StomperNet‘s Scrutinizer has recieved some updates!

• New help documentation
• Keyboard Shortcut Functionality
  • saving a screenshot
  • bookmarking a page
  • toggling the visualization
  • toggle auto-zoom
• Aesthetic improvements
• Performance optimizations
• Improved auto-update.

If you’re wondering what the heck StomperNet‘s Scrutinizer is:

What is it?

The Scrutinizer is a web browser, based upon the Adobe AIR toolkit and the WebKit browser, that offers a simulation of the human visual system. Specifically, it illustrates the distinction between foveal and peripheral vision in visual acuity and color perception. Using this simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design. We explain this, and some of the succes we’ve had, in a 30 minute video called Click Fu. It’s also a great tool for observing users interacting with your pages. By slowing them down, the Scrutinizer makes it easier for you to figure out what information the user is consuming and what actions they are considering. Learn about other ways to use the tool at our Top Ten list.

How it Works

The Scrutinizer browser applies a visual filter to where the mouse is located, simulating foveal vision centered around the mouse. For parts of the screen far away from themouse, the display deteriorates into lower resolution, both in detail and color. You can use the browser to get a better understanding of the low level mechanics of how users interact with your site design. Attempting to accomplish a key task on your site using the Scrutinizer can be very enlightening. Watching a user unfamiliar with your site attempt a key task with the Scrutinizer is even better at revealing how your site design affects the way the user extracts meaning from your presentation. Learn more in the Click Fu video, covering practical examples of improved e-commerce, or the 52 second ” Your Vision is an Illusion“, presenting a dramatic illustration of foveal vision. Finally, check out using the Scrutinizer for a findability challenge on Amazon.com.

Top Ten Things You Can Do with the Scrutinizer

1. Simulate eye tracking in a usability task
2. Assess the ease of use of multi-step processes
3. Give your designer a fresh pair of eyes
4. Find out what “pops� in your design
5. Conduct findability challenges
6. Ask: does your visual grid work?
7. Evaluate your site’s contrast levels
8. Insure learnability in your template
9. Avoid button gravity errors
10. Tell the story of how your eyes work

Software for viewing websites through a simulated fovea vision. Since not everyone could set-up, let alone afford a real eye-tracker. This software uses the mouse pointer as the user’s focal point, or foveal view. It blurs everything except where your focal point (the mouse) is. It is helpful because it forces you to re-think web design from an extreme usability standpoint. This browser software was built using AIR and Flex. Using this software as an eye-tracking simulation, you can get a better idea of how users interact with your site design.

• Post: Scrutinizer Launch
• Post: Scrutinizer Update
• Download Scrutinizer from StomperNet

I was responsible for programming and designing some key functionality of the app: the menu bar logic, bookmarking engine, capturing and saving of screenshots, and the loading bar which shows page load progress, and the overall browser chrome/skin.

Overview

This tutorial / how to / example will show how to get the current url from the browser to flash, and even how to get the query string parameters from the url into actionscript using ExternalInterface.
It has been a dilemma for many people to get this information into flash across browsers and without having to rely on flashvars or javascript, but to just have it work.
I wrote a post on it earlier, although it seemed it wouldn’t play nice with Internet Explorer IE, I later realized that it was only because of the way my blog is configured to embed flash. The call ExternalInterface.call(“window.location.href.toString”); or even ExternalInterface.call(‘eval’, ‘window.location.href’); which basically do the same thing.
This can be taken even further and we can read the query string, which, if you don’t know what that is, is the data contained in the url. The data is sent as paired strings, the key and the value. So, for example I could have a url http://example.com/index.html?var1=one&var2=two&var3=three. The question mark separates the actual url path from the query string. So following the ‘?’ we see three variables: var1, var2 and var3, and their corresponding values: one, two and three. They are seperated as pairs with an ampersand (&) and then the key and value are seperated by an equals sign (=). So it goes url?key=value&key=value&key=value…
Once we pass the complete url into our swf, it’s pretty easy to parse the keys and corresponding values.

Steps

1. Rather than use url with ExternalInterface.call(“window.location.href.toString”); implement the QueryString class make a new QueryString This will do most of the work for you: var myPath:QueryString = new QueryString();
   1. Upon creation of the QueryString object the class reads the parameters automatically by parsing the parameters after the ‘?’ and delimiting on the ‘&’. So you get var1=one and var2=two
   2. Set up each parameter (key) as a variable in the parameter object of the QueryString class assigning it’s value to that variable.
2. Access your values as myPath.parameters.var1 and myPath.parameters.var2
3. unescape() your values to make the usable, unless you need them to be encoded or course. Unescape decodes the string from URL-encoded format (converting all hexadecimal sequences to ASCII characters). If your parameter had been some funky encoded string like var4=this+stuff%3E%22%28%29%3F, after you unescape(myPath.parameters.var4) you get: this stuff>”()?.

Example

Here’s a working example. This link has the parameters appended to it following the question mark ‘?’ and separated with an ampersand ‘&’ like all query string parameters. I have one for myName (Circlecube) another for myText (Jo Jo is a monkey) which are both pulled out and put into their own text box after they are unescaped, and then there are a couple more parameters just to show, the aNum (3013), anotherParam (more), and ref (http://blog.circlecube.com/…)

Special thanks to Abdul Qabiz example. I rewrote it for as2 so it would work with some flash projects I’m working on.

I use the new swf object 2 to embed the swf. Go get it here:

Actionscript:

The actionscript layer of the swf

The QueryString.as class for as2

Download

Here’s a zip file containing the sample files, the QueryString Class file, and even the swfobject javascript file.
getURLParams.zip

Scrutinizer is constantly being updated and enhanced and with the launch of Adobe AIR 1.0 is easier than ever to install!

It now supports bookmarking, capturing and saving screenshots and displays progress as pages load.
With even more to come soon!

Go check it out at StomperNet’s public site for free download!
Here’s some images to show off scrutinizer!

Watching the loader while my page loads:

Scrutinizing this circlecube blog:

Bookmarking my page for quick access:

From the community…
people I saw quickly but didn’t get to attend their session: Renaun showed off his voip app Pacifica,  Zach from Yahoo showing some things available with Yahoo Maps AS3 API, Adam talking about Merapi where you can access Java from AIR apps and Joe showed us some awesome music app he’s working on, keep your ears open for noteflight(?)!

Brad Umbaugh- Practical 3-D: Immersive interfaces for regular people

Brad Umbaugh , Senior Developer @ effectiveui. In the discussion of 3D we pointed out that 3D is associated with the future. There have been many 3d success stories such as: games, CAD, sketchup, maya… But we decided that making good 3D interfaces is a lot different than making 3D interfaces- just because it’s 3D doesn’t mean it’s good.
Brad explained the steps in the 3d graphics rendering pipeline: place object in world coordinate system, illuminate models, transform world coords to viewing coords, perform clipping, project to screen and rasterize. Luckily there are 3d engines that will do all of this so we don’t have to think about it. It takes a lot of Linear Algebra Math. 3d apps are constantly performing lots of calculations, and thus can perform rather poorly.
Brad discussed the process of his Discover Earth Live project. They started project with papervision3d, but had problems with pinpoints and how they were wrapping around the globe as it spun. So, they tried Away3d and it fixed these problems “out of the box”. Another plus to Away3d they found is that it lets us do correct Z ordering.
We then talked about setting up the scene in away3d and making objects and he showed some 3D Globe examples: nike, mars.com, wii forecast, discovery earth live.

Ben Stucki – Reinventing Flex:

Ben an independent flex developer (nice soundtrack by the way), let’s talk about Flex, baby.
He started out giving everyone a pair of red/blue anaglyphic 3D glasses and showing us mr doob’s anaglyphic rendering tests. The 3d glasses work by filtering different colors to give your eyes two different views of the same image. Red filters out the red lines, cyan filters out the green/blue lines.
Ben has his own staging area for code that’s not yet released… lots of it is probably broken… but it is open source (benstucki.googlecode.com).
Ben then walked us through lots of openflux, his project that is rebuilding some built in componentes of flex with different proerties and capabilities in mind. Great job Ben!

Dave Hassoun – Flash Video tips (and tricks)

Dave from realeyes taught us about video codecs! Flash video gives us the compression options of sorenson, on2 VP6 and the famed H.264.
Sorenson is easy on cpu performance, but struggles with good color and quality. For the quality the file size is a bit high, but sorenson is a good standard.
on2 vp6 has high quality image, but lots of processing demand, plus it has transparency capabilities!
h.264 (& AAC/AAC+ audio is the newest with the most bells and whistles. As it’s new it’s only supported by flash player 9 (which is beginning to be less and less of an issue). It does support true HD video (1080p), multi-core support, many devices, and lots lots of metadata.
A general rule (equation) to help with encoding:

Tools he mentioned to help with encoding: rools, riva, fmpeg, on2fix, sorenson squeeze, cs & adobe media encoder.
Dave pointed out that flex video integration was simple, but too simple, making it weak. There is only video display, which is very simple. AS3 is way better equipped to handle video.
h264 streaming requires a streaming media server, can stream or seek to any point (non-linear or random access), has quicker playback and is much more secure. H264 contains a lot of metadata: length, dimensions, codec, seek points, cover art, subtitles, audio book chapters, image tracks, and more!
Dave’s tips for video compression: quality in, quality out | use the right codec for the job | be creative | code reusability! write stuff to be reused | metadata is your friend, use it
He gave so many resources! I won’t copy them here, so go check his Presentation Notes and source. Here is one resource though, Tinic Uro‘s blog about the flash player and video.

Juan Sanchez – Degrafa

Juan (better known as scalenine) taught about his open source project Degrafa – Declarative Graphics Framework for Flex. Degrafa uses mxml to make graphics so you don’t have to use the AS3 drawing API! It makes drawing objects more intuitive and allows you to do it using less code! Plus, rather than creating graphics in photoshop and importing the static image (which takes more memory and then can’t be modified), we can bind properties to the graphic and make it dynamic in flex. So far Degrafa allows us to make surfaces, shapes, objects, fills, strokes, groups, geometry compositions, segments, graphic image, graphic text, and even use svg path data, with much much more in the works! Degrafa is a great way to add custom graphics to your app and it supports advanced css as well, so it is very simple to skin your app! Juan showed us many examples of what degrafa can do and promised there is much more soon to come. Thanks for this great library Juan and everyone else at degrafa, and thanks for the T-shirt as well!

Personally, I got the most out of Day 3 at the conferenc! It was awesome! I got to attend sessions about 3D, drawing graphics, and video! Thanks to all the speakers and Big Thanks to Tom and John, who are Flex360!