Archive for September, 2007

Video: Rediscovering fun at Adobe MAX

Published on September 29, 2007 in Community, Conferences, Flash, Flash Lite, SWX and Video. 10 Comments

Want to see what goes on in one of sessions before you see it at Adobe MAX? Here you go!

Sören Steinmann recorded my talk at the Flashforum Konferenz in Germany this week and was kind enough to provide me with the raw footage. I've edited it down to a three minute segment with some of the unique highlights from that talk (it seems every one of my talks goes a little differently and I keep adding things to them -- Wednesday's talk at MAX is going to be no different in that regard!)

Rubber chickens, taking bunny ears through customs, my Mario Klingemann fetish... it's all in there!

Oh, and if you're coming to MAX, make sure you don't miss my session there. It's the inspire session titled Rediscovering Fun in room 190b from 4.15pm - 5.15pm on Wednesday, October 3rd, 2007.

Links:

Vlog Chicago 2007-09-28

Published on September 29, 2007 in Community, Conferences, SWX and Vlog. 8 Comments

I just arrived in Chicago for Adobe MAX. Join me as I take you round my hotel room and marvel at the soap. No, really, the soap! :)

GalToGalWalk.org powered by SWX PHP, to be featured on Martha Stewart Show on Monday and expected to raise $1m.

Published on September 27, 2007 in Community, Development, Flash and SWX. 11 Comments

Gal to Gal Walk 2007 powered by SWX PHP

The Gal To Gal Foundation has a new web site and online campaign for the Gal To Gal Virtual Walk 2007. It aims to improve the lives of women diagnosed with Stage IV breast cancer and is expected to raise $1m. The site is due to be featured on the Martha Stewart Show on Monday, October 1st to a national audience in the United States. Oh yes, and it's powered by SWX.

(More precisely, it uses SWX RPC, with a SWX PHP back-end.)

Jon MacDonald has a case study of the Gal To Gal Virtual Walk project, wherein he explains that the entire site was built in one-and-a-half weeks.

So what was it like, working with SWX on this project? Here's what Jon has to say:

SWX is used extensively throughout the site to communicate with the back-end and database. This enabled the rapid development timeline, and made the process of storing and passing data through PHP seamless. I haven't seen any other true sites built with SWX, but rather small mash-ups and widgets, so I believe this is a first for the SWX project.

This is definitely the first large-scale web site I've heard of that uses SWX and it's great to hear that working with it was a "seamless" process and allowed the team to develop the site so quickly.

By signing up on the site and giving a donation, you get to create your own virtual Gal to join the walk.

There are over 302,400 possible combinations when creating your 'gal': 2 body types x 2 skin tones x 9 hair styles x 5 hair colors x 2 expression choices x 2 expression/lip colors x 2 eye types x 3 eye colors x 70+ outfits. Trust me, this equates to a lot of assets!

Not only can you create hundreds of thousands of unique Gals, but the scene for the walk changes every day also as the walk progresses through different cities in the US.

The background changes with each day as the walk progresses across the US. To see the progress, click on the map at the bottom of the site. Note that the walk starts on Oct. 1st, so until then all you will see is the warm-up (Day 0) and race start background. Click the book at the bottom right to learn about each city as the walk progresses.

Following the national TV exposure on the Martha Stewart show on Monday, the site is expecting heavy traffic and $1m in donations. Jon talks about the infrastructure they have in place to handle this:

The foundation is expecting $1+ million in donations during the month of October, so the site was optimized to handle the heavy load. It is being hosted on three load-balanced servers to alleviate the crunch times as much as possible.

The whole experience is built for broadband connections where the "total upfront load is about 2.3 MB". According to Jon, this meant that they "were able to load in higher-quality (and lots of) assets".

I encourage you to check the site out and participate (it's for a good cause, after all). A big thank-you to Jon also for working with SWX on this and sharing his experiences with us on his case study.

If you have SWX success stories of your own, please do get in touch and I will share them with the world on my blog and on the SWX Showcase.

Congratulations, Jon, the site looks fabulous! Here's hoping you guys reach your aim of $1m in donations.

Read more about GalToGalWalk.org in Jon's case study.

SWX talk at FlashForum Konferenz was a blast!

Published on September 25, 2007 in Conferences, Flash and SWX. 10 Comments

I had a great time presenting my session today at FlashForum Konferenz in Cologne, Germany. I forgot to take a picture of the audience but I have lots of video footage to edit and put up in the coming days.

I added a couple of things to the presentation and announced for the first time that Flash 9 support may be coming sooner than we thought thanks to Joa Ebert who made me aware of the hxasm library by Nicolas Cannasse. Porting this over to PHP should provide us with the SWX Assembler in PHP for Flash 9 and thus Flash 9 support for SWX PHP should be just over the horizon. In fact, I'm going to be working on this during my week back in Brighton between MAX Chicago and MAX Barcelona.

We're leaving for dinner in about twenty minutes so I'm going to check some email, maybe Twitter and get ready but I wanted to say a big thank-you to the lovely audience and to Marc Thiele and Sasha Wolter for having me over.

I'm in Cologne for another two days and will be flying back to the UK on the 27th. I'm staying the night at a hotel by the airport at Heathrow and heading out to Chicago on the 28th.

Oh yeah, and here's a very warm Happy Birthday to my dear father, who is 63 today! Love you, Dad! :)

Folkert wins a Wii with SWX-based Twimpa

Published on September 24, 2007 in Flash, SWX and Wii. 2 Comments

If you've been playing with SWX, you will no doubt have heard of Folkert Hielema. Folkert has been very active in playing with SWX since the earliest alphas and he has contributed (and continues to contribute) so much to the project. And now, he's won a Nintendo Wii from Numpa.nl for his Twimpa application.

Twimpa uses SWX PHP along with the SWX Twitter, Jaiku, and Numpa APIs along with Adobe AIR. (Folkert is also the author of the Jaiku and Numpa SWX APIs). Numpa is a Netherlands (Dutch) version of Twitter.

Congratulations, Folkert! Very well deserved!

You can see more of Folkert's work, and those of other SWX developers, in the SWX Showcase.

Flashforward Boston: keynote video

Published on September 24, 2007 in Conferences, Flash, FlashForward, Flex and Video. 1 Comment

Part I

Kevin Lynch presents the Flashforward keynote. He covers the performance and penetration rate of Flash Player 9 and touches upon the open source Tamarin project at Mozilla.

ActionScript 3 features heavily in the keynote, with demonstrations of E4X (ECMAScript for XML) and Regular Expressions.

Kevin also demonstrates a couple of cool RIAs like Picnik and Buzzword. The video-heavy HBO Voyeur site is also shown.

Stay tuned for Part II...

CakeSWXPHP Updated to Version 1.01

Published on September 23, 2007 in Community, Development, Flash, PHP and SWX. 0 Comments

CakeSWXPHP: SWX for CakePHP

Wouter Verweirder, author and maintainer of CakeSWXPHP, just announced that he has upgraded it based on the latest release version of SWX PHP (Version 1.01).

Cake is a rapid development framework for PHP in the vein of Ruby on Rails.

CakeSWXPHP lets you use SWX with Cake by allowing SWX to call CakePHP controllers.

Goodbye Boston, hello Cologne!

Published on September 22, 2007 in Conferences. 3 Comments

Flashforward Boston was wonderful. I had a great time presenting my session, documenting the event, and talking with fellow speakers and attendees. I'm going to be editing and publishing more videos from the events in the coming days.

Right now, I'm about to pack away my remaining few items and head out to band practice. Band practice? What band? Hmm...

Then it's straight from the studio to the airport to fly to Cologne, Germany for Flashforum Conference.

See you guys in Germany! :)

Flashforward interviews with attendees and speakers

Published on September 22, 2007 in Community, Conferences, FlashForward, Video and Vlog. 2 Comments

I was lucky enough to snag some interviews with fellow speakers and Flashforward attendees during the Expo Hall Welcome Reception on Wednesday.

I spoke to Philip Desenne from Harvard, James Forest from Peabody Essex Museum, Sean Higby from Walt Disney Internet Group, Magnus Johansson from The Nobel Foundation, fellow speakers Mario Klingemann, Michelle Yaiser, Jared Ficklin, and Craig Swann, and, of course, my wonderful girlfriend, Stephanie.

French documentation for SWX updated

Published on September 21, 2007 in SWX. 1 Comment

Swx French Documentation

Gilles Bertrand has updated the French version of the SWX documentation to the latest version on the web site.

Gilles, thanks so much for this amazing contribution. I can't wait to talk about the cool stuff you guys are doing with SWX :)

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