Posted by: Sammy on: July 26, 2008
Been working on the Main login page the past couple of days. I know I shouldn’t be doing this yet but I’ve been refining the code to make it modular mainly so it’s easier for me to create a really basic prototype. So for the rest of the weekend I’ll finish off a presentable prototype that has some basic navigation.
Posted by: Sammy on: July 23, 2008
Just thought I’d post a minor progress update. Things are going well, I’ve managed to dynamically add user images on to the stage (in the flash player window) using AS3 and made it clickable. Now I need to design a few more icons to use!
Posted by: Sammy on: July 22, 2008
Got great news! I have found a couple of products from competing companies with more or less the same functions (for my purposes anyway) as the official FMS by Adobe.
The first one being Wowsa Media server, records in the standard flv as well as H.264/HE-AAC. Their retail price of $995 is also much more acceptable compared to Adobe and they also offer educational pricing. There is also a full featured free version with a limit of 10 concurrent connections. The software can be deployed to Windows, Max OSX or Linux servers. Link
The other product is an open source and is not as feature rich as other commercial offerings but hey! it does what we need and best of all it’s free! Although it only records in flv format it has no limits on concurrent connections and it installs on Windows, Mac OSX, Debian/Ubuntu and Gentoo. Link
Posted by: Sammy on: July 22, 2008
Today I had a meeting with Judy and Bob to discuss several resource issues and my project plan draft. For the project plan draft, Judy couldn’t really give me any suggestions until I find the evaluation criteria. I can’t say I’ve seen it anywhere on the 4707 website, I’ll need to look harder. Judy also gave me some things to add and think about such as heuristic evaluation and cognitive walkthrough. I’ll also need to follow up on the book Judy mentioned that was good reading for HCI/UI.
Resource wise everything is set. I’ve gotten an access card into the building and Bob gave me a desk with a windows machine. I’ll need to put Flash CS3 on it after installing Windows. The other thing that was resolved was the problem of Flash Interactive Media Server. As they provide a developmental version I will use that as it is sufficient for the purpose of this project.
The final thing that was decided was to code KIT in AS3 first as it speeds up development time by a lot. I will need to have a usable interface prototype by next week.
I am glad to say that I have also been notified after great confusion that my official internal supervisor is Dr Yash Shrivastava. I look forward to his guiding hand throughout this semester.
My goal for Friday:
Posted by: Sammy on: July 21, 2008
So far so good. My project plan is about halfway done but I’m still not sure if I should implement a Gantt chart. A Gantt chart is probably not the best option for a one man project, I’ll need to consult with Judy.
I must admit that I am a bit behind on the literature review. I have a lot to read up on and even more background research and stats for justification. I guess it’ll have to wait until after the project plan but I’ll be sure to do it before the intro talk in the 2nd week.
Posted by: Sammy on: July 20, 2008
After having consulted Judy and Bob last Tuesday, they have set me a couple of milestones and deadlines. The first of which is a draft of the Project Plan before next Tuesday. Having had a look at a functioning Keep in Touch application as well as some limitations Bob brought up, it gave me a good feel on the scope of the project.
My goals for the next few days are to finish a draft write up by today and the gantt on Monday.
Posted by: Sammy on: July 18, 2008
In my quest to find out what can and can’t be done on Flash Lite 3.0 I have found the following:
Posted by: Sammy on: July 18, 2008
After finding out about Flash Lite 3 and it’s limitations I decided to research on it’s capabilities to record voice and store it on an external server. Googling proved to be unsuccessful in finding a solid statement regarding Flash and voice recording. Although there were posts in various forums pointing out that in order to store media files from Flash you would need to acquire a seperate product called Flash Media Server. So off I go to the Adobe site to find out more about this FMS product and, lo and behold, it does what we want (Flash Interactive Media Server) at a retail price of more than $6,000 AUD! Luckily they provide a development version for free.
More info here:
Posted by: Sammy on: July 17, 2008
So after learning about ActionScript 3 I decided to go do some research on the Chumby device itself. Having read about the specifications before, I paid little attention over things like it’s resolution being 320 x 240, touch interface, wifi access, supports Flash Lite 3. So I dug a little deeper and found, to my surprise, my initial assumptions were wrong. Having read that the Chumby supports Flash Lite 3 I assumed that meant ActionScript 3, oh how wrong I was. Flash Lite 3 can not support ActionScript 3 which means I have to go back to ActionScript 2.
AS2 is a major step back, operators (for strings) like +, =, < etc are reverted back to add, eq, lt. To access properties you need ot call the function getProperty() instead of just applying “.” Mouse events needs more code to do the same thing in AS2. Basically overall AS2 is not as intuitive as AS3.
Another limitation I found, which is a major one, is that a widget can only draw data from it’s originating domain (if it’s published then that will be chumby.com). This means we are not able to retrieve sound/picture files from our server. This is a limitation of Flash Player but there seems to be a solution available.
Edit: This is just a stub to remind me that AS2 has a very cumbersome way of handling object depth on a stage (which object is in front of what).
Posted by: Sammy on: July 15, 2008
So I’m about half way through the ActionScript3 Fundamentals. Gone through functions, events, classes, text fields and arrays tutorials just to name a few. Only got the important topics left (working with multimedia, advanced interactivity).
