// 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.

So as many people know, I've been promising an update to the KML Loader for a while now, and even to the point where I've had some local revisions and haven't had the time to check them in (I know, I know, bad practice!)

The major update has been to enable the ability to load linked assets. Initially this just extends to ground overlays and custom icons, but now that I have the structure setup to do this I'll be able to add in linked files and styles easily.

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Just assembling a quick list of some of the shortcuts I use everyday in Eclipse. Let me know if you have any other favourites!

• Code hinting: Ctrl + Space
• Change view: Cmd + 3
• Open any file quickly without browsing for it in the Package Explorer: Cmd + Shift + R
• Open a type (e.g.: a class, an interface) without clicking through interminable list of packages: Cmd + Shift + T
• Go directly to a member (method, variable) of a huge class file, especially when a lot of methods are named similarly: Cmd + O
• Go to line number N in the source file: Cmd + L, enter line number
• Go to other open editors: Cmd + E
• Go to a type declaration: F3 or Cmd + click on declaration

Note: Cmd == Ctrl on Windows/Linux

We've recently updated Lachlan's site with some new features, including an introduction slideshow, and integration with RoyaleCMS. The CMS is a powerful, rebrandable CMS for any XML driven website or web application. It's a flash/php based CMS and provides a very simple and clean interface especially good for gallery and image based websites.

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For an upcoming project we needed to stream content from the user's webcam to be recorded on the server. In theory this sounded like a basic operation, having used FMS to this end before, but actually installing and setting up the Red5 server proved to be a little tricky. So I just wanted to outline the process I went through to get a Red5 Server running on ubuntu and how to setup your first recording stream.

Red5 is a powerful Java based video streaming and multi-user solution for the Flash Player. Red5 includes support for the latest multi-user API’s including NetConnection, NetStream and SharedObject’s while providing a powerful RTMP / Servlet implementation. It is basically an open source Flash Media Server.

We're going to go through two major steps here, firstly installing Red5 on Ubuntu and then building a simple application to record the webcam.
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