Brajeshwar

How to Write Doc Comments for ActionScript

Tuesday, March 30th, 2004 - 7:25 pm

Here is a link that should be worth bookmarking, How to Write Doc Comments for JavaDoc Tool. This should be definitely useful with Flash Developers writing Actioncript 2.0 and with the coming up Documentor Tools for Actionscript; BLDoc, ASDocGen etcetera.

Huge record intake by Flash!

Monday, March 29th, 2004 - 4:18 pm

Mike Downey had once said, “I was even asked by one team of developers how they could solve a performance problem they encounter when loading 700,000 complex data records into the Flash player via Remoting! OMG!”, at the MAX India 2004. Well, I was also there and I tried to reply with a …

Flash Actionscript Pro Contest

Monday, March 29th, 2004 - 8:51 am

Flash Actionscript Pro Contest, according to the organizer is one of the ‘greatest battle of Flash Actionscript ever’, it also claims that, “This is not a ordinary game for flash movie designers, but a hyper-competition for those who are really interested in the future of ActionScript Rich Internet Applications (RIA)…”
The winning prizes …

Flex Coders

Friday, March 26th, 2004 - 10:54 pm

FlexCoders, that is the new site around and just as the name suggests, it is about Flex Coding. Get Prepared! You can sign up for the mailing list through the YahooGroup Flex Mailing list. There are about 27 members already.

Enterprise Rich Internet Application?

Friday, March 26th, 2004 - 2:17 pm

What are Enterprise Rich Internet Application? What kind of application would you give the status of an ERIA?

We wish Jennifer Lopez would return our calls

Tuesday, March 23rd, 2004 - 11:21 am

I have seen this long back but then when I saw it again today, I smiled at those punchy words, see it for yourself at Jeffrey Zeldman’s contact page. And if you are developing, learning, working on CSS, then his site should definitely be in your favorites bookmark.

Here is what he writes,

_We get more mail …

Flash Development, e-Learning, Usability

Friday, March 19th, 2004 - 8:14 pm

Some of the comments, discussions, notes here are old, addressed and rectified but still it is worth the re-read. This is rather an excerpt from a discussion between a Flash Developer and some Top-Decision-Maker (the discussion is more biased towards e-learning but then it is applicable to most Flash development work).

Q, Vanity/Rudeness : Just because you can make a logo, text or an object rotate and transform, it doesn’t mean you SHOULD. Your focus should be on your learners as guests, use of Flash shows that your true priority is “look what I can do!“. I particularly dislike Flash intro pages, they’re the height of rudeness (thank goodness that’s becoming rare). I want to get to the content, not see an intro movie about what I WILL BE able to see/learn as a “preview of coming attractions”.

A : Noted, however it is possible to use animation appropriately too, to supplement learning material. Think of a science learning module showing how a particular widget works. Showing an animation, portraying how things interact would be beneficial. Showing a chemical reaction how atoms form into a molecule, showing business graphs etc.

Q, Navigation : I don’t need to see your navigation pretty, I just need to be able to see it. Wish more time were spent by site/module, organizing their content, rather than trying to make it pretty. Plus, you can break some browsers that way, or your learners may be in an environment that prohibits plug-ins, in which case no one gets to see how to get anywhere on your site/module.

A : The issue of organizing content is independent of the technology used. Regardless of whether it is Flash being used, or traditional HTML, a proper information design is essential. Flash offers more tools for different types of navigation, but if it is well designed and made with the idea finding information quickly in mind, Flash is more flexible and more powerful. As far as plug-ins are concerned, we don’t make courses in Flash if we are not sure of target runtime environment. A user who turns off Flash may have his Javascript turn off too, graphics turn off!

Q, Handicap : Imagine you’re visually challenged, how the heck are you supposed to “see” content that’s been Flashed? Read about Section 508 compliance and Flash. You can either go through a LOT of time and additional expense to try and make Flash slightly accessible, or just don’t use Flash in the first place. If you’re physically challenged, I’ve seen sites that require you to chase links around the page before you can select them, not the best idea.

A : I agree that Flash is limited with it’s accessibility features, but they are there. Accessibility is largely a state of mind, though, and both Flash and traditional html apps can suffer badly in this area. Overall, Flash benefits with better potential for good usability. With HTML based apps, your form components are limited to drop-downs, selection lists, text fields, radio buttons and check boxes. If you want to do something like display tabular data and allow rows to be selected, or to display nested data, you have to develop the component using DHTML, and good luck getting it to work across browsers. With Flash, you have a significant choice of ready made components that can augment the usability of an application. You can do 508 compliance in Flash, and we better do the tricky but challenging stuffs than in boring old HTML.

Q, Security : There seem to be a growing use of text only browsers (!) which can’t see any Flash. There hasn’t been any security breaches, that I’m aware of yet, but as Flash allows more interaction into deeper areas of content, it probably won’t be long.

A : (giggles a bit but well under the sleeve) Do you mean, using lynx or gopher once again? Today, learning content are delivered not only through text, images but videos, games, interactive contents are vital part of e-Learning. As one who works in the field of professional web design, I don’t see this preponderance towards text browsers. As far as security goes, everything is vulnerable. Flash has gone for years with only a few things here and there. I think it is best to judge security based on history rather than based on what might be. Anyways, Flash runs in browser’s security sandbox. So it has similar security level as browsers have. It is noway less secure than a browser.

Skype, this is cool

Friday, March 19th, 2004 - 5:01 pm

I have always refrained myself from using ‘Voice Chats’ on most applications because the connection here is not all that good at most of the time. But today when Joey Lott introduced me to this cool product, Skype, I became an ultimate fan of the same. The audio was clear and my speech was getting …

Macromedia up in arms against piracy

Thursday, March 18th, 2004 - 7:40 am

“I was wondering if you can throw any light on Macromedia’s anti-piracy initiative in India. I believe some users (in mumbai atleast) have received letters from Macromedia urging them to purchase licences.” This was an e-mail I received from a person few days back. And early today morning one of my friend called me up saying he just got a …

Me too for Firefox Search

Friday, March 12th, 2004 - 6:31 pm

On seeing Mike Chambers with his firefox plug-ins, I just made mine too. I am not sure if people would be interested but then, who knows everybody can have one of their own and it might as well be easier to search for information.

Fireworks on the server

Friday, March 12th, 2004 - 4:19 pm

I just saw this cool stuff on a mailing list, just check this out. It is believed that it uses Flash Communication server, Cold Fusion and .NET.