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Tag Archives: cool

Adobe AIR is so cool

Many times I have been touching the world, but never really had the time to look into developing my own applications based on this framework. This night I stumbled upon it again – a random application “Parleys Desktop 4.0” which turned out to be an desktop Adobe AIR appliation which can playback various medias. I found one – a – which was about cartoons. As an example of just how cool it was, this post was written at the same time that the was showing fullscreen in the background of my Windows Live Writer (where I wrote this blog).

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I found a button which apparently should let me embed the video, and here it is:

Nice so nice, not only the video above: “ Rules!”, but the Adobe Air Desktop application! Well done Adobe! Oh, and a very cool video – here are info and screenshoot from the applicaiton running (here showing information).

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Description
Using Traditional Animation Techniques for More Effective User Experiences
Speaker
Chet Haase is a Java Platform, Standard Edition (Java SE) client architect in the Java Desktop Group. He works with the client teams to make Java technology on the desktop more productive, useful, and successful. This means tracking desktop application development in general and making sure that Java software meets and hopefully exceeds developer requirements. His background is in graphics, both 2D and 3D, so he tend to focus more on graphics-specific issues in general, such as performance and graphical effects for GUI toolkits. He writes about Desktop Java issues such as graphics, performance, and Swing effects on blog at http://weblogs.java.net/blog/chet. Romain Guy is a French student currently working as an intern with the Swing Team at Sun Microsystems. He has 7 years of experience in Java development, as an Open Source and freelance developer. He also works as a freelance journalist for a French computing magazine, as a translator for OReilly and taugh Java in a University. Today Romain focuses on UI design and humane interaction.

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“Information is beautiful” – if you understand it!

To me it has allways been a joy to deliver information in an understandable form. Being 45 years old I have seen some patterns within my own behaviour (why did it take so long I often ask myself!). Communicating information is a hard task – I prefer to take the piece of information into another form which the reciever will understand. Often transforming the information into something visual make it more likely that the message (information) send will be recieved by the reciever as something close to the original message. Tonight I just found a great ! The website www.informationisbeautiful.net contains several examples of how well information can be consumed if delivered in the correct form!

imageWhat is truely healthy for you?

To the right you see an example. This interactive visualiazation will show you what is healty for you. For your eyes, skin or other of the selectable uses and types. It is very convincing and inspiring I think.

So go visit it here: http://bit.ly/aGoeom

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“When sea levels attack”

Another example of – giving you something to think about…

I have a dream…

In Denmark we pay a lot of tax, that is not a problem – I would however like to at least get to know what I am paying to! So my dream is to have some visualization of what the tax I pay for now could be said to cover. I know how much I earn per month, which lets me calculate a tax per hour/minute number. So what you should imagine is: You calculate how much tax I pay on say a national level. You then divide the national tax “spenditures” and get end up with a calender showing for instance for how many weeks I work and pay for the danish armed forces. Or if I look at the clock now: Who am I paying to right now? So the dream would let any person in Denmark log on to a portal which would give such information to them.

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A very usefull CSS framework

image I am in the search of a which will make it more standard to implement designs and add more resusability to the work put in creating CSS based designs. The issue arose when a collegue of mine – Nickey – started a talk about CSS frameworks.

I started from the top of the 12 mentioned frameworks and until now I have reached number 4 – which is YUI Grids CSS from Yahoo. It is a big thing so I just jumped directly to their online tool to autogenerate CSS for generic layouts. It is called “CSS Grid Builder”, and I must say that my first hand impression is one of respect! It is an impressive piece of work. See my very simple 1st test.

I will be trying out other frameworks, but for sure will also try to use the framework from in practice!

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Xara Web Designer – easy website creation for designer

So you are a creative mind? You dont know much about the tags of and the nature of a webpage? But still you would love to just design your and voila! put it on the web – as a valid HTML based page, not flash, not an image! The answer is here: Xara Web Designer

Web Designer (XWD) is a very cheap application which fills the gab between designing websites and creating them in HTML. The idea is that you design your site with graphics like buttons, text-areas, menues and graphics. When you are done you simply publish the site to HTML!

The HTML code generated is valid HTML – using CSS to reproduce your (complex) design from the vector (!) based application. I myself am a developer and I love to handcode HTML, CSS and javascript (ok, I said it!), so I know about validation of those elements. XWD published HTML is job well done IMHO!

Inserting dynamic elements
One thing which I specially like is the ability to insert placeholders in your design. You can then embed HTML/Javascript/CSS directly in your design. When the site is published the placeholders will contain your code – allowing you to have semi-dynamic contents in your website design.

How to do it?

Well you simply add an area and right click it.

Choose “Web properties…”.

Click on the tab “Placeholder” and select “Replace with HTML code”

Now paste your html into the textbox – voila!

Examples

QR code – information embedded in machin readable 2D barcode
Imagine that you put a small barcode on your webpage, this barcode contains your contact information in a graphic 2d barcode called a QR Code. Your cell phone and other applications can then scan the barcode and save this information about you (and your website)
Try embedding this in XWD:
<img src="http://chart.apis.google.com/chart?chl=Xara%20Ltd.%2C%20Gaddesden%20Place%2C%20Hemel%20Hempstead%2C%20HP2%206EX%2C%20United%20Kingdom&cht=qr&chs=110" />

A You Tube
Ofcause you can also embed a You Tube video!
Try embedding this into XWD:
<EMBED src="http://www.youtube.com/v/Mb-ylTDHn44" width=425 height=350 TYPE="application/-shockwave-flash" PLUGINSPAGE="http://www.macromedia.com/shockwave/download/index.cgi?P1_Prod_Version=ShockwaveFlash"></EMBED>

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Xara Web Designer Video Demos

has done it again! Created a brilliant application – this time a creation tool based on their excelant xara xtreme pro vector based drawing application. I must say this new application is a winner!

Perhaps not for us professionel website implementing developers – but, I will perhaps use it when starting up a site, or for prototyping. Xara: You are the greatest! Can’t wait to get a copy! :-) (You know my e-mail over there in UK! ;-) ).

Example demo

 Xara Web Designer Video Demos

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Dipity – Its worth remembering

Its worth remembering – sites which were hits, many visited it – all such sites are shown here in a visual timeline. I personally like to get some help remembering things, one of the main reasons for blogging is exactly that: when I thing something is – Blog it! So that I will remember it (oh and you might find it interesting also!).

I think that I own the people who made me find this “dipty” site, the line of persons and sites are like this:

  1. My wife – she accepted an invitation to visit
  2. Her collegue Pia and her husbond
  3. Hans – who mentioned
  4. The danish TV show “Spam“, who had a story about Dipity

There you are – the information path leading me to find Dipty! :-) Oh, I almost forgot – You should also remember to visit ffffound.com/

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It’s a dream: Serverside javascript!

I know that nothing is perfect, but today I saw a server running javascript! It is based on the mozilla javascript engine which means that it understands the same level of javascript that Firefox does!

So is this a dream?
Well to start with I love javascript! It’s so flexible and fits very well for the internet. With the many very APIs appearing nowadays – like , prototype and other – you would be able to use the same terms, methodes and datastructures on both client- as well as server-side! Google and are building serious javascript free APIs which you simply use on the server rather than on the browser.

I just watched a video showing an example where a RSS feed is fetched as XML, transformed using XSLT and added to the DOM using various javascript APIs. Server side that is!

You would be able to manipulate the DOM using javascript syntax and APIs before the page is returned to the browser.

But how do I get it?
Well you can get locally by downloading Aptana framework, which is also very powerfull in general – even if you do not want to play around with serverside javascript.

It is mentioned that it has its own JAXER server, not sure if it means that you will be able to host it only some places… time will show! For now I keep on dreaming!

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