July 15, 2008 at 6:54 pm · 248 views · Filed under personal
Ryan has announced a contest to investigate how Google is actually crawling swfs. He introduced the term “fleximagically searchable” to be included in external content, which is then loaded into the Flex swf. Hoping that google will read the external source file through the swf. Also testing how this shows up in the search results. Even though I think there a lot more to SEO than just letting Google crawl your site, there’s the pagerank and everything that Google uses in it’s top secret algorithm to determine search result position ranks.
Here’s the official rules:
- It has to be a Flex application
- “Fleximagically Searchable” must be dynamically loaded. It can’t be static text inside of your application. - But I don’t care how you load it, in fact that might make a difference in how Google ranks you.
- The first link must be deep linked directly into where you load “Fleximagically Searchable” into your application. Feel free to use any deep linking methods out there.
- Nothing in your code can dynamically load the phrase automatically. It has to be the result of a user interaction.
- You must provide source code and be willing to talk about exactly what you did.
- Multiple entries are allowed if you want to try different things.
They seem to be a bit vague in places, but we’ll see if Ryan decides to clarify anything.
More information: I’ve found that’s helpful at Peter Elst’s post. And Ryan explains Google and Flash’s relatoinship development here. Here and here is what Google has officially said. Here is the official press release from Adobe about their new
I’ll have a couple entries I’m sure… and I’ll be sure to post about those as well.
Tags:
actionscript,
as3,
flash,
flex,
seo,
stompernet
July 2, 2008 at 6:57 pm · 231 views · Filed under portfolio, work
StomperTools Plugin
StomperLabs is proud to announce another cool, FREE software tool. The StomperTools Firefox plug in! We’re going to pack many tools into this plugin in the future, but to start it off we’ve bundled two functions into this plug in.

StomperNet Ranker
The first is called StomperNet Ranker, and it allows your prospects to quickly survey the rankings for a keyword query. We built an interactive graphical representation of a search showing results from three top search engines: Google, Yahoo and MSN.

How to use StomperNet Ranker?
I’ll give an example… Here’s the page as it loads a search for ‘circlecube’. The green nodes represent Google results, red is Yahoo, and blue is MSN. Each result that is for an identical page is connected with a thin line, and when you hover over a node it will grow and also any nodes for identical pages. Nodes for same domain pages will grow slightly as well to give an idea of the saturation on the search results by the specific domain. Below you can see that I’m hovering over the top-left node (the screen shot helpfully removed my cursor), the title of the page is shown and you can see that the same page (my home page) ir ranked number 1 in Google and MSN (hence the line connecting them, and also they have both grown to be large nodes). Also notice that pages of the same domain (circlecube.com) are at the top 2 slots in Google, the top 3 in Yahoo, and the top 2 in MSN (the medium sized nodes). Hovering over a node displays information to the right of the node chart. Clicking on a node loads that url below the ranker ui. You can also click the Google, Yahoo, and MSN buttons above the chart to see the actual search results at each engine specifically.

Ranker had the potential to become a great comparative tool for search engine optimization and comparison.

Scrutinize This
Not only does StomperTools give you access to Ranker right in your browser, but also you can instantly “Scrutinize” any page you’re viewing right from the browser (once you have the Stomper Scrutinizer tool, so go get it too!) Use the plug in to seamlessly aim your Scrutinizer browser to whatever page you’re browsing in Firefox.

Tags:
download,
javascript,
portfolio,
stompernet,
work
June 25, 2008 at 10:20 pm · 205 views · Filed under portfolio, work
StomperNet now has a site map. Only it’s much bigger than just a site map, we’re calling it Stomper Universe! It contains all the pieces parts that make up StomperNet. It links to different sites, video series, tools, and more by giving a 3D interactive space to inspect the thumbnails and click through to the sites! It will help visitors navigate easily to all areas of StomperNet, whether they are new to them or old favorites.
So go check out the StomperNet Universe now!

Tags:
3D,
abstract,
actionscript,
animation,
as3,
flash,
interactive,
stompernet,
web design,
website
June 16, 2008 at 7:10 pm · 185 views · Filed under personal, work
Serious internet businesses require serious internet tools.
Firefox 3 is a dramatic step forward! Help Mozilla.org set a Guiness Book record by downloading the new release on Tuesday the 17th of June 2008 (11 AM PST).
To celebrate, StomperNet and Appcelerator are hosting a release party in Atlanta at Park Tavern as a part of a world-wide network of celebration Tuesday, June 17th at 7pm. RSVP at upcoming.org.
Join us if you’re in town, otherwise, check the downloads for Firefox 3:
StomperTools with SN Ranker and Scrutinize this, and the recent Scrutinizer 1.0 release.
Park Tavern
www.parktavern.com
500 10th St Ne
Atlanta, GA 30309
(404) 249-0001
Tuesday, June 17th 2008
7pm-9pm
Get the Stomper Scrutinizer browser vision simulator. Plus get StomperTools … featuring Scrutinize This and the SN Ranker SEO tool.
Tags:
download,
stompernet,
work
June 16, 2008 at 6:58 pm · 133 views · Filed under portfolio, work
- 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.
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
- Simulate eye tracking in a usability task
- Assess the ease of use of multi-step processes
- Give your designer a fresh pair of eyes
- Find out what “pops” in your design
- Conduct findability challenges
- Ask: does your visual grid work?
- Evaluate your site’s contrast levels
- Insure learnability in your template
- Avoid button gravity errors
- Tell the story of how your eyes work
Tags:
actionscript,
AIR,
as3,
download,
flex,
review,
stompernet,
work
May 9, 2008 at 7:05 pm · 255 views · Filed under portfolio
Here’s a new site and series from StomperNet called Going Natural 3!
It’s a bit of free videos made and released to showcase the talents and business of what StomperNet is about and what they do for their clients. They’re ‘moving the freeline’ so to speak…
The first video series begins with Dan Thies talking about his ‘Crazy Theory’ for AdWords.
On signing in there are a couple BONUS videos for you as well. So go check them out as well!
Watch Going Natural 3 - Adwords Triangulation Method and more
This site contains the latest flash video player built by yours truly. I also did the design of the site: involving html, css, php, javascript and dealing with drupal too!
Tags:
actionscript,
as2,
css,
drupal,
flash,
html,
javascript,
php,
stompernet,
video,
web design,
website,
work
March 10, 2008 at 6:40 pm · 445 views · Filed under portfolio, work
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:

Tags:
actionscript,
AIR,
as3,
download,
flash,
flex,
interactive,
stompernet
February 26, 2008 at 6:52 pm · 1,059 views · Filed under personal, work
Johnny Boursiquot - AIR Infrastructure to manage licensing maintenance and monetization of AIR apps
This is important information as more and more apps ar looking at using AIR to make apps. Discussion on how he’s deployed for large corporations including Avaya, Honeywell, Seagate and others. We need to be thinking about how to license the apps we make!
He’s promised a version of his slide show here: Developers Pierinc
Renaun Erickson - QTIndexSwapper H.264
The flash player now supports H.264 format video files! This is great but one problem is the meta data is placed at the end of the file and therefore the video can’t be accessed until it is fully loaded to the end. The metadata (moov) needs to be loaded before the play knows how it’s indexed. Renaun showed a technique he’s been playing with. He has an AIR app that will move the meta data to the beginning of the file for viewing during progressive download! He also talked about other meta data, like album art, and stuff, he’s promised more links to be posted on his blog
So far, here’s the source at Renaun’s site
More info posted about H264 and Flash by Dave Hassoun at Adobe’s Developer Center
Andy Edmonds - Scrutinizer
Discussing the psychology of vision (fovea and peripheral). We discussed how better design relates to a sites efficiency. Andy showed a couple videos from stomperNet (which can be found at the Going Natural 2
page or stomperNet’s youTube channel) and showed a demo of the Scrutinizer AIR app which is available for free beta download at About.StomperNet.com
. Scrutinizer is a browser which forces you to see the internet how your eyes see it, rather than how you brain puts together what your eyes see. It has a layer which blurs the rendered html page, and also a layer which desaturates the colors, which modifies the page as you are looking at it. The browser attempts to show you what you are looking at, but importantly it disconnects your vision from your eye, using instead the mouse so you can actually look at your peripheral vision. Like the “squint test”, where you squint your eyes to see the general overview of a page, this page is blurred to only show the most dominant designs. An interesting tool hat can be used to improve site designs and efficiency.
Doug McCune - Open source Flex community projects
A great discussion about projects and opensource communities. Doug loved to point out that you can take two open source libraries and mash them together to make your own thing.
A few places to find open source code: google, flexbox, ria forge, and a growing number of personal blogs
An example was FlexSpy (basically a debugger that runs live in your flex app) in which Doug added his own part to the existing open source code to monitor all event listeners in addition to all the debugging features already existing in flexSpy.
A highly recommended plugin for flex (eclipse) is subclipse, which adds svn repository, checkout source as flex library project, build swc, add to your build path…
List of open source libraries discussed: (I’ll try to add all the links later)
Big open source libraries for as3 and flex: flexLib (now including flexMDI), minimalComps, AsWing, openFlux
Graphics Libraries: Degrafa (declarative graphics framework - lets you write graphics in mxml tags), Singularity (Jim Armstrong’s math library), AlivePDF (create pdf in actionscript).
Physics engines: Actionscript Physics Engine (APE), Box2D and Motor 2 (both more of an as3 feel) (almost the same), FOAM (note that with physics engines there are differences between the particle based and rigid body based engines.)
3D: PaperVision 3D (most popular3d engine), Away3D (was a branch of papervision, but is now seperate), Sandy, wow (3D physics engine)
Flex specific uses: Alex Uhlmann’s Sandy distortion effects library, Tink’s PV3D transitions..
Tweening (moving an object property from a to b, set something with a transitional effect): Tweener, KitchenSink (MosesSuposes.com)
The Summarizing moral: Don’t reinvent anything, but don’t trust other peoples code blindly. Give credit where credit is due, and contribute back to the community.
James Echmalian - Enhancing Flex Presentations with Bitmap Technques
Bitmap data is just a 2D array of pixels with 4 channels (red, green, blue, and alpha).
Bitmaps are a view of a bitmapdata class, inheriting displayObject properties (height width, scaleX, scaleY, rotation, visible…) but bitmapData and bitmap are not the same thing.
Image - loader - loads an image out of an external file using loader, converts formatted data into display objects automatically.
Image - display - wraps a bitmap, is a flex component, has properties, styles controls…
Demo source to show bitmap editing will be on site ech.net/360flex2008 and ech.net/blog contains all source and annotated slides.
Special thanks goes out to all the Flex|360 Day Two Speakers!
Tags:
conference,
flex,
network,
review,
stompernet
Next entries »