May 26th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles, Inspiration, News
Tags: actionscript, air, code, flash, installer, pandora, practical desktop
I’ve finally gotten around to fully open source my various applications, factoring and debugging the code, commenting and applying all the necessary licenses and other miscellaneous logistical duties to get my two AIR applications up and out there.
Practical Desktop
Practical Desktop appears to be a simple timekeeping application, though in reality it’s an open source widget framework that allows pretty much anyone to build a deployable block of functionality that can start interacting with other widgets. The wrapper’s there for you, go nuts. The source is here
From a personal perspective, I use it as a beta and explorative sandbox, because there are a lot of interesting things coming out in the near future that I’d like to offer some guidance on development best practice, and to do so I will have to figure it out myself first. Rest assured that the widgets I build will be functionally complete, though perhaps limited in feature support.
Pandora
The Pandora Desktop application is really just a customized webkit browser that’s hardwired to the Pandora mini player. I’ve fixed the application so minimization works in Windows, and expanded it to include the player’s html wrapper as well. The reason I did this is because Pandora’s a free service, and I’d like to make sure that I’m not ripping them off by stripping out the ads. Optimally I’d like to help them convert their existing player to AIR, but until I have free time (or they pay me 
) that won’t happen.
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May 19th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: News
Good morning, everyone. With the release/opensourcing of a few AIR applications I’ve been working on, I’m refactoring the majority of the Practical Flash libraries. I apologize to you if this breaks your svn:externals, but in order to both stay in line with Adobe’s branding guidelines and make sure that I make my SVN repository as flexible as possible, I’m breaking things apart a little. Basically, the new folder structure will be as follows:
- Ant
Ant macros, includes and libs
- Libraries
The new home of the practicalflash libraries, refactored to match the Flex 3 project layout
- PandoraDesktop
The Pandora Desktop application
- PracticalDesktop
The Practical Desktop utility widget framework application and timekeeper
- Tools
Miscellaneous non-actionscript tools and utilities
- build.xml
The unified build script
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May 3rd, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: air, desktop, drunken coding, flash, flex, pandora
So there I was, hacking away at AIR, and my iPod runs out of batteries. I was in that rare coding zen where you really need the audio to lock you out from the rest of the world, so I was fairly annoyed that the random conversation here at Apropos suddenly started to interfere with my productivity. No worries though, I could always resort to Pandora, right?
Now, I’m not a big fan of Pandora. Don’t get me wrong, I love what they’re doing and have found some phenomenal music there, but the fact that I always have to keep a browser window open to make use of their service has kindof annoyed me, and now was no different. I could deal with it though for the sake of productivity…. until I realized that AIR came with its own embedded WebKit browser.
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May 1st, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: News
Tags: adobe, flash, flv, open screen project, open source, strategy, swf
This morning (well, at 12:01 AM) Adobe announced a large cross-industry collaborative effort called the Open Screen Project. According to the marketing boilerplate, it is dedicated to driving consistent rich Internet experiences across televisions, personal computers, mobile devices, and consumer electronics.
What it really means is described in this article.
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