Archive

This is a listing of my past works, including papers, blog posts and presentations.

  1. The Wild West of Mobile Web Dev Frameworks

    Mobile web browsers are quickly gaining features to better support smartphones and tablets. At the same time, new web frameworks are making the creation of native-app-like interfaces easier. I assess the situation and make a comparison between two mobile web development frameworks.

  2. Choosing a Server-Side Web Development Platform

    Choosing among a wide variety of programming languages, toolsets and frameworks can become a daunting task. In this article I will present the process I used for deciding on a web development platform. Using a reflective approach similar to Action Research, the platforms are compared based on personal experience.

  3. Collaborative Search

    Collective intelligence, the shard knowledge within a group, can be utilized to optimize search results. I introduce research being conducted on the topic.

  4. Compressed, High-Performing Animations in Flash

    Multimedia applications often have interactive elements based on video. The Flash Video data used for such scenes is compressed but processor intensive. I discuss a solution that decompresses the data on the client side, in order to enhance display performance.

  5. ActionScript Performance Testing

    Unlike Javascript, ActionScript usually runs on the same engine (the AVM). This makes specific performance tests worthwhile, in order to compare different code execution speeds. I start a Wiki, where I document such tests and display my results.

  6. The Forgotten Intro Video

    A video fellow students and I produced is revived and analyzed. The short clip was made with the theme of “stealing the show” and involves a street musician and a talented passer-by.

  7. Upcoming Flash Platform Goodness

    Adobe presented new Flash related products at Adobe Max in Milan. Three favorites of mine are Flex 4, BlazeDS for .Net, and the RTMFP protocol. Based on the announcements, I make some predictions for the future of the Flash platform.

  8. SWF WMODE Transparency Hell

    I have been having trouble with the WMODE=”transparent” embed setting in combination with Firefox. What I wanted to do was show a SWF on top of some HTML with the background set to transparent. Turns out that it’s just not possible in Firefox.

  9. 1001 Ways to Debug in Flash

    I have been looking around at all the different ways to debug content when developing Flash applications. The Flex folks already have a decent way of doing this, since the debug version of the Flash player communicates everything back to the Flexbuilder IDE. In Flash it’s not that easy. As soon as the SWF is being run from within a browser all those Trace statements don’t get through anymore.

  10. Lessons Learned Implementing the hResume Microformat

    A digital resume or CV has a few plusses over its paper predecessor. One of these extras is the ability to give the information more meaning to the reader - human or machine. The hResume microformat introduces some nice additions to the usual HTML markup, but some rocks lay in the path of the implementor.

  11. Making Sign-Up Forms That Much Easier

    Having to create an account is a barrier for new users to join a site and should, therefore, be kept as easy as possible. I propose a user interface improvement that pre-fills the user’s city based on the entered postal code. In addition, I describe the programming process using PHP, MySQL and AJAX.

  12. Free Stickers

    The submission of the Jajuk logo to the Free Software Sticker Book and why I think stickers are a good way to promote Open Source Software.

  13. Commons Identity

    My research paper titled “Commons Identity: A Conceptual Model for Designing Brand Identity in Free and Open Source Software Projects”.

  14. The Required Skills of a Web Designer

    I research the key qualities a web designer should have in 2006 by making a questionnaire and analyzing web design job postings. I find that the top quality is writing web markup, followed by JavaScript and image editing skills.

  15. Why I use Firefox

    I argue that the most important reason to use an Open Source browser is political: The people should have the freedom to define what technologies they want to utilize on the web.

  16. TYPO3 and Flash

    A presentation to the TYPO3 User Group Zurich on how to display dynamic Flash content using the content management system.