Welcome
Welcome to my personal web site powered by Drupal.
Above is MagONE+ a new version of MagONE that will have more configurable features. This is the early test version, for more info click here....
You will find it full of ramblings, opinions and information on various subjects. At the moment this consists of ShoZu (who I work for), Drupal(which I find quite outstanding) and Adobe AIR(Flex3) which I think is great.
MagONE customisation
I have just finished a customization request for iSixSigma who required a branded version of MagONE. You can find more details of this on my showcase site here. You can see the iSixSigma customised application in use here.
"Steve is a fantastic business partner. His customized Smugmug Photo Gallery Widget adds fantastic visual appeal and great interest to our websites. It has a clean design and is a snap to implement. I'd recommend working with Steve and implementing his Widget to everyone."
-- Michael Cyger, Founder of iSixSigma.com
What a Photobox disaster - Web 2 gone mad
I hold a Photobox account (I don't use it much but have had it a long time and have used it to get prints of some of my photos). I have also used it as I COULD upload photos via email straight to my account.
So I logged into the account today, the site has been "redesigned" completely - and in my opinion to it's detriment. It is now so slow that its almost un-usable and I seem to have lost the ability to email upload.
MagONE update
I have updated MagONE ,it now features image click through. If you click on the currently displayed photo a new browser window will open and the current smugmug album page is displayed with the clicked image as the current one.
ShoZu Desktop
ShoZu have now put up the first beta release of ShoZu Desktop, an Adobe AIR based application that I have been working on since AIR was in beta. It should run on any platform that Adobe have an AIR runtime for, currently PC or MAC, and allows you to upload photos and videos to all your favourite ShoZu destinations.
You can either use the ShoZu account that you created for your cellphone and Desktop will pick up the destinations you have already have, or you can create a new ShoZu account and just use ShoZu Desktop to upload your media. The Desktop app will allow upload to any of the destinations that ShoZu supports and you don't have any extra mobile data charges (which is personally why I started the project). It currently supports photo and video upload along with titles, descriptions and tags (depending on the feature set supported by the destination you are uploading to).
The app is the first beta release and you can find out more on the ShoZu Desktop Information Page
It would also be great to get some feedback on the app, so that it can be developed and enhanced from the ideas of the people that use it.
If you do have any comments, constructive one of course :-), you can leave then on the ShoZu User forum.
ADOBE AIR RELEASED!!
Cool news - Adobe have released version 1.00 of AIR along with version 3 of Flex - www.adobe.com/products/air - I've already put my order in (standard version only - bit expensive otherwise, at least for me).
Suppose I'd better start using it to do some more development now - I have some ideas to update MagONE and a new project MagTWO which will be an AIR based application.
I've also been developing an AIR based application for ShoZu - but more of that in the very near future.....
Video Jukebox Update
Well, it looks like the TitansOfTheTrack video and photo archive was more popular that first estimated as the site has started to reach it's preset bandwidth limit.
This is OK for the site as a holding page could be put up, but the video jukebox still played all the videos listed and therefore contributed to the bandwidth usage. Flex to the rescue, I just engineered in another XML file using the HTTPService and set it up to act as source for configuration settings.
This now means that the jump URL on the banner can be changed, the jukebox play functionality can be switched on and off and a site message can be displayed in the player, not bad for 10 minutes work.
Flash movie player
I have created a very simple flash movie player using Flex 3. It can be re-sized and it will play single flash movies(flv) by setting up a flashvar call vf.
There is an article in my Adobe AIR Diary ( see the Books menu) or go straight to the article here. I have made the player free to download and use if anyone is interested.
Video Jukebox
This was quite an interesting "home brew" project I put together over the weekend for my brother. He runs a small engineering firm and has a keen interest in both photography and railways. Add this to my curiosity with what can be done simply with Flex and you have the Video Jukebox.
He is currently building up an archive of photos and videos of railway related subjects for people to access on the internet. So I have created am embeddable video player (a widget to use the web 2.0 terminology) that can play the videos that are uploaded to his site. The list of videos is dynamic so as more are added to the site the available list will get longer. Still in the "Beta" stage at the moment (there you go web 2.0 again), you can see the player in the left hand column.
