Day 2 Afternoon

The afternoon featured 2 topics I thought applied well to what we do..

Ben Stucki: Byte Array 202
"You have reached the end of the internet, please go back the way you came."
www.benstucki.com
This was a very interesting topic. The ability to read things into flash as bytes. You can pickup a lot more information then other means. For example you can find out the type of file even if someone had changed the name of the file. Plus, as Ben stated, byte methods are 'crazy fast'. He also showed some sweet examples of mp3 players, one air app where you could drag and drop mp3 files and it would load with the album cover.

Here are some resources:
www.bytearray.com
richapps.de
metaphile

Dave Coletta: Buzzword - How'd they build that?
www.colettas.com
This was one of many application walk-throughs. Very entertaining presenter showing off his company's online word proccessor. Very slick interface, being launched Fall 07. He said his framework for coding was taken off of flex coders framework code.

Mansour Raad (ESRI): Mapping Component
This was by far the most impressive real world use of flex that I've seen. He went through is work proccesses for a recent project. They got a job for the City of Mpls for the 35W bridge collapse. City wanted a real time interface for citizens to see driving routes. And there is a back-end for the city to add/remove road-blocks. The api at arcwebservices.com is open for personnel use. Pretty cool maps, different from google.

Also demo'd an app for san fran police tracking. you can view real-time locations of police cruisers and they actually move live on the map...also an insane feature, if you click on the car it gives you the cop's profile as well as a view of his dashboard camera! (pretty cool, heh) Another demo showed a book component from eli at www.quietlyscheming.com/ that had a map and then you could fold over pages for different overlays for sex offenders, schools, etc.

Resources:
www.arcwebservices.com
www.trafficcast.com
www.papervision.com
www.greasemonkey.com (scraper)