Header

Projects

topfin

I really like grooveshark.com, but I found it a little anoying and sometimes embarrassing when scantily clad women were showing up in advertisements, while I was listening to music at work.

How do you explain that to your boss, when he walks by and there she is on your desktop?

GrooveShark is great for finding music for your little children, but once again those ads are not something you want to expose your children to.

What do you do? Well, I decided to write this wrapper that hides those embarrassng ads. You can download/install it here.

Weather Widget

1. support for international post code (you need a location id)
2. add search for city to handle international cities location id
3. use transparency instead of background color

Original

1. display weather for more than one city
2. postcode detection to default to the city you are currently in (e.g. get the city, post code, and country based on the user's ipaddress )
3. convert to an AIR desktop widget (see downloads)
4. add Weather Channel links and logo
5. create setting for farenheit or celcius
6. use transparency instead of background color or make transparency a setting

Enhanced (3 weather displays and saves state)

You can set the postal code or internation location ID by clicking the button in the botton-right corner.

Notice the subtle filter effects on the temperature value. On my blog I will discuss custom filters, effects, and effect triggers in Flex.

I will also discuss Flex and web services and how to setup a cossdomain.xml file.

I would like to do two more things with this widget:

1. create a shine effect for all objects to use
2. convert this widget into a flex module, so it can be used in a more complex application

Shooting Desktop Windows While Playing Asteroids

Have you ever seen that video, where the stick figure comes to life in Flash and starts using items on the desktop to battle the artist (click here if you haven't). Well I thought it would be fun to write a game do something similar (well at least interacting with Windows in a fundamental way). Since I have 2 hours to burn every day on the train, I thought it would be fun to write a game in ActionScript 3.0 (Flash) and run it on the desktop (using AIR). It turned out to be fairly simple. The next step was to have it interact with the windows on the desktop. I was able to accomplish this by using Window's hooks (low level events) to listen to when a window changes its state (minimized, maximized, or restored) or is moved. I wrote a server in C# that listens to these events and sends messages to the AIR application via TCP/IP sockets.

Click the image below to play the web version.

Use the LEFT and RIGHT ARROW keys to rotate the ship, the UP ARROW for thrusters, the SPACEBAR to shoot, and DOWN ARROW to start a new game when you run out of spaceships is over. Press ANY KEY to regenerate the ship after it explodes. If nothing happens, click inside the page to gain focus to the flash application and begin playing.

The above application is based on a demo from Keith Peter's book "Foundation Actionscript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move".

Currently working on something for the Ray White Corporate Office.

A long time ago I created utahxgames.com .

This was something I was playing around with a long time ago and am thinking of reusing (Mark Shepherd's SpringGraph). I'm thinking of creating an application to show results of Blitz Planning (Crystal Clear - Agile Software Development) and/or CRC cards in a graphical chart that can be easily manipulated. Another use would a pedigree chart for genealogy. The possibilities are endless¿

Dynamic Thumbnails

This is currently not working, due to limited file I/O access as well as memory stream access. I wrote to originally create a file on the server and then wrote it to stream to memory, but both aren't allowed with my hosting company. All thumbnails under Themes were generated using this code.