Speakers: Anthony Eden and Scott Weeks from Snepo

Flash is the ideal technology for public facing user interfaces but few flash developers have had the chance to cut their teeth building complex kiosk applications. Come on a journey to the land of hardware peripherals, exotic software integration and regression testing. The possibilities are endless for flash if you know which tools to use and what lies on the outer extremities of the flash universe.

Presentation description

A few points from the presentation with respect o building interactive systems:

• Touch screen technologies (haptic devices) include: Point-of sales systems, kiosks, iPhone, check in system, etc
• Attract user -> engage user -> educate user-> call to action
• User is constantly aware of where they are in their process (location, state, etc) - important because user may come into appliaction at any time during the process. Users very frequently end part way through an application - set an appropriate timeout.
• Rule of thumb: “fat fingers” - move navigation to bottom of screen - navigation must be obvious - just press: dragging and scrolling is not intuitive and release event is not intuitive either
• Accessibility: plan for limited vision so use big thick fonts; plan for color blindness so use high contrast colours. Be aware of mechanics of using the device.

What worked well:

• Transaction services and xml for storage: provides high service level and is relatively easy to develop.
• JSFL: automation scripting for flash helped to strealine production
• Logging ever single piece of interaction. You are able to track entry and exit points - this provides evidence of points of confusion and where users become frustrated and give up.
• Testing: especially brute force testing - putting the system through any imaginable situation. Example: hire a few computer science interns.
• Remote monitoring: transaction server on kiosk would send heartbeat back to server. Central server would expect hearbeat and can repsond by performing diagnostic and basic support such as restart, reset, clear memory, etc.
• Experimentation!

What didn’t work very well:

• Computationally complex procedures may cause kiosk to slow down and possibly become unresponsive.
• Dying computers and enclosures: ensure mechanical robustness of kiosk.
• Screen calibration: potentially a big issue. Callibration can creep from true state.
• Updating was cumbersome: especially as it pertained to physically loading onto machine.

Upsides:

• Environment: you know your and can define your environment - no browsers or campatibility issues.
• Economics: there is money to be made.

Popularity: 13% [?]

We recently redesigned the Portrait Gallery of Canada’s website, including a flash exhibition of fascinating collection highlights. Happily, our work was mentioned in an article about the Portrait Gallery in today’s Globe and Mail. The Portrait Gallery doesn’t yet have a new physical home, but we’re pleased that people are noticing its new virtual home.

You can find the Globe and Mail article here. And you can find the Portrait Gallery of Canada website here.

Popularity: 3% [?]

I’m trying to get a clue of that vertical bar and it just seems very closely related to how the BitmapData’s draw() method internally works: for instance, if you have the source at hand, at line 67 of the PostProcessor.as file there is the line:

The ppMatrix is the precomputed transformation matrix and, by changing that with the following, the bar will go away and it won’t crash the VM anymore:

Since i do not think a mere transformation operation can be SO wrong, i’m trying to extrapolate the smallest context into which the problem can be reproduced: so far i also noticed i can get very different results between Flash Player v9.0.47 and v9.0.60.120 by changing the code in order to produce a predictable result.
In other words, i got the expected result in v9.0.47 but only the top-most output_height / 2 portion is correct in v9.0.60.120: i’m not sure if that can be related to multi-threaded optimizations in the Flash Player since by changing the process’ affinity mask seems to affect framerate and flickering only… bah! I have to dig some more…

It seems that with the r60.184 version the vertical bar thing went away, anyway still remains that very new singularity