Prototyping Experiences – My talk @ Adobe Dev Summit 2009

Here are the slides of my talk at Adobe Dev Summit 2009 – Chennai & Hyderabad on Rapid Prototyping.

I was pleasantly surprised at the number of people who were interested in the science of Prototyping. The industry and the community has always regarded Prototyping as an optional phase in the idea-to-market process. While many other industries like mobile, automobile, mechanical have embraced Prototyping long ago, the software world still seem to be a bit reluctant in realizing the advantage and relevance of this science. Looks like more and more people are waking up 😉 …. The audience seem to be growing larger and larger with every talk I do on this subject and thats a good sign 🙂 …

Dislaimer: Some slides in the above PPT have been re-used in multiple talks to people of USiD 2009, NID – Bangalore, IIT-Kanpur Tech Tour.

[Component] Location WatchDog v1.0

It’s been a long time since I posted in my blog. The reason was that I wasn’t actually working actively on any Flex project in my previous job at Nokia. In my new role, I hope to get lots of chances to dabble with my favorite coding language 😉 . Anyway, here I am with a new simple and silly component again 🙂

I am calling it a Location WatchDog. What it does is pretty simple. It monitors a specific location (folder/directory) for any updates. If any new files are added to the folder, the WatchDog throws an event LocationEvent.FILES_ADDED. The event returns an array of new Files added to the location.

I am still working on it. Need to add some more stuff to it like capability to fire the LocationEvent.FILES_DELETED that returns the list of deleted files. The component allows you to also specify file extensions that you wish to monitor the location for. By default the component only detects normal files, while it also allows you to specify includeSystemFiles attribute as true to force the component to listen to even hidden and system files.

You can download the component in swc from here. The code of the component is checked in at the Google Code.

You can use this component in your code by calling the component in your mxml  – and then doing this in your actionscript-

private function initView():void{
snoopy.fileExtensions = <code>new Array("txt", "abc");</code>
<code>snoopy.locationPath = File.desktopDirectory.nativePath;
snoopy.addEventListener(LocationEvent.FILES_ADDED, getNewFiles);
snoopy.startPinging();
}

private function getNewFiles(event:LocationEvent):void{
var x:Object = event;
}

Nothing fancy. Just simple and plain. As long as it saves someone somewhere some coding time ;). Or is it already part of the framework? 😉

(Download: SWC | Source)