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.

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.

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

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.

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

Go the mo!

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.

The application in question was originally a demo application that has been evolving for some time, first as a Flash 8 demo that I had built for a presentation that I delivered at KiwiFlash 2005 and now evolved and redone in Flex.

So what does this application do? Well first, it’s a video player of sorts. What’s missing are the playback controls (easily added but not needed for this demo!) – but there are some nice extras instead.

While loading the video the application also pulls in cuepoints and captioning in a number of languages via a single XML file. It’s written to be generic so that a deployed version could accept arguments to instruct it to load specific videos and associated captions.

The other thing that the application does is allow the user to take “snapshots” of the video as it plays and add notes to their snapshots for some kind of recordkeeping. The images and their associated notes can be printed directly from the application.

This version of the application uses:

• mx:VideoDisplay
• mx:HTTPService to retrieve the XML data used for the video’s cuepoints and the various translations
• E4x to quickly parse the XML data used for the video’s cuepoints and the various translations
• BitmapData in the process of capturing the video images, code inspiration for the Flex version from Jam
• An ArrayCollection to store all data used in the various parts of the application, including the BitmapData for the captures
• Printing logic that was stolen almost directly from the Component Explorer

Credit where credit is due:

• More than 80% of this Flex application was authored on a Mac without the benefit of Flex Builder, instead it was written on Dreamweaver 8 and compiled using Tom Lee’s FlexWeaver plugin, here’s looking forward to Flex Builder on the Mac
• The icons used within the application are Silk Icons from famfamfam.com

So what could you do with this? Well the original inspiration was a video of a Microsoft demo made to a medical imaging conference – their demo allowed a medical specialist to add notes to the video output of a diagnosis machine. Perhaps it could be used by a movie critic to annotate what they’re reviewing – who knows?

Could the images captured be saved back to the server? Without a doubt, check out this post about image capture in Flex from work colleague Mike Shaw – interesting stuff.

Is there sample code available? While I’m intending to release snippets of what’s in the application I probably won’t release it in its entirety – but you never know unless you ask!.

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.

Thanks to Robin for running the competition and congratulations to the other entrants for producing such high quality apps and if you are entering the Adobe developer derby, best of luck.

The end result is a new component/class lib for Flex enabling it to read a barcode with any ordinary off the shelf webcam (it will need adjustable focus for best results). This demo RIA reads EAN13 barcodes, more specifically ISBN-13 barcodes and searches Amazon.com for the related book information.

Originally I had written the component for Flash 8 but with the arrival of AS3 and the AS3 VM in the flash player 8.5 Beta, I was able to make the most of the increased speed and add a lot more scanning paths so that it can scan right-side-up, up-side-down, sideways etc.

You will need the 8.5 Beta version of the Flash player to use the barcode reader demo. There are instructions on how to set up your webcam in the demo.

***Updated***

With the release of Flex 2.0 Beta 3 and Flash player 9.0 Beta I have updated the barcode reader accordingly. It’s the same, except I’ve added the price info.