winning us a Nintendo Wii and a copy of Guitar Hero III for the office. Check out Barry Beattie’s video below for the webqem travelAIR presentation at the Australian Adobe AIR launch.

A few of us have decided to get involved in this great event, by growing a mo for the month of November. Movember aims to raise awareness about male health issues, in particular prostate cancer and male depression, by encouraging guys to let their mo’s grow for a month. We’ll keep you updated on our progress, a few radical concepts for individual mo’s have been thrown around but let’s let the mo’s do the talking!

Movember donations are tax deductible and can be made at http://www.movember.com.au/ or 1300 GROW MO.

Go the mo!

After receiving several interested comments related to the source of the barcode reader I created for the developer comp. last year, I had a chat with the powers that be here and we decided that the best option for all folks involved would be to opensource the code.

I have to tidy up the code to make it presentable and compatible with Flex 2.01 but expect another announcement in the near future.

*** Updated ****

Mike no longer works at webqem, and unfortunately there will be no further news on the barcode reader.

As a contributor to Builder AU I was unable to submit an entry in the recent Adobe/Builder AU Flex Developer Derby, but I decided to build something just the same – a Flex video show & snap app. The main features? Video playback with captioning/translations; image grabbing of the video content; annotation of the image grabs and printing of both the notes and the images themselves. (more…)

I’ve seen a little bit of discussion on the Flexcoders mailing list recently regarding saving images created in a flex app to the server. Most of the solutions revolved around using HTTP to get the image from the flash player to the server. This had proved difficult for numerous reason. So I set out to try and find a simpler way. Now knowing that AMF is a binary protocol I figured it must be possible to send the binary image data to the server using Remoting.

And indeed it is. In fact it’s stunningly simple. The actual heavy lifting has already been done for us by Tinic Uro in his Image Encoding classes. All I had to do was capture the image data, encode it using Tinic’s classes and then send it to a ColdFusion CFC via remoting. I’ve put it up as a demo so you can see it in action.

The flex part is standard Remoting so you can look at the code in the download to see that part but the ColdFusion is shown below.

<cffunction name="upload" access="remote" returntype="string">
	<cfargument name="ext" type="string" required="true">
	<cfargument name="img" type="binary" required="true">

	<cfset var name = "image" & dateFormat(now(), "yyyymmdd") &
		timeFormat(now(), "HHmmss") & "." & arguments.ext>

	<cffile action="write" file="#expandPath("..\images\#name#")#"
		output="#img#" addnewline="false" >

	<cfreturn "/images/#name#">
</cffunction>

As you can see the code required in ColdFusion to do a relatively complex task is minimal, it can all be boiled down to two things:

1. Setting the argument type of the image data to binary (I’m not even sure this is required).
2. Using the cffile tag to save that binary data to a file.

See I told you it was simple. Feel free to download the Image Upload Code and try it out for youself.

I just received an iPod nano from the nice folks over at Rocketboots for my entry in their Flex 2 competition. Thanks again to Robin for putting the competition on.