Last night I began work on a project I have been planning on working on for a while. I kept thinking about it saying I should do it but never really got into it. Finally last night I started working on it. The first version is planned on being a simple cataloging system for my DVD rips. Currently I organize them in a spread sheet that tells what formats I have encoded and what hard drive they are stored on but the list is getting long and looking through 300+ rows in a spreadsheet is getting annoying. This project will hopefully help me to better organize my rips/encodes so that I can easily search, watch, and organize the movies. The project is being built in Flex 3 and AIR. Probably the best part of the project is getting to take advantage of Adobe’s AIR, which is now version 1.0 and the ability to work with AIR’s ability to write to the local file system in a database file. Right now the screen shot below does not do a whole lot other than allow for you to add a new library, but tonight I plan on adding the functionality to be able to add videos to a library, and just maybe be able to watch them. We will see how it goes.
I’m not sure if anyone else has run into this…. So for some reason, when writing Flex apps I have been relying on the creationComplete event to initialize my application, but at the time that event fires off the stage is not available yet. I found out there is an applicationComplete event, and after this event is fired off the stage is available.
According to a March 2007 comScore Video Metrix rankings study, five out of every seven Internet users (71.4 percent) in the US streamed video online. In addition, a June 2007 Pew Internet & American Life Project report states that 47% of adults in the US have high-speed connections at home.
I figured I would give it another shot and I think I’ve got a reasonably stable version of Campsite. It doesn’t seem to error out from what I’ve tested. Basic functionality is simple.
- Enter the sub domain for your campsite account (if in the url it says someplace.campfirenow.com then you would enter someplace in the field)
- Enter your email address and password, at this point it will log you in
- Choose a room to join
- After you choose a room it will load up the current chat of the room. Don’t click around or anything until you see chat messages in the display, or you will probably break it
- Type a message and click send, after sending a message it will auto-refresh
- If you want to see new messages others have typed click the refresh button
So far that is all there is to it. Its pretty simple and very unfriendly as far as usability and design goes, but that can be taken care of later.
You will need to download AIR, which can be found here.
Then next you will need to download campsite which is here
Give it a try and let me know how it works. Hope someone finds this interesting.
I have not had the time necessary to continue to work on Campsite. I really want to get this thing up and running, so hopefully sometime this week or maybe the beginning of next week I will have some spare time to throw at it.
So this is pretty lame. In flash when you see a sandbox violation you immediately think “Do I have a crossdomain.xml file to allow this?” so you then go check and if not it usually fixes it. Well, this is not the case all the time. I was trying to make a request and instead of http:// I typed http:/. By forgetting the second slash it threw a sandbox violation instead of just simply saying invalid url or something a bit more descriptive. Anyways thats my rant on non-descriptive error messages. They waste time!
It pretty much says it in the title. My motorcycle was stolen today around 12:20 PM in broad daylight from the front of the mall parking lot. It was ridiculous. I walked into the mall and came out 20 minutes later to find my motorcycle gone. I immediately thought I had been towed, but unfortunately that was not the case.
I imported in a couple of old posts from my blogger account today. They are all about programming and AS3 so not too interesting if you are here for any other reason I guess.
It’s pretty late… 1:34 AM There is a bug within Flex 3 that wont allow me to auto scroll the list that is displaying all of the chats but other than that the thing seems to be working pretty well. There is still a ton of work left to be done, but it will currently log you in to the desired sub domain, you can pick a room and chat away. It currently has to have its date hard coded because of some inconsistencies with the way I get the date and the way campfire does the date, so after I get that worked out hopefully I will be able to put it up for download. Here is a screenshot of it for now.
Yup thats right I’m continuing to work on the campfire chat client, which I’m going to call “Campsite.” Thanks to Cade (Vorak) for that one. It’s going a bit slower than I anticipated, mostly because parsing through a bunch of HTML to find the necessary chats everyone has typed is harder than I would have guessed. I started by using Regular Expressions, and realized that turning the HTML into an XML Object is a far simpler approach. Hopefully I will be able to finish that tonight. I was planning on releasing a simple Beta of the application tonight, but there is no way that is going to happen. Well more wine, music, and typing….. Oh yeah, I’m going to start up another blog for tech things so these types of posts wont end up in here where most people probably don’t care to read them anyway. More later…