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Flash on the Beach is just over and the final day had the most impressive (and the single most useful) presentations. The inspirational level this year has been great. The wonderfully beautiful creations by Eric Natzke or Robert Hodgin can take anyones breath away and the generally inspiring nature of Jonathan Harris’ works makes everyone want to do the same (if only we could get similar great ideas).

But Mario Klingemann’s presentation about reading QR codes in Flash was the most (technically) inspiring presentation in my opinion and I could immediately see a bunch of ways in which, I could use this for all different sorts of purposes - in real life advertising and not just for the fun of it. I really feel that I could join this project and make it into a complete library and so far I’ve written him a mail offering my help (and a minor possibility for optimization).

But credits also go to Grant Skinner, as his talk on important things to learn as a new web developer (in Flash in particular) gave me some good inspiration for my own job as head of development with developers of my own needing help and guidelines.

Was: self-currying JavaScript functions

I read this nice post on self-currying JavaScript functions, and even though the code to me is not optimal (dispite the low line count), it is improperly named, and it depends on the Prototype JavaScript library (which I really don’t like), it is a very nice script and a very nice idea. The trick in this script is using Function.prototype.length. I didn’t know that this property existed, but after digging a bit I’ve realized, that it has been in ECMAScript at least since 3rd edition (which is the latest edition published in 1999), in JavaScript since v1.1, but only made it into ActionScript by ActionScript 3 (which I haven’t study in as much detail as I have with ActionScript 1 and 2 in relation to my book on basic programming in these versions).

In this post I discuss this property and functionality a bit further, and I implement this function for creating self-”partially applying” functions using both no framework, the MochiKit framework and the Prototype framework.

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This library by polygonal.de looks really nice. I would most definitely be using this for future development.

A recent post on the MochiKit mailing list inspired me to have a little more fun with MochiKit, which I use a lot professionally and privately. The task was to see how simply a filtering for tables could be done using MochiKit.

The first task was to identify all the problems of the original script. Then comes setting up the basics, and finally implementing the necessary functionality. And as always MochiKit supplies so many convenient functions, that only the fun part is left. Furthermore this article suggest some simple extensions to the concept of filtering.
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With a colleague of mine, Morten Reinholdt, I have started to work on a new flash gaming website called Dexgames. Actually we started on the idea several months ago, but now we both have the time to do some more actual work on it.

The concept is very much inspired by many other gaming sites. The ones that I personally have frequented some times are:

• Orisinal
• Donutgames
• Miniclip

Just to name a few.
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Bibliotekr (a badly hidden pun on Flickr) is an idea crafted by a group of persons trying to create a book-sharing site “competing” with the Danish libraries. And one of the organizers had thrown together a small Hackathon, which I just had to attend.
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Today we launched a new website for one of the major Danish mortgage provider, Totalkredit. They are known by all Danes due to their tv-ads (produced by TBWA\Copenhagen), that everyone either hates or loves. This is a very big client, and thus they require a very big website. But as they are for the people and tries to communicate directly with the common man, the website need not be corporate, but must be rich with content, easy to use and with many features that will create returning visitors.

Well, all this I did not have much to do with, that concerns the concept department. But concretising, technically verifying and realizing this concept is very much my job. The project has taken many months but it is now finally complete. Or well, such is never complete, but the first version has been launched at least. And this site is (technically) amazing if I should describe it. The amount of JavaScript used is huge and much of it uses MochiKit heavily. The JavaScript is used to enliven the page in a very interesting way.

The whole page works without JavaScript in the classical fashion (clicking links, reloading the whole page with the new page), but with JavaScript enabled, all links are caught and handle via Ajax instead. This technique was introduced to me by Jeremy Keith and his somewhat cute term Hijax. In order to do this, but not combine markup with content, large portions of the HTML (very large in fact) are built in JavaScript. For this need MochiKit.DOM is really handy.

Other features of the site, that makes this a very satisfying job to have completed:

• It is of course search engine optimized (Hijax preserves this)
• It uses a very concise, readable markup and works as mentioned without JavaScript (the properties of Progressive Enhancement)
• The URL is modified on every major page change using fragments in order to allow deep-linking and bookmarking (this is partly self-developed, partly borrowed from SWFAddress)
• And given the above, that “back” and “forward” buttons of the browser works (unlike many other full-Ajax websites)
• The site includes Google Maps (you can’t go wrong with that!)
• The site is tested and optimized for Internet Explorer 6 and 7 as well as Firefox 2 (and friends).

Enough talking, here is the site: http://www.totalkredit.dk – “unfortunately” most of the site is in Danish except for a small investor-part.

Adobe has released a new version of Apollo AIR (yup, that is the new name along with quite a boring logo) and to promote it, they have also announced Adobe AIR Developer Derby – a competition to see who’s best at their new runtime.

The prizes are quite amazing and given the long duration of the development time (deadline is in September), anyone can create some pretty amazing applications. But one things puzzles me about the license, that they require applications to be released under: is attribution-requiring licenses accepted? And what about copyleft-licenses? The official rules are pretty clear on what the license must permit Adobe to use the content for (display, commercial use and derivative use), but does that mean, that if my application is released under say CC-BY-SA-2.5, is that accepted? And what if I include Wikipedia-texts in it (GFDL’ed) and some Flickr-images (under free licenses) will Adobe then be willing to credit me, the main 5 authors of every article from Wikipedia (which is what GFDL requires) as well as the creators of all the Flickr-images that require attribution?

I’ve sent a mail and hope for a positive response. I will keep this entry updated on the matter.

And for once, I am not talking bad about our company clients, but the clients in a client-server architecture.

Flash memory cheats have always been known to any good flash game hackers and ditto developer, but some still don’t know about them. Thus, as shoemoney recently posted a competition to get the best score in Desktop Tower Defence, “some guy” of course fired up Tsearch and throw a lot of points his way. The result was of course, that he won (even though he cheated), and afterwards he posted a simple guide to do it.

That is why should should always have a server telling you what to do when. More on this topic in the months to come - as I and a friend is developing a brand new game site including high-level security.

Google Maps Street View is pretty amazing. The detail, the 360 view, the small increments between images. Just see these poor guys driving down Park Drive N. Google is quite amazing. This new street view has mapped 5 cities in the US.

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