assertTrue is the professional blog of Luke Bayes and Ali Mills

Flash Lite 1.1 Mobile Google Calendar

Posted by: Ali Mills Wed, 08 Nov 2006 06:42:00 GMT

The video above demonstrates the Google Calendar edition of the Flash Lite 1.1 mobile calendar project we’re working on at Pattern Park. Please forgive the video quality. It’s just a sneak peak, and we’re not marketing guys.

In the video, I walk through launching the calendar (which, as a nod to CL2, we call CaLendar2) from a deck icon; navigating its month, day, and event views; and adding an event to Google Calendar with the application’s hook to Google’s SMS gateway.

The version demo’ed above is a quite a few iterations beyond what I showed during my MAXUP presentation. In fact, it’s bug free. You may be wondering, “it sounds mature, is CaLendar2 available in source or packaged form”? Well, for those asking, thanks for asking. The answer is, “not yet”. We still need to implement a distribution process because of some Flash Lite 1.1 details. Our plan is to have that process complete in time to release CaLendar2 with Lifebin. We’ll be talking about Lifebin quite a bit in future posts.

If you’re interested in CaLendar2, will you please post a comment letting us know? If there’s enough interest, we’re willing to shift priorities to get the distribution process implemented sooner. Also, if you feel like CaLendar2 is something you would pay for, will you please include how much you feel it’s worth in your comment? Luke and I plan for it to be free, but it’s always interesting to get a feel for something’s value.

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Max 2006

Posted by: Luke Bayes Sat, 28 Oct 2006 00:46:00 GMT

We just got back in town from Vegas for the Max conference last night and I wanted to blog a little bit about a few different things…

First off, we promised to post our presentation materials, so here they are:
  1. Source code from the project we demoed (6 KB)
  2. Powerpoint doc (5 MB)

Secondly, I feel like our presentation on Thursday went exceptionally well, but the one on Wednesday could have been better. I’m not going to lament it too much – or try to make excuses – but suffice to say that neither of us feels our performance on Wednesday met our expectations.

If you agree with us about Wednesday, you have our apologies, if you disagree, well, we both appreciate the support!

Finally, I wanted to express some real gratitude for some of the other presentations that I was able to attend. I have to say that I was absolutely blown away by both the quantity and quality of the presentations that I attended, following are some highlights from my somewhat blurry memory:

  • Roger Gonazales gave an awesome presentation highlighting some low-level details in the MXMLC compiler and how they pertain to building modular swf applications. I’ve known that he was a smart guy for quite awhile now, man, I really had no idea. He managed to jam about a years’ worth of information into an hour, and still make it comprehensible!
  • Ely Greenfield gave a really good talk on component development in Flex2. He answered a lot of the questions that I’ve been pondering over the past month or so. But the most amazing thing he did, was present a swf file of a project with snapshots of it at each stage of development. So he was able to step through the development of a Flex2 component, one step at a time, without actually making us sit there and watch him type… It was also nice to see him present a really nice-looking Flex component. It was a Flash version of the new album browser from iTunes and it looked great.

There were quite a few other presos that I really liked, but I’m out of time for now, maybe Mills will talk about some of those…

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MAX :: Design Patterns in ActionScript 3

Posted by: Ali Mills Tue, 10 Oct 2006 16:39:00 GMT

In two weeks, Luke and I will be at MAX where we’ll be giving two sessions on Design Patterns in ActionScript 3. The first session is on Wednesday, October 25 from 1:45pm – 2:45pm in rooms 4201 – 4202 of the Lando space. The second is on Thursday, October 26 from 3:00pm – 4:00pm in rooms 4105 – 4106 of the Delfino space. Both Lando and Delfino are on the fourth floor. If you have a Google Calendar account, you can add our session to it by clicking the following buttons:


for Wednesday for Thursday

If you’re registered for MAX, use the MAX Session Scheduler to add our session to your schedule. Lists of all Wednesday and Thursday sessions are posted here and here. If you want something more portable than the MAX Session Scheduler, Bill Perry is soliciting MAX conference guides in Flash Lite that he’ll be uploading to his site as he gets them.

If you haven’t already registered for MAX, you still can! Go to https://www.adobemax06.com/ and do it.

Finally, if you can’t register but are planning to be in Vegas and want to attend something Adobe related, consider attending Ted Patrick’s unconference MAXUP. I’ll be there demonstrating a mobile iCalendar reader project I’m working on. Many other people will be there, too. To sign up for MAXUP, just follow Ted’s instructions.

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MAXUP :: Mobile iCalendar Reader is Going to MAX

Posted by: Ali Mills Fri, 06 Oct 2006 19:07:00 GMT

MAXUP is an unconference that will be running parallel to the MAX conference from October 24rd – October 26th at the The Venetian Hotel in Las Vegas, Nevada. I’ve been hearing about these unconference Foo Camp style spin-offs for a little while and like the idea. Since I’ll already be in Vegas presenting at MAX on design patterns in ActionScript 3, I’m going to join all these attendees and participate in MAXUP, too.

At MAXUP I’m going to give a demo of a mobile calendar project I’m working on that reads and presents remote calendar files (specifically iCalendar formatted files) on Flash Lite devices. Like most projects, this one has both a server and client component. The server is written in Ruby and the client in Flash Lite 1.1. I’ll be demonstrating the project running on my Nokia 6600 and Nokia N70 phones, and discuss how it was built. I’ll do my best to follow Scott Berkin’s advice on how to run a great unconference session.

Here are some recent pictures of the calendar running on my N70:

Read more...

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