Baking desktop applications using As3 and Zinc.

Zinc 3.0 is an alternative to turn Flash/Flex applications to full portable desktop applications.

As3 and Zinc 3 is the standard to develop desktop applications (often called widget) in the advertisement industry: it is easy and cost effective.

It is possible to style the window (I had transparent mode).
There is a very interesting library that extends the capabilities of flash.

The Mdm Zinc forum is very helpful.

Bug using Pyamf with Google App Engine templates

It seems that Pyamf conflicts with the Google App Engine template library.
You may have this error loading a template:

AttributeError: 'module' object has no attribute 'defaulttags'

Perhaps Pyamf includes an older version of Django library .
To workaround write the imports in this order:

from google.appengine.ext.webapp import template
from pyamf.remoting.gateway.google import WebAppGateway

It seems odd but the problem disappears.

A new version of Blogger is coming!

Blogger starts to be interesting with the new version in draft.

To use the new tool go to draft.blogger.com after logging in.

What's new in draft.blogger:

Use of the maps
Use of Picasa Albums
Creation of pages
Nicer aspect

There are also interesting functions for collaboration with other writers.

Unofficial terms of use for demo applications

This document is not meant to be a proper legal terms of use but just an acknowledgement for who finds my demo applications over the web:

This application is intended to be just an experiment, please take it as a free service without any expectation of results.

I do not use your personal information for any kind of business, furthermore I make some statistical analysis on the data.

I attempt to destroy the sensible information about you as soon as you will finish to use the demo.

Handmade Particicle System

I had to develop a particle system in flash which could render more than 20.000 particles.

Check the final solution. That is not perfect, but it is really near to the best you can run on AS3.

The low level implementation throught image processing can render up to 50.000 particles moving.

Automated Testing using Selenium

For browser-based testing of web applications I recommend Selenium. It can be used both for functional, compatibility (it has extensive cross-browser support) and regression testing.
I used the Java Api, but it is available in other languages.
There are other tools similar to Selenium.
In my team we use it and we feel quite comfortable but for a brand new project I would rather review some other tool. Anyway Selenium is great.