Haha Janus is leight wieght, can speak two lanuages, and very extendable. According to Roman mythology "Janus was frequently used to symbolize change and transitions such as the progression of past to future". Today shes an extenable wrapper that will hopefully make using flex in .NET alot less painfull. 

There isnt alot of information about Janus but a quick look through the JanusLibrary using Reflector you can soon see what a great little library they have built up.

Also they have adopted a similar way of doing Flex/flash to .NET assembly comunication as to what I do. With .net you can use reflection to load libraries (dlls) at runtime and using method info you can call methods in the dll. This means that developers can probably extend what dlls are loaded ) cool. The wrapper exe itself seems to be using the flashplayercontrol, which without a doubt is the best wrapper for .net coders to use in conjunction with the flash player. The one thing I wonder is the liscensing of the flashplayercontrol. Janus must have to release it with its exe, and you release it with your app. I know that the control library costs about $300 US  so that will be interesting. All you need to develop your own wrappers is that dll.

The AS3 code required to create a winform is really obvious to any flex coder.

var newForm:Form = new Form();
newForm.maximise();

Basically I think Janus is a great thing. Adobe has really been dragging its heels in developing cross technology comunitcation. It has been from this void of products that projects such as AMFPHP and WebOrb grew to fill. Time to wise up Adobe!! 

Any ways, this will be one project I will watch with interest. Ill post some examples once I have had a chance to play.

Videmo the website has a new child. Its fat and "web aware". Lol I finished the videmo.co.nz event display yesterday and it has withstood 24 hours of testing. Basically the concept is that plasma screens, big screens etc can display the video, images, and text messages that people send in. It can be moderated remotely via a flex web interface too (just incase any of you have dodgy photos ;o). I have packed this product with so many technologies and three letter acronyms it isnt funny.

We had planned to launch the first display for Vodafone NZ at the surf champs this weekend (at the beach) but a local service provider HyperFactory threw thier toys out of the cot so well have to re-schedule.  ( gutted cause I have spent alot of nights on this thing. We had been hooked up with a GPRS modem for the display and everything.

If your unsure as to where videmo came from there is a project link on the side bar to your right (i will update it soon with this information). Basically I took that website 1 step further. Messages are convertered server side and added to a database. A Prudy Flex web interface allows people to moderate the messages remotely, via AMF and once given the ok they beam thier way off to a remote location at a live event. At the event the are displayed in all thier mobile goodness on a large Flex screen. (but no-one ever knows that unless Adobe sponsors me for the Video SDK wink wink nudge nudge)

I have to now save to buy the On2 Server side sdk. The photo above shows the display running on my tv at home (has been for 24 hours remember) and youll notice the video is a little small. Basically pumping it up much more with FFMpeg kills the quality, so I really have to get the video On2 SDK to take it to the next level. Considering that the SDK is about $7000 NZ I might be saving for a while, OUCH!

So if anyone out there thinks that live video and images along with text would suit their event, feel free to let me know, and we can work something out. Im cheap as I need to eat and have to start raising funds for that SDk and paying bills again.

Its a version 1 with many possible features, but well just see how it sits with users for now and see what people actually want this thing to do.

Rock on Flex though!!!! It was the easiest to implement and mate up with the other technologies. It (really the flash player) is so suited to GUI over many other platforms it really was the only choice. Next up I will be plumbing the ROR site back into the new schema so photos and video will be availble for viewing afterwards with lightbox like video popups.

Finally, I would really appreciate it if anyone out there, no matter what country your from would send me a pxt or mobile video. I need to start getting a feel for other formats of service providers. Ill even post the funniest in a few days.

Send the message to testevent@videmo.co.nz, and it will display on my tv at home in all its glory. 

Today Ted Patrick posted some interesting points [HERE] and I think they are right on target. In summary (and a real quick on at that) he thinks the web is becoming a "Real time & multi user" experience, not just someone wandering around the internet on a loney journey. The technologies that surround this sort of experience are emerging to solve the new problems that come with this target. For me it's going to be intergrated VOIP.

I dont play alot of games, but when I do I play battle field 2. Why, because when some random fella decides to ram me with a plane I can just press a key and abuse him with my voice. He can do the same and mock me back. The battle ensues and this is real interactivity. BRING ON VOIP in flash.

"Online / offline" another one that hits home with me. I love working with what I call web awareapplications. At the end of the day the web is just a data transportation protocol, why do I have to be always be connected when I dont require it.

Other points made by Ted revolve around:

Rich, Beautiful, Amazing
Simple Server APIs
Flash Player/Apollo is the client
Cross-platform

Well worth a read and a gaze into the near future where the web might be heading.

I checked through my MeasureMap stats last night and decided to check the search words that are leading to my site. Guess what. Alot of people are searching on tree Item renderers and datadescriptors. So in the first part of what I hope to be a many part ….um blog post here is how to put a button on a tree. Nothing special but it illustrates a few points and the basics. Remember you could change the button out to be an image or what ever.

SOURCE HERE or DOWNLOAD DA ZIP 

The biggest thing to note for someone venturing into the world of itemRenderers is that just because your itemrenderer is used for a node called bob the first time it is drawn doesnt mean it will be used for that same node (bob) after the parent node has been contracted and expanded again. So a good thing to do is pass the node data to your button (or what ever type) of class each time the itemrenderer updates, and evaluate what that class needs to do when it recieves this data. I made my Node getter in the class the trigger for this.

Also note that large collections in a tree can get pretty resource intensive. So try to make you ItemRenderers as effient as possible, by removing buttons etc if not needed. The day may come when your tree has thousands of nodes ekkkkkkkkkk. 

P.S. does anyone know of a good plugin for wordpress that embeds swfs with SWFObject? Im doing this more and more now and really want something easy. Work smart not hard and all that. 

You know I see on techcrunch and mashable all these stories about "xbeloit", "peebOs", Smegoooo's" or some wierd named web 2.0 site getting another 10 million funding. ANOTHER 10 MILLION? friggen Aye? how does someone get 10 mill for building yet another basecamp with a freeky name. And then what are you expected to give back for that 10 mill. Your soul, first born and the left nut of your uncles brother?

Then I came across a link which instilled in me a sense of, "now that just makes sense". It was about getting the idea out. Getting that version 1 live.

How many of you out there have had a cool idea and developed it so far but all the 3am nights later you start to loose interest because it just doesnt seem to be happening. Well if your in the US time to check out http://www.ycombinator.com.

[ VIA: Orielly.com ]

Check this from thier site:

Do we need to write a business plan?

Not for us. We make funding decisions based on our application form and personal interviews. We love demos, but we never read business plans.

How much do you usually invest?

Rarely more than $20,000. The goal is usually to give you enough money to build an impressive prototype or version 1, which you can then use to get further funding.

What does Y Combinator get out of this?

Stock, usually about 5-7% of it.

Heck, give me 6k to hold me over for the time, and ill give you 20% and the nut of my uncles brother.

Man how I wish someone in New Zealand had a clue and started something like this. Really to get that version 1 out…to get it to a really basic product…full time…. should take 3mnths. How many peolpe in that three months is just a measure of how hard it is.

When I dream that my idea could make a really usefull and cool site/idea, and I dream that I could make a really sweet product out of it, I am not looking for 10 mill of funding. heck Im looking to not go hungry and still have a home at the end of developing it.

Where are the VC's that give you 10g to push out a web 2.0 site in Ruby on rails in 2mnths that functions and can handel some users on your so so hosting plan. Thats the point that I want to reach. Where it can be evaluated as a self standing product. 

Wise up guys (all you VC's out there) and youll find you get alot more for your money.