PhotoCam; My First Adobe Apollo Application

I finally found a little bit of time to try out Adobe Apollo. My first attempt was mearly just to get one Apollo application up and running, so I decided to do something simple. PhotoCam takes your webcam stream, allows you to take a ‘snapshot’ and save it off to the hard drive as a JPG. You can download the source or try the application out. Besure to have the Adobe Apollo Runtime pre-installed.

I must say, I really do like Apollo. I used the Flex Builder Extensions to author with, and it was just so easy to code and get working. I was expecting a few problems, being an Alpha product, but everything just worked! And if you’re a Flex developer, than you’re in luck; apart from the Apollo specific libraries, you’re basically coding a Flex Application!

Filed under: apollo, flex, web 2.0

reCaptcha

Every so often you stumble across an idea which is really quite simple, but actually does some good in the world too (a WIN WIN). I’ve recently come across such a project, which is an extension of the popular captcha concept.

Most of us use captchas daily; simply put, it’s an image containing a smudged word in which you need to type and get it right before you can move forward. It’s used in blogging applications all the time (when you’re posting a comment for example) and is used to determine if the user is a human or a computer (computers struggle to decipher the word in the image correctly).

Anyway, reCaptcha is a project in which the captcha image is a word from a scanned book that the computer can’t recognise and therefore needs to be deciphered. Humans can do this, computers can’t. We’re deciphering things for the sake of security anyway, so why not put our deciphering skills to some use!

It’s an interesting read, and there’s more to it than you first think. One of the problems they had to overcome was, if the computer couldn’t read the word, how would the captcha system clarify if the user got the decipher right?

What’s even better is that it’s completely free! It’s one of the better captcha implementations I’ve seen too, as it allows for audio challenges. There’s a few platform specific implementations of it including a nice version in ColdFusion by Robin Hilliard.

technorati tags:recaptcha

Filed under: technology, web 2.0

goplan.org First Impressions

Although ALL my time is taken up with my business Enpresiv, I do like to have a couple of side projects going to keep my development skills up (I’m doing less development with Enpresiv these days), and so I can try out some ideas and experiment a little.

I’ve just launched a small side project, and decided I’d give goplan.org a shot to help manage the development. I’ve used Basecamp before (the leading web application in this space) on a number of personal projects, and I’ve really enjoyed the experience.

I’ve only just started to use goplan.org so these are my first impressions, I’m sure I’ll have different things to say as I keep using it. However, I’ll start on a positive note with the design. I really like the design of goplan.org, it is clean, clutter less and is very simple to use; in fact, in points it’s too simple and a little more information at times would be handy.

I think the feature set is one of it’s strongest selling points. The feature that goplan.org does better than Basecamp is bug management or tickets. Basecamp doesn’t have a direct function dedicated to bug management or tickets, and because I’m a web developer, bug/ticket handling is a really nice feature to have.

The only bad thing about goplan.org is, it’s speed! I signed up yesterday and started my first project, and I must say, it was really slow. I was even questioning continuing my trial. However, when using working with goplan.org today, it was much faster. In fact, speed was not even an issue. I’m not sure what was going on yesterday, but I hope the speed continues!

technorati tags:goplan, web2.0

Filed under: web 2.0

Google Maps ColdFusion Tag; now with official Google Maps API Driving Directions support

As the rather long title says, I’ve just updated my Google Maps ColdFusion Tag with support for the new official Google Maps API Driving Directions. In a previous post, I launched Driving Directions for my Google Maps ColdFusion Tag, however it didn’t use anything official from Google to achieve this. Adding support for the official API from Google will allow me to make it more feature rich and much more robust and stable.

There are a couple of other nice enhancements, including some JavaScript methods so you can update the directions on the maps, without having to reload the page. I’ve also added some more driving directions examples.

You can download the source (or a zipped 0.4 version) and check it out via subversion over at RIAForge.

Filed under: coldfusion, google maps, web 2.0