Makibishi Comic
By Mims Wright | on April 28, 2007
In Flash, Graphic Design, Site-seeing, User Interface Design, Video Games | No Comments
Makibishi Comic is a beautiful, silly, and very strange Flash based puzzle game. The objective is to find the 5 ninjas who are hiding from you by clicking through riddles. The puzzles are just challenging enough and the illustration is amazing.
Warning - You may be tempted to spend an hour playing this game, as I was.
Apollo Mail Client Version 0.3
By Roger Braunstein | on April 26, 2007
In AIR, AS3, Authors, Flex, Programming | 25 Comments
I’m pleased to announce the first alpha release of ApolloMail, a cross-platform POP3 / SMTP e-mail client written in Apollo (obviously) in under 500K (and most of that is my gratuitous about banner). It’s just the beginnings, really, but here is a short feature matrix:
- Authenticated POP3
- Authenticated SMTP
- MIME multipart emails
- HTML e-mail rendering
- Image attachments
- Base64 decoding
- Quoted-printable decoding
Features that may be added very soon are:
- Local message store
- HTML e-mail composing
- Rich Text rendering
- Better attachment handling
- Far more robustness
IMAP and SSL are less likely to be added soon. I would like to also use this as a platform to do something new with email, including several unique views which visualize your e-mail life graphically and in three dimensions. Otherwise it’s just another boring e-mail client.
E-mail has been around since 1971 (that’s ten years longer than me!), and it’s been built upon time and time again. I learned a ton about how e-mail works by building this app. On the other hand, I am sure I haven’t covered every kind of e-mail, POP server, or SMTP server; chances are fairly good you will come across an e-mail that this client doesn’t handle. Don’t panic
It’s just an alpha. In addition to mail rendering, the error handling while communicating to the server could be better. If you are experiencing trouble, watch the Activity window. Further, the windowing built into this version of Apollo is a hack, so many Flex components don’t work correctly.
There are a number of interesting technologies in Apollo that this app takes advantage of, which I will be sharing all of in the coming days. First, it leverages my windowing framework which I discussed in a bit of depth before. It logs to a file using the File Logging Target I published earlier. It also uses another simple but awesome technique to implement the activity window — a String logger which exposes its cumulative log messages as a bindable variable — so the activity window is a TextArea bound to a log target which filters only a specific category of logging information (while all logs are saved to disk). It extends an abstract preferences class which makes it a snap to bind to, serialize and deserialize application preferences to disk. And of course, it makes heavy use of binary sockets and regular expressions made possible by Flash Player 9.
I’ll be writing more about the technology involved, and sharing more of the source, in another post or two. For now, grab the Apollo runtime if you need it (link has mandatory registration), and take ApolloMail for a spin! Cheers!
Update: This application is made for the Apollo Alpha. If you have the AIR Beta runtime, it will not work. The next version of ApolloMail will be upgraded for this release of the runtime.
ApolloMail (ZIP, 486k, ZIP decompresses to an AIR file, open the AIR file after installing the Apollo Runtime.)
Web Design Survey by A List Apart
By Mims Wright | on April 26, 2007
In Business, News, Serious Stuff, Site-seeing, XHTML / CSS / JS | No Comments
A List Apart, your favorite source for web standards advocacy and CSS minutiae, is conducting their own survey of web designers similar to the ones created by Aquent or AIGA. I can’t think of a good reason for you to not take it so you might as well stop trying to weasel your way out of it.