“Student Shuffler” AIR Application

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

shuffler

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!

VidLoop at the AIR Marketplace

There are two items to note here.

AIR Marketplace

Firstly, Adobe has done an awesome job updating the AIR Marketplace to be much more organized that the previous version. Very nice presentation.

Second, my VidLoop AIR application has been approved and is now live at the AIR Marketplace. Very Nice!

There are a lot of great apps there for download or purchase – check it out.

Nifty AIR App: VidLoop

icon_128Last week, I was approached by someone asking if we could build a small application that would run a series of videos in a continual loop. I told him it would be pretty simple to do this and that it would only be an afternoon’s work in AIR. So, that evening, I was able to point him to the URL hosting the AIR app. It performed exactly as he requested- user points to a local directory and then all the videos within are run in a loop until the user intervenes. Very simple.

My client had no problem installing the app or running it but asked if it might be possible to inject still images between videos as well. This got me thinking of other useful features and I ended up spending a good deal of time over the Thanksgiving break enhancing and tweaking until I had what you can see below.

VidLoop

The VidLoop application allows a user to specify a directory of media files in order to present them within a semi-infinite loop.

File types that are supported are as follows…

VIDEO: flv, f4v, mp4, m4v

IMAGE: jpg, jpeg, gif, png

The user is able to adjust certain settings based on the controls presented. This includes the amount of time images are to persist on the screen, whether or not to scale these images up to fill the screen, the local directory to pull media from, and whether or not to parse subdirectories. All settings are saved upon each occurrence of a successful run.

Hit ESCAPE to stop a presentation. CLICKING will step through each item and can be used to skip ahead regardless of video length or image duration settings.

I can see a lot of applications for this tool and have begun thinking of some future enhancements; Screensaver Mode, Media Sort Functionality, Randomize Option…

Before AIR, it would be have been a lot of trouble for me to put something like this together.  Now, it’s a piece of cake – and this work is very addicting as well!

Grab it, if you wish…

Flash is King

There is really no denying it at this point for anyone who was seriously contending. Flash has the crown and is in no way giving it up.

After seeing what Alchemy can do at the keynote today, P2P multicast video, Durango, and Server-Side ActionScript (!) during Sneaks this evening…

Good God… what an awesome time to be a Flash Platform developer. I’ve seen more than enough in the past two days to validate all that I am doing, professionally. I neglect to even mention Flash Catalyst or Gumbo in all this- that’s just ‘normal’ stuff compared to what is coming down the pipeline.

I asked the JavaFX guy today why I should use his technology over Flash. His only remark was that Java was 13 years old… okay.

An amazing show of Flash over the entire conference and the competition is defenseless. Go Flash!

Big Day for Flash Player 10 (and 9)

So, we have both Flash Player 10 final (10.0.12.36) released today on top of the CS4 products shipping. We also finally see Flash Player 9 bundled with the newest Playstation 3 update (2.50).

Flash Player 10
Do I really need to write anything here? Native 3D, Custom Filter Effects, Dynamic Sound Generation, Fullscreen Keyboard Support, Hardware Acceleration, unloadAndStop() … Grab it: http://www.adobe.com/products/flashplayer/

Flash Player 9 (PS3)
Aside from being a game console, PS3 is an awesome Blu-ray player and also has web browsing capabilities.  If you’ve ever tried to load up any FP8, FP9, or FP10 content in the browser though… you’d be pretty disappointed as the only supported version of Flash Player has been FP7!  Well, with today’s update, owners can now access most FP9 content (AS3!) on their PS3s.  Awesome!

Flash Player 10 Debug
Debug versions of FP10 for developers can be found at http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html.  Super important!

Creative Suite 4
Shipping today.  I was fortunate enough to be on the beta and prerelease programs and still cannot wait to get my hands on the final bits.