// labs

I've been a fan of Eclipse for a long time now, even before FDT and Flash Builder were built around it. The use of workspaces, once you get your head around them, is powerful for focusing your head on the work at hand, keeping all associated projects within the one space.

However there are times when I wish I was able to have multiple workspaces open. And too the rescue comes the command line.
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Last year we developed an application for the University of Melbourne, Ultrasound Education Group, Heartweb. The application is a file browsing, support and synchronisation utility for students enrolled in the Ultrasound Education Group's courses.

The group had a large amount of course material that traditionally was distributed on media (such as DVDs) to the students. The material was all being protected via Livecycle PDF security policy but they requested a simpler method of distributing and updating the materials.
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We've been doing a lot with Native Extensions for AIR lately, both in Android and iOS, and I just wanted to put together a quick "how to" on using other people's Actionscript Native Extensions (ANE) in Flash Builder 4.6.

I'm going to assume you already understand the process of developing and deploying mobile applications using AIR.

The process is quite simple, you'll need the supplied ANE for the extension. In your mobile project you want to add it into, open up the project properties (Right click / Properties) and find the "Actionscript Build Path" (or "Flex Build Path" if it's a Flex project).

You'll see a tab up the top labeled "Native Extensions" in which you can "Add ANE...". Click on this and select the ANE extension file. Once it's added in, you can expand out the details of the extension to see the target platforms supported by the extension. Below I'm showing the details on our Android Camera Extension.

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The Disaster Mapper - An interactive Resource for Schools is a project for the Attorney-General's Department, Australian Emergency Management Institute. The aim of the project was to provide an educational resource aimed at school students for investigating Australian natural disasters throughout history.

It was developed in 2009 but has just been released to the public.

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Holden's latest promotion for their Barina includes a game that we developed for ThinkNimble and McCann Melbourne.

The game is a Guitar Hero style game, where icons move along the road and the player has to hit the matching key as the icon moves over the hit area.

"The aim of the game is to beat the street and score as many points possible by hitting colourful icons as they race down the street! There are eight stages that get more challenging as you play. The prize? Whoever has the highest eligible score at the end of the competition period will win an all-new Holden Barina."

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We've been so busy over the last few months that we haven't had a chance to update any information on what we've been doing.

So here's the first in a series of updates.

One of our clients Marija Ivkovic, an amazing photographer, whose site I did a while ago. In order to show to power of Flash we decided to turn her site into a mobile application, by taking the exact same code base from the site and applying a few small tweaks.

The end result was actually quite surprising for a direct port of a website. We obviously added some touch and swipe based interactions, removed the "mouse over" interactions and added in a nifty little database cache process to cache images for offline access, but overall the code base remained relatively unchanged.

We were very excited to be able to supply this as an option for development. Creating an interactive web and mobile application has never been easier or more powerful.

It's available for free for iPhone, iPod Touch and iPad in the App Store.

Well if you use OSX or any program that produces metadata files on your file-system, it can become a nightmare trying to sort through the files you need to check in to svn... However! Once you discover there is a little hidden global ignore feature in svn, all the horror goes away.

On OSX the file of concern is located :

~/.subversion/config

Linux (sometimes) :

/etc/subversion/config

Windows... No idea sorry, depends on your client, though apparently TortoiseSVN has it as an option...

To add a file or folder to the list just open up that file and find the "global-ignores" option. It's just a space separated list of potential file or folder names that you want to ignore.

Mine now looks like this:

global-ignores = *.o *.lo *.la *.al .libs *.so *.so.[0-9]* *.a *.pyc *.pyo _notes .DS_Store .#* .AppleDouble *:2e_* ._*

Have fun with a cleaner svn...

So I know this was a few weeks ago now, but I took a few weeks off afterwards to travel around Europe and now that I'm back I thought I'd put together a few little thoughts on the week.

As an Australian it's a long journey to Brighton, UK, and one that even with my passion for Flash could not be solely made for a 3 day conference. So with luck a few friends and I packed up and went off for a month to travel around France and Spain and I managed to work in the trip to Brighton for a few days.

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We've just pushed a new site live for the interior designer, David Hicks. The site is a simple gallery style site using jQuery and smarty templates.

David has had a Flash site for a long time but recent trends has made him request a new simplified html version of his site, and to reflect his new branding.

See the new site at davidhicks.com.

So we all know and love our Android notification bar. So I just wanted to post a quick example application to show how easy it is to display a local notification.

The process runs something like this:

• retrieve a reference to the NotificationManager
• create a Notification
• notify the manager of the notification you've created

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