capital H coder

So I decided to do a little experiment. I wanted to create an embeddable player for Knowtes that users could post on their own pages. I could have just used the one I have on the Knowtes site, but it weighs in at a hefty 277k due to its use of the Flex Framework. This is obviously not acceptable if I’m going to have a lot of users embedding this new player on their pages.

So, I set out to create an actionscript only project that would provide all the features of my current framework based player. Here is the result:

I ended up adding more features than the original version (most notably, the theme changes to match the library theme of the user who embeds it), but it still only weighs in at 17k! I think I’ll have to can the original

In creating this I had to convert a few of my personalization classes to work without the framework. So if anyone would like to see how I did one of the following, just post a comment and let me know:

• Bitmap Fade: makes a bitmap copy of a given DisplayObject, replaces the target with the bitmap in the display list and then fades the bitmap, switching it back when it is done. This let me avoid embedding fonts
• Full Gradient Background: allows radial or linear gradients, any number of colors/ratios/alphas, and changeable angle and focalpointratio (pretty much any common gradient option).
• Strech/Zoom/Center/Tile -able Background Image: An actionscript only component that fills up its display area with an image using any of these methods.

So it turns out that Knowtes was not even judged in the Adobe AIR Developer Derby. Apparently in all my heads down coding of the application itself, I left my signup page a little confusing. The judge (yes, singluar - only one visit to my signup page was unaccounted for during the judging period) did not realize they needed to fill out the CAPTCHA on the page in order to have an invitation sent.

In their defense, my code mistakenly showed a message indicating that the invitation was sent on one part of the page while another part said that they needed to fill out the CAPTCHA. It’s kind of tough to swallow that kind of mistake after so much work, especially when it had nothing to do with the application itself.

Still, the competition did motivate me to get quite a lot done on the program, and now it’s time to try and do something with it. To that end, I’ll be trying to get it showcased on Adobe’s website and a few other places. We’ll see what happens.

And yes, I still plan on blogging some of the code I did for the site… just have to find the time.

Shaun

Whew!

So my real job turned out to be a lot less work than programming on Knowtes for the Derby. I need to work on my self-motivation (less would be better I think).

In any case, the bug-ridden AIR version of Knowtes is off, and I can only hope that there are too many features in there for the judges to get too in-depth and find all of the errors

I waited pretty much until the last second to submit it, just in case Adobe had some automated process to download your AIR file as soon as you sent in your submission, though it appears they did not. Now it’s time to sit around and wait for the judges to start doing their thing.

Well, not exactly just sit around. I’ve got plenty of projects to be working on and I’d like to start blogging about different parts of the AIR development experience as well as code I used. So to that end, here’s a list of things I might blog about:

• The Knowtes GradientSelector control
• The BitmapFade effect (gets around non-embedded font issues and is faster than typical fade)
• Secure login via HTML
• Kuler integration
• Tile-able, center-able, stretch-able, zoom-able background image

Just post a comment and let me know what you’d like to hear about and I’ll make a blog post about it.

Till then,
~Shaun (more…)