Speakers: Anthony Eden and Scott Weeks from Snepo

Flash is the ideal technology for public facing user interfaces but few flash developers have had the chance to cut their teeth building complex kiosk applications. Come on a journey to the land of hardware peripherals, exotic software integration and regression testing. The possibilities are endless for flash if you know which tools to use and what lies on the outer extremities of the flash universe.

Presentation description

A few points from the presentation with respect o building interactive systems:

• Touch screen technologies (haptic devices) include: Point-of sales systems, kiosks, iPhone, check in system, etc
• Attract user -> engage user -> educate user-> call to action
• User is constantly aware of where they are in their process (location, state, etc) - important because user may come into appliaction at any time during the process. Users very frequently end part way through an application – set an appropriate timeout.
• Rule of thumb: “fat fingers” – move navigation to bottom of screen – navigation must be obvious - just press: dragging and scrolling is not intuitive and release event is not intuitive either
• Accessibility: plan for limited vision so use big thick fonts; plan for color blindness so use high contrast colours. Be aware of mechanics of using the device.

What worked well:

• Transaction services and xml for storage: provides high service level and is relatively easy to develop.
• JSFL: automation scripting for flash helped to strealine production
• Logging ever single piece of interaction. You are able to track entry and exit points – this provides evidence of points of confusion and where users become frustrated and give up.
• Testing: especially brute force testing – putting the system through any imaginable situation. Example: hire a few computer science interns.
• Remote monitoring: transaction server on kiosk would send heartbeat back to server. Central server would expect hearbeat and can repsond by performing diagnostic and basic support such as restart, reset, clear memory, etc.
• Experimentation!

What didn’t work very well:

• Computationally complex procedures may cause kiosk to slow down and possibly become unresponsive.
• Dying computers and enclosures: ensure mechanical robustness of kiosk.
• Screen calibration: potentially a big issue. Callibration can creep from true state.
• Updating was cumbersome: especially as it pertained to physically loading onto machine.

Upsides:

• Environment: you know your and can define your environment – no browsers or campatibility issues.
• Economics: there is money to be made.

Speaker: Colin Moock, www.moock.org, the full presentation for ActionScript 3.0 and Flash CS3

Veteran ActionScript educator and author Colin Moock discusses the new links between ActionScript 3.0 code and content created in Flash CS3. Topics covered include the document class, linking symbols to classes, automatically generated classes, accessing on-stage instances from linked classes, and symbol instantiation.

Colin is a regular speaker at FITC and has been for a couple years now. His presentations are always informative and he never fails to humble any self-proclaimed flash guru. Colin’s new book Essential ActionScript 3.0 is due out in early June.

This presentation is particularly timely in light of Adobe’s recent launch (March 27) of Creative Suite 3 which includes Flash CS3 (or the much anticipated Flash 9). Although ActionScript 3 isn’t a new technology (released last summer), there is a lot of new and neat stuff in Flash CS3. For a full review see (P)review of Flash CS3.

A few highlights of the presentation:

• The mechanics of AS3 is rooted deeply in objected oriented programming. The presentation focuses on the new APIs and changes in actionscript and how the changes affect development.
• The display API (documentation on Adobe.com) provides control over all shapes, bitmaps, video on the stage. It provides control to draw and move any objects in a movie. Although this isn’t a new concept, the changes in the construction of the language provide a more flexible approach for object oriented programming.
• A major change in the architecture is the addition of the document object inherent on the root in all flash documents. This simply means the Flash cleans up any non-object-orinetd-programming objects on the timeline and makes them accessible (programmatically) to the root document.
• Like document object model programming (others include XML, HTML, etc), you can reference document objects with functions such as addChild(), getChildByName().
• disabling stage instance auto-declaration: [Open File > Publish Settings > Flash > ActionScript Version > Settings] Under Stage, uncheck “Automatically declare stage instances”
• *** AttachMovie is gone. Attaching a movie to the stage is to be done by creating a new instance of a class (class name is set through linkage of object) – in true OOP form.

Speaker: Rob Rusher

This session describes how to build large-scale Flex applications using sound design patterns, such as the model-view-controller (MVC) architecture, and best practices, such as loose coupling of application components.

For those unfamiliar, Adobe Flex is an application framework for rich application development that are fully scalable and portable for anyone on any platform.

Highlights:

• Cairngorm is a framework for application development on flex.
• Flex inherently makes it easy to separate logic from design and control. This model is called Model View Controller (MVC). This is typically a very good practice for development at any scope. Data models, User views, Controller – a design pattern that separates programs into manageable, scalable and flexible components.
• Flex consists of a number of components existing in MXML, an xml based document.
• Cairngorm Docs – This site is dedicated to providing documentation and learning resources for the Cairngorm Microarchitecture for Adobe Flex.

The Ebay desktop application was built on Flex and Apollo using Cairngorm. If you haven’t seen the demo (linked just above), check it out.

Apollo is the code name for a cross-operating system runtime being created by Adobe that will allow developers to leverage existing web technologies, such as Flash, Flex, HTML, JavaScript, Ajax, and PDF to easily create and deploy desktop applications.

Apollo gives power to web developers and the like - people like us – to escape the limitations of the browser and common pitfalls therein that have been simply a frustration over the years.

Ottawa Flash guy JP Guevremont has updated his personal site with a very seasonal wall-to-wall video background. Personally, I think I could listen to that loop all day.

Anyways… I gotta finish up some work so I can jet to the rink!

Last week we at 76design received a notice inviting us to develop and submit a flash game to www.addictinggames.com as part of a contest with $20,000 in prizes. As we had just left a meeting in which our design team had decided we should do more ‘fun’ projects for our own amusement, this seemed like a timely opportunity. After checking out the very fine print, however, I discovered that by submitting a game to the contest you give up ALL rights of ownership to the game to www.addicitinggames.com, regardless of whether or not your game wins a prize.

In other words, under the guise of a contest, and for the modest investment of 20k, the folks at www.addictinggames.com are planning to harvest perhaps hundreds of new games, the best of which would surely show up on the popular site shortly thereafter, and likely without attribution.

What a scam! I was surprised to learn that www.addictinggames.com is owned by Atom Entertainment, whose Board of Directors includes Rob Burgess, Chairman of Macromedia (now owned by Adobe) and former Warner CEO Bob Daly. I wonder if such predatory and deceptive content development stategies are OK with them.

Yesterday I received an alert from the New Media Business Alliance warning its members about the contest. I’m posting this now to remind others to ‘read the fine print’ and (in a small way) to challenge Atom Entertainment to stop trying to sucker people into handing over their best content for free.

Based on the popularity of my original adaption of Macc’s page flipping engine, I’ve gone back and made several major improvements to the dynamic page flip files:

• Huge performance enhancements – new “smart” loading means that performance won’t suffer when you add more pages
• Ability to specify which pages must be preloaded before the book starts (others will preload in the background)
• Ability to have audio on individual pages fade in when you turn to that page and fade out when you turn to another page
• Ability to specify a function to run after a page is torn out
• Ability to have a “spread” (i.e. a single page that spans two pages)
• Ability to place a “page” that precedes the book (ideal for instructions, tips, or help)
• Ability to have pages perform actions when they’re turned to
• Smarter preloading – less likely to stall or hang
• Addition of page navigation bar – flip to next, previous, or specific page

There’s a readme file included with the source files that explains in a bit more detail how these features are implemented.

Enjoy!

Download the source files:
Flash 8/MX2004 – with sample video FLA (5Mb)
Flash 8/MX2004 – without sample video FLA (1Mb)