bedenk.de/sign blog

yougel.com - the creative network

You didn't hear from me for quite a while, but for a reason We were very busy!

Let me tease you with some big words about our new Internet Platform yougel.com

yougel.com is the revolution in webdesign and user created content. Create your own websites simply by draging your content on your page. It's truly that easy! It's not about what you see is what you get, its about what you see is what you have. It's not another myspace clone and its not a social networking site, its a creative networking site! Furthermore we aren't another website in beta state, no - we are a website in alpha state. We just didn't feel like calling it beta, but its already public. Ok you might think, a change in name, not a big deal. So go ahead, see what we have to offer...

Okok I stop it! This is of course no official press release, more like a sneak preview for all you interested bloggers out there. Let me explain yougel.com a little more clear to you without stressing your attention span even more.

First the creative part:

yougel.com lets you upload all kinds of media (pictures,videos,soundfiles,flash animation,vector graphics) and combine them with widgets that define a certain form and function (textblox,line,slideshow,3 coloumn layout...) by just draging and dropping them on your own page.

And of course the networking features:

yougel.com lets you make friends, create groups, send internal mails, ... and gives you automatic subdomains for your profile and pages [ username.yougel.com (/page1) ]

Like i said we are in a very early state of development. There will be alot more features coming soon, since we built the whole thing pretty modular with Flex and PHP (well parts of that are still in development too haha).

For now the Interface is in german but soon we are going to change it back to english (thats what we started with) or put dual language support in it.

I could talk about it forever, and even less structured than i just did, but for now better register and try out what we have got on yougel.com by clicking on the start button on the bottom left and then the register button("bist du neu hier?").

Keep the following in mind while trying out yougel.com

- You only need your left mouse button

- Menu on the bottom left is your personal stuff like uploaded media...

- Menu on the bottom right lets you edit a page if its your own and you can find the widgets in there

- When you activated the edit mode, try to drag and drop to add things to your page and double click objects on your page or the background to edit its details.

- Be creative!

have fun Thomas

Flex in the Future

I asked Allen Seirafi from Adobe a couple of questions about Flex. Thought you would be interested, of course these are not official Adobe statements. Here is what he had to say:

- Is Flash Player 9 going to be included in Windows Vista?

We don’t know yet, since it is really MS call. The good news is whether they include or not, about 80% of PCs will have it by the end of the year regardless. We get about 10 mil downloads daily. Sites like myspace and google video all use Flash 9. therefore the adaptation is very high. Also Flex 2 has the auto detect and upgrade capability, therefore users can get the upgrade without getting redirected to Adobe’s site…

- Are there plans to include the main Flex framework classes in the flash player to reduce file size and redundancy?

That is a very good question, and I believe the answer is no. however, Adobe is working on a new technology called Apollo, which will give ability to have more of these libraries loaded, and a much much better performance. The Alpha or Beta should start becoming available during the beginning of next year. They really like to keep the player slim, therefore most likely not…

- Are there plans to improve the support of rotation of visual elements (buggy in some aspects)?

Yes, that should see some improvement in the next dot release, and a lot more by the next major release. Already there are some 3-D charts that people have built for rotation etc. that works pretty good… this area needs improvement and is one of the major ones they are looking at…

- Is the Flex framework staying free?

Yes. They are definitely doing that to increase adaptation. Therefore the sdk is definitely staying free. This model has not slowed down the sales and only increased it, so I very much doubt if they change…

- When will be the official release date of Flex 2.01?

This is not dated yet, so anything I say would be a pure guess, and my guess would be mid-year next year!

Great questions Thomas!

Best,
-Allen

photoDesk RIA demo

Check out our cool rich internet application based on flash 9 that makes it possible to discuss images online in a whole new way. There are even video tutorials available on the website. Be sure to check out the amazing live feature with a friend!

As the saying goes, “a picture is worth a thousand words”, photoDesk live can give you a whole new experience of sharing and communicating your ideas about pictures.

photoDesk enables users to simultaneously arrange and manipulate pictures online, through a flash application that connects to the photoDesk Live Server. In combination with a voice-over-ip solution it tears down the wall in communication about pictures. photoDesk provides an direct and innovative way of viewing and discussing pictures online. It just takes your desk with your pictures spread out on it and makes it virtual. Selecting a set of pictures becomes as natural and intuitive as it always was in the analog world.

This is not a public release, but everyone who is really interested can check out our photoDesk RIA demo at http://photodesk.bounceme.net.

Please be aware that the demo is not running in a appropriate server enviroment and might be slow or unstable. Be nice and only upload small image sizes!

Read more about it and see screen shots on my website photoDesk project on bedenk.de/sign

enjoy and please give me feedback

Flex 2.0 rotation

We are currently working on an advanced Flex 2.0 project. No details yet, but soon to read about it in this blog. But what we discovered working on it is that the Flex framework has some lacks regarding rotation of elements.

While the "no device font in rotated objects problem" is already known we tripped over some new interesting stumble stones.

- For example placing a rotated element in a canvas doesnt generate the scrollbars as you would expect, but only takes the width and height starting from the upper left corner to define the size of the element.

- Another problem is using the implemented drag n drop with rotated elements. It seems like there is a "non dropping area" created that resembles the size of the used canvas (or other element) at the top of the application. While this area is out of screen for unrotated objects it comes into stage when rotation is applied. For example a 180 degrees rotated object can be invisibly found in the top left corner of your application. This might be a bug in our application or a flex feature, lets see...

We are working on these things and i keep you up to date when we figure out how to solve this problems.

brand new bedenk.de/sign blog

Finally I started blogging, too. My name is Thomas Bedenk and I'm a designer and web developer living in Nürnberg, Germany. This blog is going to be mostly in English, just b/c I will probably talk about some technical stuff and English is just the language of international developers.

So wait - before going into details I should say a welcome to the readers of my blog. And if no one reads this it will be a get-rid-of-some-thoughts-blog

For everyone accessing this blog directly, my website can be found at bedenk.de/sign

So long, happy surfing and more to come soon…