webqem blog

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.

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.

Well the results of the Rocketboots Flex developer competition are in and to everyone here’s surprise I actually won. Considering the calibre of the other entries it’s a very pleasing result. Now I have to focus on the Official Adobe Australian Developer Derby, I could do with an Xbox.

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 Adobe  Flex  2.0 release is on the horizon and in an effort to stir up developer interest Adobe has announced the  Adobe Flex Developer Derby . It’s a competition (with some rather cool prizes) for developers to take the current beta release of Flex 2.0 and make the best RIA possible. The only problem with this idea is that the competition is open only to residents of the USA and Canada excluding Quebec (they have some funny laws apparently). But all is not lost for the rest of the world, Robin Hilliard (from RocketBoots) has stepped up and announced a competition for us second class netizens. So to this end I turned my messing about with Flex 2.0 into something a little more focused. (more…)