Zinc – Saving images
It was obvious that I had to write a few more lines about Zinc in the near future, but somehow this topic didn't leave me alone at all, and no, I'm not writing about Zinc because I like it, I'm writing this because I don't want that other people fall into the traps I fell while using it. Do I like Zinc? Yes & No, it's a very weird situation, it's useful, it would be even more useful if they would do their job right, but I already wrote about it here. So let's leave this discussion out of here.
So let's begin from the ground up, your goal is to resize and save the newly resized files back again into a jpeg. Sounds easy?
It should be but it isn't!!
First of all I have to tell you that I began my project with Zinc 3.0 which supports bytearrays, it was really cool to work with it, as I was able to use the JPEGEncoder class that anyway writes bytearrays.
Zinc – A love hate relationship
Zinc! Who doesn't know zinc? A long time ago, before the Adobe AIR runtime was available flash developers didn't had much choice when developing desktop applications, screensavers, either you created an .exe / .dmg file directly out of the Flash IDE or like I mentioned before you bought Zinc!
Let's be fair, Zinc isn't actually that bad, their API is huge and you can access a whole load of methods that you would never think about, the first time you use zinc and browse through the API you automatically try out the OpenCDTray method, something happens how cool is that? 
But let's start from the beginning.
It was a nice sunny day in Zurich, and I got an assignment to create a screensaver with a shitload of functionality, (read images from a specific folder (user can't change the folder), resize the images accordingly, resave them again with the new size and settings. read some registry values from the Users computer, and so on.. so I thought, let's unpack Zinc and give it a try. yes it was the first time I ever used Zinc!
I ran into so many issues / problems / bugs / headaches / sleepless nights that I thought I need to share this with you guys.
1. Zinc 2.5 vs. Zinc 3.0
When you have the choice of using an "old" version against the new version, your guts tell you that maybe you shouldn't use the new version, stick with the old one which is in use for enough time to get a good resource to get information from.
So I began to develop with Zinc 2.5 after a few headaches and tons of coffee I finally managed to get my screensaver to work, yay. But let's have a look at the performance, 30% CPU, 40MB RAM.. well not that bad for so many operations and graphical changes. Apparently there were some issues with the performance and resources on the clients environment, so I decided to jump on the new train (zinc 3.0) and guess what. Zinc 3.0 uses 38% MORE resources then the previous version AND I'm still using the same player version and same settings. Hmm.. does Zinc 3.0 really have that many more base code? After a few coffee sessions comparing API's and looking into their code. NOPE, they only repacked their old code and gave us a few more methods to work with, damn does that really result in 65% CPU and 120MB RAM? sigh... Ok spend another few hours reverting everything back to Zinc 2.5. Nice...
Flash At The Lake
The SwissFlashUserGroup will be inviting all Flash designers and developers, project managers, illustrators, and developers of all other programming languages to get together in Zurich to share knowledge and enthusiasm about Flash at the conference Flash At The Lake. The conference will be held at the Rote Fabrik right by the lake of Zurich from 26. to 27. June 2009.
During the two days participants will be able to attend presentations and workshops to learn everything they want to know about the development and management of Flash platform projects. Several workshops will give insight into established workflow concepts and the manifold opportunities that have become possible through the application of Flash, Flex, AIR, Open Source, Video and Wii in Flash projects.
Flash At The Lake is an event organised by the community for the community. Next to international speakers of the Flash scene such as Aral Balkan (UK), Peter Elst (BE), Mario Klingemann (DE), Serge Jespers (BE), James Ward (USA) and DeMonsters (NL), there will also be several presentations by local Flash professionals, sharing their experiences with Flash and enriching the conference proceedings.
The conference will be topped off by an open Showcase Night where everybody can show what Flash is really made of: cool projects, fancy designs and ingenious experiments accompanied by groovy music will make sure that visitors will have a fantastic time in the competition for the coolest flash project.
Tickets and further information can be found at: www.flashatthelake.ch
4 things I like about Klok
If you are one of those persons who never heard of Klok, then jump right over to the Developers page, http://klok.mcgraphix.com/klok/index.htm.
Klok is a wonderful tool that helps you keep track of your time, it's made for freelancers, individuals, for people that workout on different billable projects. I could even think that it could be used by a small company to track time of their workers.
1. IT'S SIMPLE!
I've tested and used a lot of timetracking software throughout the past years and no other timetracking tool was that easy as Klok. Drag & Drop the defined project into the weekly / daily grid and you are done, you can change the time by dragging the top or bottom bar of the entry, done!
2. FLEXIBLE
Let's say you work on different projects like webdesign, Flex development or Video editing, you never have the descriptions that you really need to comment your tracked hours, Klok gives you the possiblity to create your own Project templates and define subcategories.
3. STOPCLOCK
Wouldn't it be cool to just track your time realtime, Klok enables you to do that with the help of a simple drag&drop.
Drag & Drop your project or activity to the title bar and Klok stops the time that passes by until you hit the stop button, the entry is automatically created and you can move on to the next project.
4. REPORTING
What's more important than tracking your time? You would like to BILL your time to your client, Klock does a pretty solid job, you just click on "weekly timesheet" and you can drag & drop the table to your desktop an Excel file is automatically created for you, not enough? Then click the "Reports" tab and you get a nice pie chart of all the projects that you worked on during the current month, past month or any user defined date range.
Am I completely happy with Klok, well yeh kind of, there are a few bugs and issues that are a bit annoying like for example the zoom slider of the weekly grid, if you work past midnight and the stopclock is running the entry will be closed at midnight and the stopclock stops working. But all in all it's a great Project and I hope that Rob McKeown continues the development of Klok
UPDATE: I've just seen that Rob has released Klok 1.5 as a beta version, some of the bugs mentioned above that I encoutered have been fixed, which really makes me look forward to this nice little AIR application
Interviewed on actionscripthero.org
I've just been interviewed on actionscripthero.org thanks to Pablo & Peter for the interview and for the opportunity to share my thoughts with the community.
Looking forward to an awesome 2009 full of innovation and new interesting projects
yeh I know it's early for an outlook for 2009 but I'll be going on holidays very soon, and I will be away for a long time. 
You'll find the interview on the frontpage or on the direct link to the Interview
BlogRoll
- Andreas Keel
- Aral Balkan
- Benjamin Dobler
- Chris Mills
- Dan Florio
- Dan Richard
- David Stiller
- Jackson Dunstan
- Jamie Huskisson
- JD on EP
- Lee Brimelow
- Marcel Vogt
- Romuald
- Sandro Ducceschi
- Scott Fegette
- Serge Jespers
- Stefan Richter
- Tom Green
- Zueritex
Resources
- Artbeats
- communityMX
- Flashenabledblog.com
- Flex Examples
- Fotosearch Stock Video
- Getty Images
- Kaliber 1000
- Pixel2Life
Respect
Tiago is now:
- Todays song: Natalie Walker - Urban Angel
- testing testing testing.....
- RT @mesh: RT @rlux: The 'Flex Gangsta' strikes again: "Who Broke The Build?" http://bit.ly/abwsQD
- life is good.. finally experimenting with something interesting :) #flash #....
- @_sandro nice, I like it
- hello iphone dev
- RT @stefanrichter: Flash Player 10.1 will kill HTML5 http://is.gd/9snfb
- GO Canada.. Congrats!!!
- wooot.. my part of the code is done @marcelvogt where is your stuff? :) #megaphone :)
- Watching sherlock holmes, then work on ch4 and continue my megaphone journey :) i think its going to be a very short night..
