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.

[Path/To/Eclipse]/eclipse -data [Your/Workspace/Dir] &

I've wrapped this up into a little bash script to start eclipse from either the current directory or using the specified directory as the workspace:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -n "$1" ]; then
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " $1
	/Applications/eclipse/eclipse  -data $1 &
else
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " `pwd`
	/Applications/eclipse/eclipse  -data `pwd` &
fi

On OSX it's better to use the open command, like:

#!/bin/sh
if [ -n "$1" ]; then
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " $1
	open -n /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app --args  -data $1
else
	echo "Starting eclipse: WORKSPACE: " `pwd`
	open -n /Applications/eclipse/Eclipse.app --args  -data `pwd`
fi

This will work equally as well with the Flash Builder application, just replace the Eclipse.app with the path to Flash Builder.

Happy workspacing!

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.

Users' of the application log in and then are presented with a list of material that their policy allows them access to. The content was all moved to the Livecycle server and access was only available through custom developed secure API.

The application allows the user to select material for synchronisation keeping a directory, or individual files, "up-to-date" with the most recent updates to course material. As they browse through the material, files can be viewed or located on the local machine in the default system viewers or in the application where applicable.

Additionally links and other information can be passed to the students via the application allowing the course organisers to supply the students with important information through a single application portal.

A web browsing function was included so they could display content from the Heartweb website directly in the application. We used the StageWebView class functionality to achieve this end.

The application is written completely in Adobe AIR, allowing us to deploy across the multiple different platforms that the students used. We used the built in application updating techniques to provide application updates to the students.

Unfortunately, unless you want to sign up to the Heartweb course to get access to the materials, the application is unavailable, but it was a great experience in integrating file synchronisation with a secure document-based internet distribution process.

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.

The extension is now included in your project, however before you leave here I suggest you go to the "Build Packaging" for the platforms you are deploying and check the extension is going to be packaged (and available) with them.

You should now be able to return to your code and use the functionality and classes supplied in the extension, hopefully you've been supplied with documentation or example usage of the extension!

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.

This project made use of the latest Flash technologies with the Google Maps API to provide an interactive map where users could navigate and search disaster information by time, location, disaster types and keywords.

The application uses a very simple series of navigational elements. A series of large buttons allows the user to select the disaster categories of interest and a timeline allows the user to limit the time period displayed. The disasters matching these two filters are then displayed on the map along with overview information of the selected disaster categories in the information panels on the left.

Media associated with each disaster (including images, flv, youtube, viemo, mp3 and other media types) can be viewed either in quick view in the information panels or in the detail overlay.

The system also supported and included additional data such as population, temperature, rainfall and specific high-risk disaster areas which could be overlaid on the map.

The result is a very easy-to-use, interesting website and something suitable for the target audience of school students.

Making use of some extra available time, distriqt also developed an additional component for the CMS which allowed an administrator to directly edit overlay data on top of a Google Map, using a standard data format (KML). This allowed the client to create more meaningful and suitable overlay information for the website such as risk areas, temperature, population and rainfall data.

The project was delivered on-time and on-budget, and has been well-received by the client, schools, and educators - all feedback has been very positive.

See the site here.

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."

It was created as a Facebook application to tap into the popularity of the growing social gaming market and to promote the features of the all-new Holden Barina. The game features music and sound effects from the radio adverts and TVC.

The competition is running until the end of February 2012. Play the game here

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.

The trip there was fraught with danger, so much so that my laptop had packed it in by the time I got to Brighton. A brand new MacBook Air mind you. I arrived late afternoon into Brighton and of course my first destination was the Apple store, can't survive a conference without a laptop. Thankfully it was a quick fix and I was in and out within 30 minutes. They were actually really helpful and even gave me a UK power adapter so I didn't have to use the converter I've had for years.

So I was back on track and went off to the Dome for registration.

The first day was lots of fun. Stray's talk about the brain was compelling, I went in expecting an update on my favourite framework, Robotlegs and walked away with a lesson in brain science. She had us playing memory games and doing basic maths and, Stray, I've since become a Pomodoro timer addict as well!

Rob Bateman talked on Away3D and the integration with Stage3D. Eugene showed us some really amazing image pattern matching techniques that he's working on, using Alchemy and Apparat.

The day finished off with Jon Burgerman showing us how he ended up where he is, an artist with a fun, creative illustration style and interactive passion. A interesting trip along through the life of an illustrator. Even managed to score myself a little sticker of one of his characters.

The evening I met up with Neil who I worked with at Studio Moso in Melbourne and we went out for a few drinks. He's now working at Stink Digital in London and was great to meet some of the cool flash devs from there: Ian, Phil and Thomas.

But the highlight of the evening had to be meeting the Robotlegs creator, Shaun Smith (twitter). I fear I probably acted a little star struck and came across like an adoring idiot but I hope he understood. It had been a big day of meeting people who from Australia seem far distant and almost imaginary, but they are all real and down to earth people!

Day 2 started off a little slow (mainly because of the beer from the previous evening). I took my time getting to the conference so I could wander the streets of Brighton and discover some of the much talked about street art.

Seb-lee's presentation soon kicked my brain into gear. (Or perhaps it was all that coffee. They were giving it away for free!!) He showed us a really clever way of using the audience's mobile devices, controlled by a server to create a display, each device displaying a colour at a particular time. The thing I found really interesting was his idea to locate each device in the room. He sent each device an id and got the device to transmit it by flashing the screen colour (sort of like morse code) Then using a camera he analysed the camera feed for each id and attached it to the identified location. Such a great solution to what may have initially seemed a very complex problem.

Mike Chambers followed up with a break down of the expressive web, a site set up by Adobe to show the potential of HTML5 and CSS3.

More talks, before the evening finished in the required amount of one pound beers, i.e. lots.

Day 3, more coffee, more talks, I'm being brief on the talks as I think I got more out of the conference lunch breaks and evenings than the actual talks. One I would like to mention from the last day however is one by Jared Ficklin, "Visions from the man cave". This guy was great, showing off what fun can be had with a few pieces of electronics and a great idea. From the toilets that showed not only whether the toilet was occupied but if the occupant was sitting or standing, to large scale interactive music bit sampler, and of course, playing with smoke and fire!

So as the conference came to an end, and after a few of the Stink Digital boys and me had a huge buffet dinner, it was time for me to leave Brighton.

The conference was an amazing experience, something that we just don't have in Australia, and I don't think would work even if you managed to pull together the speaker list and venue locally. The amazing thing about this conference was the people that attend. The development community in close proximity, from London, France, Germany, Netherlands, and even Russia. It really is just mind blowing the number of highly qualified developers over there.

And as I say that I think about our local community and love that it is so small. We don't need a big conference to get together, just the pub on a Friday night. Either way, I've come back inspired, excited and full of ideas for the year to come.

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

The Notification class, at it's simplest consists of an image icon and 3 pieces of text, one for the ticker, one as the title and the last as the content text.

package com.distriqt.mobile.experiments;
 
import android.app.Activity;
import android.app.Notification;
import android.app.NotificationManager;
import android.app.PendingIntent;
import android.content.Context;
import android.content.Intent;
import android.os.Bundle;
 
public class NotificationExperimentActivity extends Activity
{
    private static final int HELLO_ID = 1;
 
    @Override
    public void onCreate(Bundle savedInstanceState)
    {
        super.onCreate(savedInstanceState);
        setContentView(R.layout.main);
 
        //
	//  Look up the notification manager server
        NotificationManager nm =
          (NotificationManager) getSystemService(NOTIFICATION_SERVICE);
 
        //
        //  Create your notification
        int icon = R.drawable.icon;
        CharSequence tickerText = "Hello";
        long when = System.currentTimeMillis();
 
        Notification notification =
            new Notification( icon, tickerText, when);
 
        Context context = getApplicationContext();
        CharSequence contentTitle = "My notification";
        CharSequence contentText = "Hello World!";
        Intent notificationIntent =
            new Intent(this, NotificationExperimentIntent.class);
        PendingIntent contentIntent =
            PendingIntent.getActivity(this, 0, notificationIntent, 0);
 
        notification.setLatestEventInfo(
            context,
            contentTitle,
            contentText,
            contentIntent);
 
        //
        //  Send the notification
        nm.notify( HELLO_ID, notification );
    }
}
 

The Android developer documentation goes through all of this in detail here.