This is my first foray into using Flex 4, and it takes off from where I was at with my Converter application (as mentioned here, here and here) back in September of 2006 (shizzer time flies!).
I’ve changed the currency conversion to use Google’s Finance site, which means far more accurate conversions are occurring now.
I’d like to make it so you can select multiple currencies and convert to them all at one time. Also with the ability to remember the settings that you’ve used.
If anyone else has got any ideas about features they’d like to see just leave me a comment.
You can view the web version of the converter here www.wrench.com.au/converter
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Or you can install the Air app by clicking on the install badge if you’d prefer to have it on your desktop.
I’m using Flash Builder 4 Beta 2 to create this app. I’ve had to setup 2 projects to export both the web and Air version of the converter. If anyone’s got any tips on doing this from a single project then that would be appreciated. I suppose if it was a more complex piece of code, then there’d be some benefit in splitting the codebase, as it is this just adds a hurdle in the way of a smooth development process.
I’ve also given up on trying to fix the security issues I was having with accessing an external link on a 3rd party server for the currency conversions (as detailed back in the first three posts I made on the converter). I’ve got a php proxy page on my server instead which calls the google site and then returns the results to the swf. This only occurs for the web version though, the Air one connects directly to Google so is about 250ms quicker on each currency conversion.
My love hate affair with Google’s Picasa is starting to tilt more towards just being one of love. Picasa 3 is out (somehow I totally missed the Beta) and has some really great new features. I especially like the new video controls (no idea why it took them so long to implement a shuttle slider control) and the fact that videos now also play in slideshows (whoo hoo!) There’s also some really nice slide show transitions that have been added as well, which can help make some of your more mundane shots… well less mundane I suppose ;-)
I’m also using the screensaver functionality to play selected images from Picasa (though this was already in Picasa 2.7) and again this uses some of the nice transitions available in the slideshow.
Two reasons I’m blogging about this. Firstly as hitting the normal “Check For Updates Online” link in Picasa doesn’t allude to the fact that there’s something new available, I thought I’d spread the word. Secondly, I was looking at Nokia’s Ovi service (which does look pretty sharp I must say) as an alternative to my Picasa and Picasa Web Albums. This was primarily because of what Picasa Web Albums does to videos when they’re uploaded. Basically it buggers them up during transcoding, losing considerable quality - which is bizarre because I’m actually uploading .mp4 files that don’t need any transcoding (from my N95) and would look just fine if left alone. Not only that, the original files seem to still get stored on the Picasa server, taking up space that I’m paying for. Hopefully that’s something that will be addressed in future Picasa Web Albums updates.
This morning when doing my normal Googling I noticed two new icons associated with every search result. Here’s a screenshot (click for a larger image):
As you can see there is a new arrow icon (promote) and a cross icon (remove). The purpose of which is explained on Justin Hileman’s site. He went into extensive detail regarding his findings and the operation of the new feature here, here and here.
If you’re not seeing the icons on your Google results you’re either not logged into your Google account or your account currently isn’t selected for the closed test. And there doesn’t appear to be any selection criteria for the test as I haven’t (as far as I’m aware) changed any Google settings or my browser or location recently and the new icons just appeared.
I’ve never really got into the Social Bookmarking scene so it will be interesting to see what Google can make of this.
Here’s the official Google word on the experiment.
A few years back I worked on a project that used the Google Maps API and at the time I was charged with recommending to the client whether to use Flash or Javascript/HTML to get the job done. At the time there was no readily accessible Flash API for Google maps, and I wasn’t that keen to go with the Yahoo or Microsoft offerings (though Yahoo now has a very robust Flash API, the Microsoft (surprise surprise) one doesn’t… though I found this Silverlight version). FYI the Kaurna Place Names site was developed to identify and map places with Kaurna (Aboriginal) names and to encourage the use and increase knowledge of these names. It begins with names in southern Kaurna country (which is the region of Australia where I’m from).
So there’s the back story. I recently came across a post which talked about the Google Maps API now being available for Flash AS3. With my current push to learn about Flex I was also pleased to see that there were components available that you could just drop into your MXML and whamo, insta-map!
Here’s what I pieced together, hopefully it illustrates what can be done with a few Flex components and the Maps code provided from the Google Maps developer site.
View source is enabled in the following example.
Obviously it’s not a scratch on Paul Neave’s venerable Flash Earth, but then this example only took 15 minutes to knock together ;-)
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