FlashGuru Blog

Ive put a collection of my photos online from this years adventure to Sydney for the MXDU Conference. Thanks to flickr for providing a great tool for uploading and resizing a batch of photos. Its a great service, but unfortuneatley the RSS feed is pretty pants for two reasons, firstly it only provides the 10 latest photos, secondly it doesnt provide a direct link to any of the images. I was hoping to modify Graffiti to work with Flickr but decided against it because i would have to do tonnes of html parsing.

Myself and Peter Hall have been busy over the past couple of weeks working on a Flash Installation for the MXDU 2005 conference in Sydney. We have called it Graffiti.

The application is basically a noticeboard that allows attendees to send in photos, videos and text messages from their mobile phones, via email, through the website or via the Central application. They are displayed realtime on all clients. The application will run 24 hours a day on various plasma screens around the venue.

We also built in the ability for the organisers to broadcast announcements to all the screens to let people know about room changes, gatherings, competitions and such like. It is made with Flash MX 2004, Flash Communication Server, Flash Remoting, Coldfusion (Various add-on libraries) and Central.

As it will be running for 24 hours a day, we have to worry about memory usage, and thus it has been a big challenge and also alot of fun to rid it of any memory leaks, im still ironing out a few issues at the moment - just taking a break to write this. The browser version may still have problems if you leave it running for along time.

We have been asked to present a session about how me made it at the conference and will be releasing the whole application as open source so that other people can add new features etc…

I will be posting alot of my photos from the conference on there.

So, about 12 on Monday evening, Peter Hall arrives at the apartment, Grant and Aral were in bed already so i popped upstairs to his room to have a beer and catch up. Ended up going to bed about 1.30 am and was hoping to have a good 11 hours sleep, wishful thinking. Peter decided to wake me up at 8am. Thanks man Aral made a feeble attempt at stopping him, luckily for Grant, we stopped Peter from waking him.

We wandered through the malls looking for some more summer clothes. Peter Hall is hopeless at buying clothes so we spent an hour or so buying nothing other than some trainer socks. Matt Voerman arrived in the afternoon, had a beer on the balcony, i sat on the table and it collapsed, rather amusing.

We spent the remainder of the day wandering around town, had a Nando’s in a massive open food court, that had every type of food known to man. I ate chicken (i had a chicken craving), everybody else chowed on Chinese and Japanese food.

In the afternoon we went over to Mike Chambers hotel, hung out, fixed some bugs and tweaked the conference Graffiti application. Mike Downey joined us around 8pm and then we headed down to circular quays for a nice meal by the sea, good ol’ fish & chips for me, chatting flash, 6 star hotels etc…

After a 19 hour flight with a one hour break in-between, myself and Aral made it here to Sydney almost in one piece. We were completley knackered due to lack of sleep on the first leg of the flight, which brought us into Singapore. We decided it might be a good idea to choose our seats online, so we could ensure we sat together, we chose the only two seats that were left… the ones at the very back, seemed like a good idea at the time.

Doh… First things first, they were right next to the three washrooms on the plane, secondly the back row has two emergency exits with large windows with shutters on. Every single person that went to the washroom during the night opened the shutter to look at a black sky…. letting all the light in and waking me up, which had me very aggravated. Fortuneatley the second leg of the flight i slept for near enough eight hours on and off. Still my body clock is now all over the place.

We met Grant at the airport when we arrived and then headed over to our three bedroom apartment in the city. I was the lucky one that happened to work into the bedroom with the en-suite bathroom and television, so i parked my bags and that was that he he…. Aral was fuming. Anyways, we decided to spend the day exploring and so we caught the shuttle from outside our apartment into darling harbour and then caught the speedboat over to circular quays, where we ate ice-cream (lovely weather over here right now) from there we took the ferry over to Manly, were we could see the Sydney Opera House etc… lots of good photo ops. We perved over people on the beach as we were on our way to the aquarium were we watched a show about deadly animals. Then we explored the aquarium and its many tanks and animals for a good couple of hours. We headed back on the boat and got a good spot on the front on the top level, lots more good photo ops.

When we got back to circular quays we decided to walk back to the apartment from there, seemed like a good idea at the time, one hour later we got back, after walking around in circles a couple of times and so on. We are all fairly toasted (red) after only one day in the sun. Weve just been for a swim and in the spa and now were gonna grab a bite to eat after checking our mail. Were now waiting for Peter Hall to get here tonight and the rest of the gang tommorow and onwards. Photos are on their way… got alot of good shots. Thats me done for the night, im exhausted.

Tommorow evening myself and Aral Balkan will set off on our voyage across to the other side of the world for MXDU 2005 in Sydney were i will be presenting a new session on Effective Flash Navigation. If you dont have a ticket already, then there are still some tickets left. I am looking forward to leaving the british weather behind for the sun and warm weather that i expect from Australia, sitting on Bondi beach with a cocktail or three, and of course hanging out with all the regular’s and those people i havent seen since last years conference. It’s about time i had a holiday…. so ill be in Sydney for a couple of weeks. Im not looking forward to the 23 hour flight, but will have to grim and bear it! I will be posting photo’s and updates on the site, so check back often for updates on what us Flash geeks are getting up to (assuming all is well with the Internet Connection at our apartment and/or the conference venue). Should be a blast!

Wow! How cool is this? Macromedia Coldfusion MX 7 (Blackstone) was released today and it includes some very useful new features that make use of the Macromedia Flash Player and Macromedia Flash Paper.

With Coldfusion 7 you can now create rich forms using CFML tags. A Rich Form is a form made with Flash UI Controls. A new <cfform> attribute type=”flash” allows you to dynamically generate a Flash Movie on the server-side that can then be outputted to the browser for viewing in the Flash Player. You can even create tabbed navigation using the formgroup tag, splitting forms into easy to digest chunks. See the cross-over between Flex and Coldfusion here? - excellent stuff!

Another cool addition is the ability to convert documents into Flash Paper or PDF’s on the server-side using the new <cfdocument> tag. Basically it is now really easy to dynamically generate Flash Paper documents and either output them to the browser or send them via email. You can download the html source of a webpage on the server-side, convert it into a Flash Paper document that is then outputted to the browser and then user can print that webpage without any problems (such as content being cut off the page and so on…)

More information on these new features and many more can be found here.

Checkout the funky 3D navigation system at CrashMedia. They released their new site late last week and its looking shweeet! The items are listed in chronological order along a winding 3d trail. Use your arrow keys to move through the items, click an item to bring it to the front, or select a year from the timeline bar on the right. Probably the best executed 3d navigation system ive seen. Before this, i was very against 3d for navigation systems, looks like an example ill have to include in my upcoming presentation at MXDU in Sydney.