Entries Tagged 'Flex' ↓

I managed to sort out a good and affordable VPS solution to host the Quizine Live Demo and hopefully more Quizine related content.
You can access the demo here: http://quizine.org/demo. The username and password are already filled in so you just have to click “Login”.
Don’t trash the place though…

I managed to implement a quick face lift for Quizine’s user interface. A bit cleaner and more compact.
A few screenshots can be seen here (click on the magnifier to view the original size).

During the past months Quizine went through a complete rewrite of both the core and the user interface. Mostly due to the need of more flexibility and the need for additional concepts like “evaluative” and others on which I will not insist right now. Along with this, it also has a Flex interface now, built with the Flex 4 SDK (even though the code is still Flex3-ish).

The current version is a first Alpha of a 0.5 and there’s still room for improvement, so ideas are more than welcome. In addition, the UI itself is not as “Rich” as “RIA” and not a major change in layout since the previous version. This is mostly because I didn’t want to invest too much effort in this direction just yet (and as we all know, professional UI is always a bitch in terms of effort).

I’ve managed to put up a demo .war file that can be dropped in a Tomcat or anything like it. It uses the HSQLDB engine so no additional setups will be required (except for what’s already here). Username and password for the demo .war are admin/admin.

I’m also trying to get some decent VPS hosting for a Live-Demo so it can get more exposure. I’ve evaluated some options so it should be sorted in a few weeks.

Anyways, any ideas or any kind of help is more than welcome. So if you like it, find it useful or want to contribute, just let me know.

Last week I’ve looked around for a decent flash solution to present flickr.com photo sets and after a while I ran into SmashingMagazine’s list (which is not around flickr but also highlights some solutions supporting it). I have a high (although probably not 100% founded) level of trust for SmashingMagazine’s relevance in terms of media and internet content so I kind of took this for granted – although there might be other alternatives out there.

Anyways, going through the list, the candidates either look over designed (and clearly serving other purposes), were licensed under some inconvenient terms or just with a low level of control over the features and content aggregation.

So I decided to give it a shot and see how really complicated is to code something like this with flex and here are the results: http://cosminaru.ro/photo/cosmin and http://cosminaru.ro/photo/alexandra.

It doesn’t have the smooth scroll and other fancy stuff but it gets the flickr sets and it displays their content – which is actually what I was looking for. Later maybe I can find some time to add some cool effects here and there, but for now is good enough. It also has support for linking directly to one of the images so you can do stuff like this.

The binary package can be found here. It works by editing the flickr-user.txt file with your flickr user id (not user name) which you can obtain from here: http://idgettr.com/.

I also want to publish the code but it needs some cleanup and some wtf’s removal first.