“Student Shuffler” AIR Application

The Student Shuffler AIR application is now available via Adobe AIR Marketplace.

The app was built to facilitate a fair and transparent way of organizing classroom presentations whether by group or individual student. The instructor goes in before class and inputs each presenter into the application edit interface. This is saved locally to the internal database. When it comes time to begin presentations, the instructor needs only to run the app and the students can all see their names being shuffled into a random, numbered presentation order. This not only frees the instructor of any responsibility toward the selection of presentation order, but always transmits an air of fairness around the process that the students can appreciate.

Student Shuffler is a small application that allows the user to edit a list of names to be randomized into a numbered list. Useful for generating an unbiased presentation order for classroom or presentation scenarios. Makes use of the local SQLite database to preserve student names across active sessions.

There were a number of firsts for me in developing this app. Specifically, this was my first experimentation with custom chrome and use of the internal SQLite database. I found both features to be very simple to deal with once the process was understood in a complete manner.

I hope others find this to be a useful piece of software!

Shudderflowers

An Early Morning Letter, Displaced is proud to announce that the new collection of work in progress will be titled “Shudderflowers”. A number of interesting titles were candidates before this one and the decision to finalize a name is not taken lightly.

Shudderflowers revolves around themes of fervent self-destruction and the fragility of the female mind. Interested in having a listen? Demo material has been uploaded to MySpace Music and Facebook.

Cover art is absolutely temporary.

Current Track Titles:

• Fever-Drenched and Burning
• Beneath White Stones
• Fearless
• Alice (the bones)
• Waning Flower
• Drowning Past the Sky

SoDA 2009 Digital Marketing Outlook

“As the dark clouds of the economy envelope the marketing world, many wonder if digital marketing may be a ray of sunshine in the gloom. To find out, the Society of Digital Agencies conducted a broad survey of traditional and digital agencies as well as brands, digital vendors and even freelance digital experts.”

Most interesting for me is page 20 of the report:

Go, Flash!

…why is Java grouped together with JavaScript? Eh?

Grab the full report or visit SoDA.

Google Analytics for Flash (gaforflash)

For some time now, I’ve been using Google Analytics for various personal websites including this weblog. Recently though, we’ve begun using it at my place of employment and have received a request to track user generated events from a live Flash Media Server stream. After poking around a bit and coming upon numerous dead ends, I was lucky enough to stumble upon Google Analytics for Flash (gaforflash).

Not only can you pass in “page views” to be reported just like HTML, but you can also craft custom events in a very customizable format:

trackEvent( FMS, Seek, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 60 )
trackEvent( FMS, Pause, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 8 )
trackEvent( FMS, Play, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 8 )
trackEvent( FMS, Pause, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 10 )
trackEvent( FMS, Play, rtmp://localhost/vod/mp4:test.m4v, 10 )

The “Event” view within Analytics itself is still in closed beta but you can request the UI to be enabled on a profile via this form.

You can also track events with a little cheat. Once logged in, just edit the address bar from “reporting/content” to “reporting/events”. You can even then add it to your Dashboard.