Posts Tagged ‘flash’
June 30th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles
Tags: flash, flex, javascript, ria, rna
I had an excellent discussion with my coworker Susan today about refining certain internal processes, and one of the tangents of the conversation went off on what the actual definition of a Rich Internet Application actually was. As we know, anything from a banner ad to a product configurator can be considered an RIA, and the only common element seemed to be that an RIA retains its functionality within the context of what the user is interacting with. In other words, if you click on button in an RIA, the resulting action does not significantly change the page or window the user is interacting with; Clicking to go to a new page loses context, using an animated accordion to display different content does not.
The similarities, though, end there. Implementation varies, technology varies, scope and location and functionality varies, and all in all it ends up being a pretty difficult convoluted mess to describe. At best you can group them via complexity, and after a brief exercise of that nature we realized that a new breed of networked application was emerging. Well, alright, perhaps not emerging, but instead gaining momentum and acceptance in the mainstream. Here’s the scale, see if you agree with our reasoning.
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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 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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February 14th, 2008
Author: Michael Krotscheck
Category: Articles, Tutorials
Tags: actionscript, analytics, flash, google, metrics, omniture, urchin
Web analytics is a way in which individual visitor action can be easily tracked within a site, and the aggregate statistical data derived from this can often lend remarkable insights into the effectiveness of your design, how ’sticky’ your content is, and what your users are actually looking for. Unfortunately, extending this paradigm into flash has always been tricky, because it doesn’t adhere to the page-based paradigm on which most Analytics packages are built. Once a flash application or widget is loaded, the server loses most knowledge about what the user is actually doing within it.
Usually this isn’t really a problem- flash applications have not been too complex and not many people care where on the banner you clicked, just that you left the site as a result. Yet now with the strong growth of Flex and Ajax our web applications are becoming more and more complex, and marketers and usability experts are now demanding this tracking data in spite of the paradigm limitations.
If you really think about it, what we really are interested in tracking is a user action, rather than the page loads we are collecting right now, which means that the largest part of an analysts job is turning these page events into meaningful user actions, rather than interpreting those users. There’s been some attempt to set metrics to individual places within a page flow, yet nobody has yet thought to rethink the paradigm. But I digress…
Most Metrics providers have since opened their API’s enough to allow a developer to pretend like a new page refresh has occurred. While this is hardly optimal, it does allow us to track user events from inside of flash, but the fact that each provider has implemented their API a different way means that implementing metrics for each is still a string of unique problems to solve.
To that end I’ve written the Metrics package, which is intended to provide a common metrics proxy that any developer may use, which relies on a common library of connectors that can be swapped out as needed. In this article I go over the details of how to use it, and touch on how individual connectors might be written.
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