The Flex based insurance gap calculator we developed for MLC was added to the Flex theme showcase site scale nine. The site is a collection of Flex themes and applications that push the design capabilities of Flex past the default theme.
Thanks to Juan from scale nine for including our work.
A new study commissioned by the United Nations has found that most websites fail to meet basic accessibility guidelines. The study found that 78 per cent of sites reviewed used colour combinations of poor contrast, 87 per cent caused pop-up windows to appear without warning and 92 per cent failed to provide keyboard shortcuts. Designing websites that are usable and accessible to a broad range of users has always been a focus at webqem. We design and code all sites to the minimum W3C conformity of ‘A’, which inlcudes XHTML 1.0 Transitional, CSS2 and DOM based scripting.
To read more about accessbility and usability on the web follow the links below.
On 15 November Google announced that Yahoo and MSN would join Google in supporting a common Sitemap Protocol. Information about the agreement has been placed on a new site at Sitemaps.org
The Black Dog Institute has a clear vision about how to help as many people as possible using their website – the Bipolar Disorder educational program is an example of how they have put that vision into action. The information supplied by the program is in audiovisual format (Macromedia Breeze presentations) as well as PDF. The power of seeing and hearing from experts in the bipolar disorder field is a corner stone of this program. The institute has gone one step further in their mission to effectively distribute information about biploar disorder by inviting feedback from users. The feedback is collected using a Macromedia Breeze (now Adobe Connect) presentation containing online Quiz questions. The questions are multichoice and freeform text entry. Answers are collected at a statistical level rather than individual.
The whole online Bipolar Education program has also been created on CD for distribution to users in the bush and remote areas.
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:
See I told you it was simple. Feel free to download the Image Upload Code and try it out for youself.
Despite some people provocatively claiming that blogging is dead (flogged to death by spam blogs, replaced by audio and video blogs, or that it never lived), blogging is alive and kicking as an interactive communications tool and search engine optimisation favourite. (more…)
