ActivoRicordi Captain’s log

Buenas noches:

No hace mucho que descubri el entorno de desarrollo flashdevelop.org, la verdad es aunque no he podido utilizarlo todo lo que quisiera, es bastante potente y permite desarrollar comodamente en Flex sin necesidad de utilizar el FlexBuilder o FlashBuilder. Es cierto que tiene limitaciones pero en su mayoría relativas a que el Flex SDK no posee todas las librerias existentes en el FlexBuilder.

Instalarlo es muy sencillo y existen varios tutoriales que lo explican.  Lo que no he encontrado son tutoriales, ejemplos o artículos que lo utilicen a fondo con todas sus posibilidades. Así que he decido adentrarme yo mismo en este territorio inexplorado.

• Antes de nada he descargarme Flex SDK. Se trata de un fichero zip que es facil de descomprimir. En mi caso, yo lo he hecho en mi disco secundario D:\FlexSDK.
• Se ejecuta el FlashDevelop. Se selecciona la opción

Crear un nuevo proyecto

Debajo de la pestaña de proyectos recientes “Recent Projects”, existe la opción “New Project”. Esta opción nos dirige a una ventana emergente de donde se puede seleccionar el proyecto deseado. En este caso, se selecciona la opción “ActionScript 3 > Flex Project”.

En este ejemplo especifico se introduce los siguientes valores:

• Name: AddressBook
• Location: D:\adobeflexprojects
• Package: – Se deja en blanco -

Automaticamente, se genera una colección de carpetas como se generarían en el caso de un proyecto utilizando FlexBuilder.

• bin
• lib
• src

En nuestro caso, se desgarga este fichero (fichero), se introduce en la carpeta lib, que se encuentra en
D:/

Se abre el fichero Main.mxml que se encuentra localizado en la carpeta src, al que se puede acceder desde la pestaña Project.

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<mx:Button id="myButton" label="Hello" />

Queda el siguiente codigo

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
<mx:Button id="myButton" label="Hello" />
</mx:Application>

Una vez salvado, se pulsa sobre el botón “Test Movie”, y el SDK de Flex compila el fichero. Y si se ha cometido ningún error al copiar/pegar aparece un botón.

A continuación, se le añade nuevos elementos de UI,como una etiqueta o un campo donde se almacena el Nombre de Pila del contacto.

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<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml">
	<mx:Panel title="New AddressBook Contact" height="75%" width="75%" 
        paddingTop="10" paddingLeft="10">
			<mx:Label id="fNameLabel" text="FirstName."/>
			<mx:TextInput id="fName" text="Enter First Name"/>
			<mx:Button id="myButton" label="Submit" />
	</mx:Panel>
</mx:Application>

Se ha introducido elementos nuevos

• Label
• TextInput

Tambien puedo introducir campos múltiples, como este campo lista que me va a permitir seleccionar el tratamiento del individuo:

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<mx:List> 
	<mx:dataProvider>
		<mx:String>Mr.</mx:String>
		<mx:String>Ms.</mx:String>
		<mx:String>Miss</mx:String>
	</mx:dataProvider>
</mx:List>

Esto es solo el comienzo para abrir boca,en los siguientes capitulos se comenzará de una manera más organizada entendiendo cual debe ser la organización de un desarrollo, como se organiza un formulario y como se puede dar estilos a la aplicación.

Un saludo

I discovered QRCodes at 11870.com where they are using them on a Marketing Campaign. There is nice article in Spanish which explains what they are.Also there is another post from a spanish blog which relates first introduction of an occidental guys to it.

For your benefit, I include its automatic translations to English

• QR Codes for mobiles
• What are QRCodes?

For our non-Spanish readers I will do a summary:

From 2000 at Japan all magazines and products have started to use QRCode, a version of the two-dimensional code bar for Kanji characters, which is readable with the use of a mobile camera: Simply making a photo is enough for saving the information inside of the mobile device.Companies like McDonalds use them to inform about ingredients or nutritional facts, or MoviStar offering discounts. At Barcelona, they are using them for providing tourist information on the sightseeing points to Japanese tourists.
It is a technology designed for the warehourse but it is mainly target now a mass-consumer products.

How to read a QRCode?

Reading software is available for many mobile manufacturers such as Nokia or from companies specialized in this technologies such as i-Nigma or Kaywa. Nokia provide a page which explain which readers are compatible with each of its phones and which phones have Nokia barcode reader already preinstalled on your device.
This page provide very good information about the applications which support the most common phones.

For iphone users, there is a open source project which provide a reader application called QRDecode, obviously it is only available for hijacked phones on version 1.x, and for 2.x users. Unfortunately, I am not aware. Please, comments welcome. There is a page which explains how to install it with the installer.

There is also another application called 2D Sense Platform which seems a commercial application which support not only QRCodes but also traditional DataMatrix codes.

How to produce a QRCode?

Nokia has a page where you can produce through a web application which can help to play around a little bit in order to understand all the possibilities.

The first thing we notice is that Nokia recommends us not to exceed 60 characters of text, as mobile code starts getting too complex for camera phones to handle.
Kaywa has also its own application to create this QRCodes from URL, Texts, Phone Number and SMS.

Well, folks that is enough for today. Next chapter we will see how to create programmatically QRCode from XML through J2EE or Ruby on Rails.

Inspiring, revealing what to say about this lecture from Michael Wesch called “A Portal to Media Literacy”. I have watched several time this thought-provoking lecture and each time I watch it I found something different that makes me think how mass-user content providing , or what it is called more generally web 2.0 could slowly turn up-side-down how knowledge and knowledge jobs are made today.

He has did it again after creating a video about web 2.0, which not only really explain very well what the whole concept is, but also its visual language has inspired other videos about technology.

Although the lecture is about how web 2.0 tools and media could revolutionaize learning and classroom work, it is also talking about something else, it goes beyond to learning environment and it could influence other environment such as research, consulting or product development where knowledge is main asset.

Tools presented on the video are interesting and but the best are the reflections, concepts and the best practices which could be interfered from the video. How interesting could be to apply these concepts to consulting, and how challenging at the same time. Could you imagine to apply these methodology to our behemoths (companies) currently on the markets.

There are in fact companies such as Accenture which are creating their own wikis, blogs, social bookmarking, social computing applications, or companies like Capgemini which are using youtube for publishing their videos

It is a long, more than 1 hour but really it deserves time to watch it.

Kind regards