More on Papervision 3D

Pelle Christenson from the Danish Flash User Group demonstrates setting up a PaperVision3D in Flex. PaperVision can use the Collada format (*.DAE) as input. Collada files can be exported from softwares like Maya, 3D Studio Max easily. Download his Flex source for the Little Planet example.

 On a separate note, you got to watch this . Animation at its best (informative, educational, alarming).

Satyameva – ECTA’s US premiere

“Satyameba” is being premiered on Jan 26th, 2008 in USA. Please come and watch the play. If you liked Phera, Kalsuddhi, Ron and other plays by ECTA, then this is a must see. It was first staged in India last year. Click here for the details.

NJISACF – rated as Adobe site of the day

NJISACF has been rated Adobe site of the day on Jan 09, 2008. It was built using Flex 3. I updated the site with the “Site of the day” logo. I guess this is the first official website built using Flex 3. It was fun building the video component using VideoDisplay class in Flex. This website has been viewed in 73 countries based on the Google Analytics stats.

Flex 3 application – NJISACF

Well, I launched NJISACF website built on Flex 3 SDK. Please check it out. I am open for suggestions. If you need to know how I built certain things in the site, let me know. I am more than willing to share my experience. It took me 50 hours (3 week-ends) to build this site (from concept to go live). I am able to track visitors using Google Analytics too. So far it got hits from 33 countries.

Recently I updated the video component on the site. Learnt the tricks of skinning. Scalenine is a very good resource.

HTML Special characters in Flex

I struggled to put special characters like copyright and registered trademark in a <mx:Label> control. I was reading the data from XML file where the content is published as HTML text. I gave up using <mx:Label> and started using <mx:Text> and I was able to display copyright(©) once I had replaced © with #0169;. Similarly I used #0064; for @ sign in email address. I finally found Peter Dehaan’s blog post very handy to resolve these issues.

I am still struggling to do the following though in <mx:Text> control.

• test 1
  • test 2

Also I am not able to put an ordered list too.

1. test 1
2. test 2

LiveCycle Data Service, Spring and Hibernate

This is a good post on LiveCycle Data Service, Spring and Hibernate. Here is the link to the LiveCycle Data Services Developers Guide.

Design Patterns, Flex and Actionscript

Read posts from Paul Williams on the Presentation Patterns for Flex applications. Martin Fowler has been documenting Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture. Here is a short summary of the patterns in Patterns of Enterprise Application Architecture (P of EAA) .

Two books on Design Patterns and ActionScript 3

• Advanced ActionScript 3 with Design Patterns – Joey Lott and Danny Patterson
• ActionScript 3.0 Design Patterns: Object Oriented Programming Technique – William Sanders and Chandima Cumaranatunge

Flex Builder Tips & Tricks

Check it out – Flex Builder Tips and Tricks

Look at the “Responses/Comments” section also. May be keep contributing more comments to that list.

Google Tech Talks

These are the Google Tech talk videos that I saw recently.

Pipes – A tool for remixing the web. I wrote my own pipe very quickly. It shows used cars in a Yahoo map based on Google data for used cars. When you click it, it shows the details.

Scrum et al.

Biofuels Think Outside the Barrel

In Box zero

 Strike up the brand

 Flex, Flash and Apollo for Rich Internet Application James Ward talks about Flex

Django Web Development for perfectionists with deadlines

Human Computation

 What to do with Thousands of GPS Tracker

Everything is Miscellaneous

Away with applications – Death of Desktop.

 If Google becomes Giigle

 Gears and the Mashup Problem

SWFAddress and deep linking

All the intranet projects we did using Flex didn’t have any support for browser back/forward button. It didn’t have unique URLs to bookmark nor abilities to expose URLs for the search engines like Yahoo, Google or internal website search for SEO initiatives. The issue is that we are very much used to the browser buttons and the UIs in applications we are building still has page based metaphor. Till we have UI with page based metaphor, we will need to address the deep linking issue. Flex 2 doesn’t address the deep linking issue and Flex 3 now has APIs for addressing deep linking issue.

SWFAddress has been used a lot by many Flash websites to solve the deep linking issue. It supports the most popular browsers. The blog also covers good topics on using  SWFAddress. I found Ryan Christensen’s blog very helpful regarding this issue. By the way, SWFObject 2.0 beta 6 has been released.