Apollo Black Dot Digital Image Resizer [Edit] [Edit]
Posted At : May 11, 2007 4:36 PM | Posted By : Wayne McFetridge
Related Categories: AIR,Apollo

Please note: This project is now fixed for the AIR runtime. BDDResizer

Please note: This project is now broken due to some changes between the alpha Apollo runtime and the new beta AIR runtime

I have wished for a rough and ready no frills image resizer for ages to help my clients resize images before attempting to upload them into Farcry or other CMS solutions that I build from time to time.

A lot of clients still insist on trying to upload hi-resolutions pictures and often resent the time it takes to get the picture up to the server. (They often send them to me to be "resized" grrrrr )

Obviously I am resizing on the server but client side image manipulation ( even if it is just to cut the picture down to half the size and let the server do the rest) is always a good idea in my books but too many of my web administrators (clients) don't have any image editing software on their computers. (There is always Paint but I have my limits)

Apollo to the rescue.

Introducing my Super Easy No Fuss No Features BDDResizer. (Yes it only saves as jpeg).

Thanks to head starts I found here and here

Comments (6) | Print | Send | del.icio.us | Linking Blogs | 2670 Views

A Holiday and an Apollo Widget - Black Dot MultiTimer
Posted At : March 30, 2007 3:06 PM | Posted By : Wayne McFetridge
Related Categories: Apollo

Straight after I got home from WebDU my family and I left for a holiday in a quite northern New South Wales seaside town for about a week.

It was great to get away away and have a "disconnected" experience. I actually really enjoyed being offline and just hanging with my family and catching some waves. I took my laptop and tinkered with my first Apollo application.

"Application" is pushing it as its an Apollo version of the Daily Grind widget that I use on my Mac to track time spent on various jobs. My wife is on a PC so I thought I'd see if this Apollo stuff really is "Cross Platform".

My creation gets even more modest when compared with the gTimer application demoed at WebDU and announced by Grant Skinner today

I think the coolest part of the experiment was Serialising and Deserialising ActionScript objects to a file on the local computer. I pretty much lifted the example from the Apollo for Adobe Flex Developers Pocket Guide and I'm feeling that Adobe couldn't have made it any easier.

I just serialize the part of my model that I want to persist, in this case an ArrayCollection of TimerVO's, to the file system on close of the app and look for it on creation. Too easy.

I used the ModelLocator from Cairngorm and am curious as to if/where/how people may tweak the framework to add a layer ala ServiceLocator to allow an Event - Command - Delegate - Local File System scenario.

Enjoy it here.

Comments (0) | Print | Send | del.icio.us | Linking Blogs | 1421 Views