One of my friend pointed me to this video on YouTube. Its really funny, apparently one of the guy - Jekre(the one with a pony tail) was working with me in my old company. Check it out here.

Posted by Last ActionScript Hero at 12:37 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

This thing is spreading like fire. Thought I will give it a try too and here is the result:

Posted by Last ActionScript Hero at 04:27 PM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)

It has been more than a couple of months since I last posted to my blog and the reason was that I has been involved fulltime in architecturing and developing a Math based RIA in Flash for my employer. The key features included:

• Creating an authoring component and player component which can be used to create mathematical equations using Flash and play them back using the player (an SWF file)
• Being able to render back these mathematical equations as images in the server
• Generating MathML inside Flash and creating corresponding MathML’s on the server
• Maintaining compliance with MathML 2.0 standards
• Creating a customizable panel where a user can select and create his own Math items
• And a lot more…this whole page wouldn’t fit to spell out all the features

Believe me it was not an easy job to create one, we slogged day in and day out. Hit almost all the bugs in Flash, found workarounds and nothing but equations were running through my mind all the time.

Due to copyright issues and IP’s I will not be able to really give you a link to this application but here is a sample image which the application generates. This sample depicts only a very small subset of the supported elements and the application supports more than 400 elements including foreign characters.

The front-end and the business logic were built in Flash and the backend was Java with openamf. Because the image which was send to the server was huge (pixel data) I had developed some compression algorithm which would compress the pixel dump before it send to the server and server side script would decode it when it receives it.

One of the key challenges we faced was with sending the data to the Director wrapper in the standalone version. We have to use LCO’s to send data from Flash to Director and LCO’s had a size limit so we literally had to split the data into parts – send it to Director and then reassemble the whole content inside Director. It was a pain on the ***.

I learnt a lot, a real lot when creating this application. I am really happy to have created this application, which as far as my knowledge goes has never been created in this form elsewhere. A very close, but very light version of a similar implementation is here but this is way too simple than the one I am speaking about.

A very close application which resembles the one I am speaking about is MathType by Design Science but this is not developed in Flash.
Apart from all the technical learning I got from this project I had a great personal learning which I would carry for my life. I always used to flop Mathematics in school and that was my most hated subject of all but now most of the applications I am working on are Mathematical based applications and though I am able to successfully architecture, develop and deliver them I don’t have a clue of what they all mean and now I am realizing how important it was to learn Maths. The proof of this is the sample image above – I am sure that it doesn’t make any sense mathematically ;)

Take good care of yourself till me meet in my next post.

Posted by Last ActionScript Hero at 08:26 AM | Permalink | Comments (0) | TrackBacks (0)