What’s new?

I finished working on a new partially flash website for EBBA (European Border Breakers Awards).
The site is nice combination between flash and HTML.

I must say it was really fun to do and I hope I get more opportunities to work on projects like this one!

Check out the result at : EBBA

(Only “Home” and “The winners” are flash)

Last year at TFE we (Gerben and I) have been working on a project called Tactive. It’s an online platform for treatment of addictions. This platform is a replacement for the already existing treatment for an alcohol addiction. It seems to be easier for people to sign up for a treatment online rather than meeting an expert face to face.

The platform is build generic and can be extended for other addictions but the first release is for an alcohol addiction. The platform consists of seven Flex applications, from these applications the client uses three. The other applications are used by counselors and administrators.

The Clientapplication

Via this application the client communicates with the counselor. The counselor can send assignments which help the client to complete the treatment. From this application the diary and help can be openend.

The Diary

During the treatment a client can fill in his alcohol consumption. Also the counselor can monitor the drinking habit and set a drinking target for the clients.

Via the moment description panel a client can describe what he was feeling and why they wanted to drink.

The other applications which are used by administrators and counselors are used for administration and maintainability.

Tips

Define your stylesheets beforehand! Doing this after a couple of months without any good structure in the beginning isn’t the best thing to do.

We learned a lot about security. Medical information has the highest privacy rating so it needs to be kept as save as possible.

We used subversion and cruisecontrol on a remote server to develop and deploy our project with ease.

Potential clients can sign up via a website called alcoholdebaas.nl (alcohol treatment [dutch]) .

A few weeks ago I subscribed to participate an e-seminar of Buzzword.
Today it finally was time to take action, I got home as fast as I could and started up my home PC. To be sure I took the special meeting_test and everything checked out perfect. After login the crowd started showing up on a map, which is nice.
This way you can see people from all over the world participated.
I was planning to do a full review about this e-seminar and put it here, yes… exactly in this post. Then the presentation begun. I managed the last a half hour, from that point a totally lost the total picture. Why? because the audio was very bad… I heard about 40 percent of each sentence. There was a “sollution”, a telephone number with an audio stream. The only thing is, I wasn’t prepared for VoIP and I don’t live in the US, so that’s opposed a problem. I was really disappointed because I looked forward to this e-seminar!

Well, from what I’ve seen the presentation itself was good and well prepared, thumbs up for the people at Buzzword! I only hope this presentation will be downloadable soon with good audio, because I want to hear what they have to say about their fantastic product.

Anyway the’re probably will be other people to review this e-seminar, I’m only sorry I’m not included.

Jaap Kooiker

A couple of days ago I struggled with (at the time) seemed a strange problem.

I had a main application which on it’s part loaded new applications (sub swf’s). Both (the main and the sub) swf’s where on my local machine at the time of development and both swf’s used (besides many other classes) the same (from the same package) static class with static functions. Let’s say the Class had a counter which whenever called, a function called countUp() traced the current count, like so:

public static function countUp():Void{
trace(”current count: “+Sample.countUp++);
}

For now everything worked fine. So at the end of the day I uploaded all the swf’s to a test server. The next morning I started with a glimps at the victory I achieved the day before. I did this by compiling the main application and discovered it wasn’t working anymore. The output for an instance would be this:


(output : current count: 1)
(output : current count: 2)
(output : current count: 3)
(output : current count: 4)

and when the external loaded swf called the static method


(output : current count: 1)
(output : current count: 2)
(output : current count: 3)

Somehow the two swf’s used a different static class??? At that time I had a big questionmark above my head and got up to get some coffee first.

While drinking my coffee I re-tested the whole on the test server and it worked fine…what the… After some struggeling I remembered that the XML for the main application had Urls to the sub swf’s. Of course these sub swf’s where comming from the server. Maybe that is the problem? I discussed this with a colleague of mine and we concluded flash does this (as in the sample above) for security reasons (of course). This way it is not possible for another external swf to manipulate the classes from another server. It’s all seems so logical now…

So from an interaction design point of view:

If there only was a Sercurity Warning in the flash output panel….

Jaap Kooiker

I’m sorry to say the above out loud, but I just have to.
Personally I don’t like the standard flash components. Why? They are heavy and mostly unusable because we use flash to build custom interfaces and the standard components aren’t made to be custom easily. Take for instance a button and try to make a fade between off state and on state. Anyway, once in every couple of years I grab a component (as with the FLVPlayback in an earlier post) and start playing with it. The conclusion: I always get a little disappointed.

I know, I know, in a moment I’m going to tell you what I want, keep reading

Now with Flash CS3 Adobe has thrown away the one component that could be of any use and that’s the accordion component. Well that said…. I still think the components set shipped with Flash CS3 is wrong. I have my own custom AS2 components which do exactly what I want, when I want. I name a few: Button, DropDown, Accordion, List, Pane (which is Box in Flex), Scroll, Pager, and so on…. You noticed something? There are similarities in the standard Flash components set and mine! But I still (and many others out there) create my own, mine are very customizable and do exactly what I want. So for me the flash components are obsolete and ready to be thrown overboard.

So, what do I want…

…the basic, but apparently unappealing (I mean not selling) layout components (which are shipped with Adobe Flex Builder). I think these would be helpful. I know these would be heavy to, but at least they are usefull and I will use them. The layout components could have sober functionality and they probably do what I want anyway, layout other displayObjects. The great thing is that skinning is not needed. Though the components have to be somewhat extendable, like in Adobe Flex. A few important components I’d like to see in the standard Flash Components Library: Container, Box, VBox, HBox. Devider… So Adobe, if you please could make these suitable for flash (or tell me why they can’t, please), I would be a happy man. For now I will just create my own layout components…again.

Jaap Kooiker

EDIT