Harish Sivaramakrishnan

I have been toying with the idea of building an AIR app that would do something more than the usual flickr photo searching. That’s when I came across this cool application from Idée labs .

I just spent a couple of days to something similar using Adobe AIR and Flex as a desktop app. In the process I also got the Adobe Kuler APIs tied in to this application. I call this experiment colrful desktop.

Feel free to test drive this application and tell me what you think. There are plenty of bugs in it, since I have spent very little (read that as nothing) effort in testing this out. Its a fun app, so go ahead, play with some colors, find images and save them to your desktop. All in a seamless work flow.

Features at a glance

1. Select colors from the palette and search. You will get images matching that color (Results restricted to 25 in the preview build)
2. Search for themes in Adobe Kuler, select a theme and you will get search results matching that theme.
3. Paste the URL of your favorite image in the web and colrful will look up similar images from the web
4. Preview the image of your choice from the search results and download it to your desktop. Just a couple of clicks

Coming soon:

A whole lot of offline stuff, which I am currently working on.

I haven’t gotten a whole lot of time setting up install badge for this one (and wordpress wont let me embed it here anyways. grrr)

A special word of thanks goes to my colleague and sr evangelist Ramesh Srinivasaraghavan for all the value added features. He is the ultimate idea machine!

Download and Install colrful desktop from here

Stay colrful!

I just finished my presentation and demo for my talk on gumbo. Just got to see the shortlisted submissions for the riathon as well! The apps just rock. I can’t wait to see the showdown at riathon finals @ flash ahead tomorrow. Its going to be one hell of a finals, I am sure.

If you are going to be in bangalore tomorrow and want to attend Flash ahead tomorrow, I still have about 10 invites left with me. If you haven’t signed up, just come to Lalit Ashok, Bangalore tomorrow and ask for me. For all those coming, See you all tomorrow.

Flash Ahead! Its gonnabe fun!

Woah! The response has been overwhelming. We have the last few seats left for Flash Ahead. Sign up now to get a glimpse of all that’s new and smoking in Adobe Flash Platform.

http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

Here’s announcing Flash Ahead… The event that will showcase the future of the Flash platform to the Indian audience for the first time.

Date: 17th January, 2009

Venue: Lalit Ashok (erstwhile Grand Ashok), Bangalore

Time: 09:00 to 18:00

At Flash Ahead we are going to announce the selected finalists of riathon’08 and they will battle it out in an on-stage showdown of application, in front of the crowd and judges. Later in the day, the results will be announced and prizes will be distributed. You will also get to see the latest technologies on the Adobe Flash Platform.

For more info and event details, visit: http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

Register here: http://endtoend.in/apps/forms/adobe/flash/adobe.htm

If you are a Flex/ Flash /  AIR developer in India and think you can be the one behind the coolest of all  RIAs, you cannot afford to miss this event! Put on your RIA development shoes, build the coolest app that you can imagine and send it to us on or before 26^th November 2008. If your application catches our attention, you will be invited to a very special event on the 29^th of November at Grand Ashok, Bangalore where the top applications will go on stage for a demo showdown! This is your chance to Flash your design skills, Flex your coding muscles and AIR your demos in front of an elite judge panel & the Adobe community.

The Grand winner / winning team will walk away with a groovy Apple IPhone.

The runners up will take home with them a Sony home theater system.

What’s more, there are loads of IPod Nano’s, shuffles and Adobe branded goodies to be won.

This event also brings to you  an exclusive preview on the new developments in the Adobe Flash Platform. Experience the Flash Catalyst (code name Thermo), Gumbo(code name for the upcoming version of Flex) ,FXG and Flash Player 10.

Register today at http://adoberiathon.eventbrite.com

For more information and contest rules & regulations, please visit http://adoberiathon.wordpress.com

<riathon> :: hack . play . win – the Adobe way.

Calling all the RIA developers, designers & User experience geeks from all over India for an 8 hour long RIA hackathon. Here is your chance to build the coolest RIA ever and walk away with some seriously kick ass prizes (Will post more on the prizes later, but trust me there are really, really BIG prizes to be won!) Come to hack, play, get famous and most importantly walk away with the prizes!

Register here - http://adoberiathon.eventbrite.com/ and we will tell you more!.

Where: Bangalore
When: Coming Soon

Also, watch this place for more info.

Get ready to hack.play.win

Dear All:

The links to the examples and source code of most of my applications in this blog has been broken for a very long time and I have had a lot of folks mail / comment me pointing this out. I apologize for not having gotten back to many of you in the past weeks primarly because I was absolutely busy with my official commitments which is taking quite a bit of my bandwidth. I am changing my hosting provider and I will have all the examples and source code back up for download. In the meanwhile, I will also try and send the source of my applications to whoever has requested it in the coming days. I might be a little slow in responding, apologize for that.

Thank you once again for hitting this space, Things will be back, up and running really quick.

Thanks
Vodka.

Oh yeah, They have now done this in silverlight – The kind of stuff we used to do back in Flash 4 days! (Stop embarassing yourself, MSFT! Do it in Flash – there isn’t any other way to do this. Ever.)

Check out http://www.mojaveexperiment.com/ . This is a campaign for Windows vista and is done Entirely in Flash.

I am extremely impressed by seeing Microsoft’s confidence (or the lack of it) on their own platform when it comes to building their own applications. (or may be they know there isn’t a better way (there can’t be one!) of doing this other than doing this in Flash! That’s more like it!)

The application looks great nevertheless! Good work, Microsoft

My hosting provider screwed up bigtime $#@#@% – Still working to get the site back up, Apologies for the broken download links. Will be back up soon.

-vodka.

Its been a while since I blogged. Have been really busy with work and had hectic travel assignments through the last couple of months. It was exciting, nevertheless. The next version of Flex (code named Gumbo) is announced at http://opensource.adobe.com. Information on Gumbo (the next version of Flex) is now available at http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Gumbo

Main themes for Gumbo: (from http://opensource.adobe.com)

• Design in Mind: provide a framework meant for continuous collaboration between designer and developer.
• Developer Productivity: improve compiler performance and add productivity enhancements to language features like data binding
• Framework Evolution: take advantage of new Flash Player capabilities and add features required by common use-cases

You can dowload gumbo builds from http://opensource.adobe.com/wiki/display/flexsdk/Download+Flex+4

Happy Flexing!!