In Lynda.com’s course titled “InDesign CS5: Interactive Documents and Presentations,” the Unitus Annual Report was shown as a case study for building interactive Flash presentations right from InDesign documents.

You can see it here. Look under “Trends in Digital Design” > Annual Report Case Study: Unitus.

You can see the annual report here.

As an aid to education and fundraising, this multimedia version of the printed Unitus Annual Report was developed in 2009 using the Adobe InDesign-to-Flash export format in order to closely match the print version of the report.

CooCoo Clock for the iPad is an app version of the cuckoo wall clock. It has custom alarm times, bird colors, animation & sound, and an interactive clock face. Technologies used: XCode and Interface Builder, UIImageView animations, UILocalNotifications, UITableViews with custom cells, AVAudioPlayer and Instruments-tested.

Visit CooCooApps.com to read more about the app and download

Graphic Design by Yiu Studio

This website features user-managed content throughout, including searchable attorney profiles, detailed industry groups & services, a search engine, and a user-edited image scroller for expertise groups. Technologies used: xHTML, CSS, JavaScript (JQuery) and ExpressionEngine (PHP/MySQL) content management system.

Visit the site

Graphic design by Henry Yiu

The Supertooth site is single, scrolling page design with inline slideshow and toggled FAQ section, all powered by the JQuery JavaScript framework.

Technologies used: HTML, CSS, and JavaScript (JQuery).

Visit the site

Graphic design by Yiu Studio

This website features a series of value-proposition Flash modules on home page and user-managed content throughout, including searchable attorney profiles, detailed industry groups & services, and localized content for Chinese and Japanese visitors. Technologies used: xHTML, CSS, Flash, Actionscript and ExpressionEngine (PHP/MySQL) content management system.

Visit the site

Graphic design by Henry Yiu

This Flex desktop application was created to aid pavement design engineers by taking existing road data, performing a series of guided computations and road wear measurements, and providing suggested redesign guidelines and resource links. It features custom data visualization on pavement layer thickness, both Flex and Spark controls, data validation and printable report generation. Technologies used: Illustrator, Flex/Flash Builder 4, and OOP ActionScript.

Contact me for a link to the application

This website features a series of value-proposition JQuery slider modules on home page and user-managed content throughout, including searchable product pages. Technologies used: xHTML, CSS, JQuery JavaScript framework, and ExpressionEngine (PHP/MySQL) content management system.

Visit the site

It turns out that garbage collection won’t be automatic, but rather, the SDK will feature a compiler-level feature called Automatic Reference Counting, which at the very least, will make memory management much easier for iOS developers by automatically inserting retain and release commands.

So while not officially automatically collecting garbage for memory, it still is very good news and will remove one of the biggest headaches for iOS/Cocoa Touch development. See the notice for “Automatic Reference Counting” on Apple’s iOS5 for Developers page.

Being new to iOS development myself, I’m also personally excited by “Storyboards” and the new version of “Instruments” in XCode.

This touchscreen kiosk lives in the lobby of Harbor Properties’ Link Apartments building in West Seattle, and allows residents to get the five-day weather forecast, scan announcements and package notifications at a glance, and explore neighborhood amenities and getting local bus times on a custom Google Map, all using live data that is periodically updated. Technologies used: Flash, OOP ActionScript, REST APIs (Google Maps, ActiveBuilding, OneBusAway and WeatherUnderground).

Contact me for a link to the kiosk application.

Graphic design and project commissioned by DEI Creative

Until now, I’ve always used local XML documents, had access to the server where the XML was being served and could put a crossdomain.xml file in place, or had access to a public API that provided an XML feed and had a crossdomain.xml file already in place. But an application I’m working on now uses XML from a server where I have no access or ability to put a crossdomain.xml file.

Enter the PHP proxy and the ActionScript escape method. A PHP script handles the URL for the API call, but you have to encode that URL with its arguments before handing off to the proxy.

Example:

Here’s the code for the PHP proxy file, which goes on the same server as your SWF.

$post_data = $HTTP_RAW_POST_DATA;

if (curl_errno($ch)) {
print curl_error($ch);
} else {
curl_close($ch);
header( 'Content-type: ' . $response_headers['content-type']);
print $response;
}


(Thanks to xmlrpcflash.mattism.com for the PHP script.)

Now, assuming you are using a Loader with a URLRequest to pull XML into your application, and your xml_proxy.php file is in the same directory as your SWF, you have to escape( ) on the URL call to the API server, then tack that on to the end of your URLRequest to the PHP proxy, like this:

var myXMLLoader:URLLoader = new URLLoader();

myXMLLoader.load(new URLRequest("xml_proxy.php?url="+API_URL));

Voila! No security sandbox error from Flash Player.