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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April 24th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: apple, corporate strategy, google, judo economics, microsoft, nintendo
A few years ago I took what must have been one of the most entertaining courses of my graduate career: Business Game Theory. It was run using the Harvard Case method, but with no supporting textbook and no explanatory lectures before a case was assigned- we simply received a problem and were expected to solve it by the next lecture. The problems themselves were simple: we were given a situation and asked a fairly straightforward question. Should Company B enter a particular market, how will a competition play out, can you predict the next step in a competition given certain parameters, things like that. Most of us got the first problems blatantly wrong- the tacit requirement to do our own research didn’t sink in until after the first discussion- yet after that reality check it became one of the most engaging classes ever: The problems were challenging but not beyond rational analysis, and though I spent hours at a time bending my brain around decision making in a risky environment and other situations, I can still name the topics and methodologies for every case.
As a result I was practically giddy when I recognized a real world example of Judo Economics, a situation where a player uses the strength of their opponent against them. Consider a simple case: There exist two markets for a single product and two companies that can produce said product. The first market is large, however serving it comes with a high cost and therefore a low margin. The second market is small, but serving it is cheap and therefore comes with a high margin. The first of the companies must serve both markets, has deep pockets, while the second is considering market entry, but can only serve one of the two. Each company can only set one price against both markets. The question posed is: What will happen?
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April 18th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Libraries
Tags: actionscript, flex, localization
One of my many and varied tools from my localization sandbox, the StringsProxy is a generic object proxy container intended to simplify the management of large sets of application strings with little investment from the developer. It’s effectively an implementation of the Proxy object that includes propertyChange event dispatching so that Data Binding works properly.
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