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Oct 05Heineken Greenspace desktop edition: my first widget
In this time of widgets fever, when everybody can’t live without desktop companions, we built a desktop application to promote our client’s activity for the greenspace project.
The tool works as a weather widget but not just that.
It provides weather conditions for the user’s location (based on user’s choice) and for the next Heineken Greenspace event’s city, Valencia (Spain) in this first edition.
It also displays a small image gallery and a tiny preview of the artists you can find on the site.
The artist is randomly picked from the site.
The whole tool makes intense use of XML for data collection, PHP is used on the server to generate XML feeds.
It relies on Weather.com’s feed to display weather conditions (updated every 30 minutes according to the provider’s business policy).
The final application has been packaged using the incredibly powerful (and easy) mProjector by ScreenTime Media
The development of the application was bringing fun and frustration altogether.
The tools to produce desktop applications from flash are just a few, and after spending 700 $ to find the right one, I had to face the windows/mac issues for portability.
The flash has been developed on Mac and then deployed on both platform, with a series of issues I don’t want to talk about now (past is past).
The application actually works smoothly and is pretty nice too.
I just hope the mac platform will soon become a better deployement environment for this kind of applications.
the desktop edition of greenspace features graphics by niko stumpo for the HANAZUKi Company and has been engineered/developed by me as TwoDotOne
a few screenshots
download it here
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October 23rd, 2005 at 10:17 pm
Back from LA, just spotted this in my newsreader. Great work man…tell me you used rTweenEngine ? :) Up for a meeting this week… Call me…old phone still broken.