This afternoon, I  came accross this perticular set of video tutorials from Adobe to learn Adobe Flex in a week. These video tutorials provide a brief introduction to Flash, Flex, ActionScript, MXML and the Adobe Flex Builder.

a nice resource for those who wish to learn

Hoping for a great experience.

~Nac

I ran my bluetooth connectivity adventures using ITC BlueSoleil and here’s my experience :

Bluetooth connection is pretty descent. It won’t cost you more than Rs. 350 for a neat bluetooth dongle to allow your laptops to connect to your desktops. The configuration steps for bluetooth connection are fairly easy as well. You connect the dongle to PC, install drivers, make the device discoverable, seek your device (PC) from laptop, exchange passkeys and there… you’re now connected ! Share your PC’s existing internet connection, configure the network adapter settings and you’re on your way to surf the net off the bluetooth !!!

Simple it may be. But its SLOW. reminds of dialups. Forget the downloads, even PC-Laptop transfer speed is also low. You simply cant transfer files that are HUGE in filesize merely because such transfer will take HOURS and is not at all feasible to waste so much time. transfer of the same data via usb is a better option than on bluetooth connection.

Same goes for bluetooth internet. It is not good for streaming things online, downloading files that are larger than 2-4 MB or sending/receiving emails with descently bulky attachments. PLUS, you are definitely restricted by RANGE factor of the bluetooth dongle.

Now, I had some STRANGE requirement to go for a better connectivity solution. I wanted to teach things like Voice Chat and PC-to-PC calling to my parents. I did attempt to make do with bluetooth, but having a voice chat on the internet while sitting in the same room is just too much to handle.

I needed more range and preferably more speed to go further on Webcam features. Thus, after three months of bluetooth experience, I extended my arms (paws?) for the wireless router.

I happened to have some experience with configuring wireless internet connections at office. Wireless router configuration was not much of a hazzle. It completed in less than fifteen minutes with all necessary settings for port forwarding to support my website’s smooth running over this new thing routing network traffic.

now that I have these things set up, somewhere in the back of my mind, i’m planning to write tiny guides for bluetooth and/or wireless configurations. Currently am too lazy to do that.

Ultimately, why this post. The purpose of this post is less for bosting about the new device or my connectivity experiences. It’s more like I’m trying to justify the purchase of the device itself. Doesn’t really matter now, I’m connected, happy and wireless !!!

~JaguarNac~

It was awsome. It had been long since I actually felt tired and bored of working in front of computer. It finally happened this month. Another unbelievable thing was the M.Com examinations. I could appear for two papers only, one was skipped due to an official meeting and another was skipped merely because it was Accountancy, a definite Zero for me.

Birthday was fun. Turned 22. thats a lot of two’s in there…

It was a good fun and experience while working with PHP, C#, ASP.NET, Flash ActionScript, InnoSetup, Visual Basic 6, Different CD image formats, Flex, CSS, XHTML and JavaScript. I do not want to believe that I know these things. They just happen. I just like to see them happen and prefer to change the way they happen so that the way they happen is the way I want them to happen, which usually is the way in which someone else wants the things to be happened. Weired yet enjoyable phenomenon.

Logix are teh magix !

~JaguarNac~

meanwhile, all those interested in Flex, you may want to check this out :
http://www.quietlyscheming.com/blog/

~Nachiket~

Table tag can scale in its height depending upon the content being placed within it. A table can efficiently split a page into columns, thus boosting the “alignment” aspect of various page elements. Tables come handy especially when placing web forms onto a page, where the alignment of labels and input fields is to be considered.

Table cells can have background colors, borders, border styles, border colors and background images as well. These design factors can significantly improve the looks of a table based design.

However, whenever writing a table, a designer has to keep several things in mind. Things like start and closure of Table, Row and Cell, Spanning of cells accross the rows and columns, starts and closures of nested tables, cell widths and heights and many more.

Whenever creating a table cell, designer has to define a table, table row and the column. Thus, it takes three start tags and three closing tags to reach to a first element which is capable to display its contents. In short we create several unnecessecary elements while defining a page layout in table formats. This results into a complicated DOM layout and increases the filesize.

However, the original purpose of a “Table” tag was never to represent the page layout. Table tag is meant to be used where there’s a tabular data to be placed onto the page. When we use table do define the page layout, we are actually representing parts of the page and not any tabular data in there.

The porpose of defining various parts of the page can be served using another tag instead of tables. Its the “DIV” tag. DIV refers to division. DIV tag is division of a page, or a part of the page. Hence, it is more accurate to use DIV to define “parts” of the page instead of creating several supporting tags and one cell tag to do the same.

A huge benifit of “DIV” tag is that it takes most of the properties that a CSS can define. Using the strengths of CSS, DIVS can go one step beyond the capabilities of a table. DIVs can be nested just like tables, however, single div tag is sufficient to reach an element capable to display its contents.

This helps in a less complicated Document Object Model. As the “visual styling” of a div is done in CSS, it enables us to seperate the design and data more efficiently. Instead complicated and rigid layouts, designer can simply go on writing tags and text in a page. He neednot worry about width and heights of the element while writing this data as all these things are already taken care of in CSS.

DIVs are definitely much more effective, simple and flexible than complicated tables.
I’ll be writing a few more posts elabrating on various aspects in Tables VS. DIVs.

Your comments and suggestions are valuable in this matter. Please correct me if I’m wrong or missing any point.

Thanks
~JaguarNac~

Adobe® AIR™ is a cross-operating system runtime that allows web application developers to use their existing web development skills (HTML, Javascript, Adobe Flash®, Adobe Flex™, Ajax) to build and deploy rich Internet applications to the desktop.

Cool things coming this way!!!

BE HAPPY

~JaguarNac~

Last week was really a busy one. A few upcoming projects and a few ongoing ones…..
really busy. Plus, now I’ll have to rush to Universities and Colleges for the
MCA admission details.

Many things to do… Too few hours per day. 24 is just not enough….

Apart from work there are plenty of things that i can see, which need my attention,
but simply cant get enough of it.

Tic Tac Toe AI modifications, Chat functionalify/framework for Flex,
Some database relationship drawing for mom, and many more things.

Hardly a few hopes to get “Spare time” in upcoming couple of weeks.

I’m also expecting a “First” student for my Flash Tutions… I wish it works out well…..

thats it for now… will post here soon

Goodnite !!

~JaguarNac~

it is available at http:\\tictactoe.riaforge.org
This adds some cool benifits to the project :

Issue Tracker
SVN
seperate blog for the project

so, now we have versioning

I’m expecting the multilayer GUI to complete today.

~JaguarNac~

I’m working on the basic chat room/waiting room functionality for the same.
For now, I’m basically looking out for all the possible ways to get the things done, preferably through AMFPHP. However, i am unsure if AMFPHP is able to call a client-side function.

I’ve recently worked with the Flash Media Server. FMS can call a client method using the netConnection object. At first glance at AMFPHP documentations, I couldn’t find any such functionality. Maybe, the functionality is already there, but i haven’t seen it yet. Must look through the documentations first.

I’m sure I DON’T want to use FMS for this.

I haven’t yet tried the Flex Data Services. However, I prefer to keep FDS as an alternative to AMFPHP as of now.

Thats it for now,

~JaguarNac~