Paranoid Blogger

Flash Box 2D tutorials

AS3 Flash Physics Engine
Box2D - http://box2dflash.sourceforge.net/

Box2D is an open source physics engine written primarily for games. As the name suggests, Box2D is a purely 2D engine. However, Box2D has grown beyond it's humble box simulating roots, and can now handle convex polygons and other shapes.

Flash Box 2D Tutorials
http://www.kerp.net/box2d/
http://www.emanueleferonato.com/category/box2d/

jQuery Lightbox Scripts

Why build your own light box when there are more than a dozen scripts available!!

The Best jQuery Lightbox Scripts by Bilal Çınarlı
http://woorkup.com/2009/12/29/jquery-lightbox-scripts/

and
Comparison of various scripts that display images
and other objects in somehow cool CSS popups
http://planetozh.com/projects/lightbox-clones/

Flex Testing

I have been using Flex Unit for a while and suddenly felt the urge to search on other competitive testing frameworks, and to my surprise there were couple of testing frameworks. I think they specialize in their own ways.

Flex Monkey
FlexMonkey is a testing framework for Flex apps that provides for the capture, replay and verification of Flex UI functionality. FlexMonkey can record and playback Flex UI interactions, and generates ActionScript-based testing scripts that can easily be included within a continuous integration process. It uses the Flex Automation API and was created by extending Adobe's sample automation adapter, AutoQuick.

Features:
* Records and plays back Flex UI interactions
* UI Interactions can be edited and replayed
* Generates FlexUnit TestCases, and can also be used with non-FlexUnit-based testing frameworks
* Works with Flex and AIR apps
* Apps can be tested running standalone or in a browser
* Tests can be run from build systems such as Ant
* Handles all Flex UI events
* Uses Flex Automation API to provide native control over your flex app. Requires no javascript or browser plug-ins to use.
* Unit tests are written entirely in ActionScript. No other programming or special purpose scripting languages are needed to develop comprehensive UI test suites.
* Non-invasive. Requires no modifications to your application source.

FlexUISelenium
FlexUISelenium is an extension to the Selenium RC client driver that enables the Selenium RC client drivers to interact (and test) the Flex UI components and methods of the Flex application.

Flex Unit
FlexUnit is a unit testing framework for Flex and ActionScript 3.0 applications and libraries. It mimics the functionality of JUnit, a Java unit testing framework, and comes with a graphical test runner.

Chew on this.

www.chewonthis.org
After a long time... a new site goes up.

This site educates us about the health and environmental benefits of eating locally. It is managed by Carlin Greenstein and Annie Stranger. The design is done by Annie Stranger. The site is based upon Wordpress, this is the first wordpress site developed by Nitesh Sankhalkar and I have put in my bits to help out. Overall it works really well.

Will update with more info later.

Beyond Compare - File/Folder/Source Code Comparison

This is an amazing little tool that lets you compare files, folders and source code. It has been extremely useful for me, when there are more developers working on a single page of code. I have tried some code compare'r software before and this one turns out the best. It is small, simple and easy to use. Do not forget to look into the file viewer rules here.

Other code compare tools are.. (I havent tested them yet)

Araxis Merge
Examdiff Pro (Fast search on hard disk)
Win Merge
File Locator Pro
KDiff

.sol editor (flash shared object/ flash cookie)

If you are working with Flash shared object or you might say flash cookie. It would be easier to verify the stored data by using .sol editor by Alexis Isaac. I frequently use this to even debug/read cookies from other sites. It just helps me understand the architect of some games they way it is made.

Download .sol editor from sound forge.
.sol editor

Photoshop Brushes

some free photoshop brush sites.

let me know if anyone has other sites for photoshop brushes.

Flash Physics Engines

List of Physics engines for Adobe Flash

1. APE: www.cove.org/ape/index.htm
2. Box2DFlashAS3: box2dflash.sourceforge.net
3. Fisix Engine: www.fisixengine.com
4. Glaze: yaa-blog.blogspot.com/search/label/Glaze
5. Motor2: lab.polygonal.de
6. PopShapes: lab.andre-michelle.com/physics-engine

Cake PHP

Its been sometime I have worked on PHP, but I would love to try this out.

http://cakephp.org/

CakePHP is a rapid development framework for PHP that provides an extensible architecture for developing, maintaining, and deploying applications. Using commonly known design patterns like MVC and ORM within the convention over configuration paradigm, CakePHP reduces development costs and helps developers write less code.

Saving Images Out of Flash/Flex Without Losing Quality

An interesting post by Jesse Warden, something you don't want to forget when you have an opportunity to work on an application that saves an image on the disk.

http://jessewarden.com/2009/01/saving-images-out-of-flashflex-without-losing-quality.html

VisualComplexity

www.visualcomplexity.com

visualcomplexity is a space to view complex network visualization. The main goal is to understand different visualization methods across a series of disciplines, as diverse as Biology, Social Networks or the World Wide Web.

This is very inspiring and truly can be a future of visualization.

Wordpress blogger templates

I am still planning to switch over from moveabletype to wordpress. progress have been very slow on it. Trying and testing different features, plugins, templates... this time I would like to make sure I have most of the items fixed and not bother about the blog engine for next couple of years.

Templates:
http://www.jackbook.com/
http://www.wordpress.org/
http://www.smashingmagazine.com/
http://www.bspcn.com/2008/11/10/50-beautiful-free-wordpress-themes/

Flex Styling and Skinning

Degrafa is a Declarative Graphic Framework to level things between a designer and a developer. There are many things involved in it, one of it is to eliminate the learning curve to use these. So at a production level it can be used pretty fast. The core team is a mix of Architects, Framework Developers, UX Architect and Framework Engineers.

http://www.degrafa.com/

http://www.scalenine.com/

http://www.linearticulator.com/

Time Tracker/ GTD's

Using time trackers/ GTDs on medium level projects becomes essential to track efficiency and development progress. It especially becomes important when you are not a the same location. Here are the few links to online time trackers which can be useful.

http://www.myintervals.com/

http://www.basecamphq.com/

http://www.simplegtd.com/

Statistics and Trend Links

Links that would help to learn the web search trends and traffic results, I am pretty sure there are a lot more and these results are really intriguing and helps to learn in a global perspective of where a company site stands. Wish to get more such links and append this list.

Google Trends

Alexa - Web Information

wakoopa - Software trends