Monthly Archives: August 2008

Flex/Flash/Actionscript

Flex spotted on TV

I came across a video of a segment that aired on Fox Business News about HotPads.com, which is an online housing search website (rentals, sales, etc). As I was watching the clip I noticed that beautiful little preloader we’ve all come to know and love 🙂 HotPads uses a custom map engine they developed in Flex (after porting an older Flash app).

Here’s the screenshot that caught my eye:
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You can watch the full video here:

And if you haven’t checked out hotpads before, it’s pretty dope. In addition to seeing rental listings on a map, they let you see some cool heatmaps of various things like foreclosure rates, income and age levels, etc. And it’s Flex, so show some love people.

Disclaimer or whatever: The guys who founded and run hotpads are friends of mine, I even did some work for them back a few years ago. I’ve got a little investment in the company that will one day either make me rich or hopefully at least buy me a six pack of beer.

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Maps, SpatialKey

Announcing SpatialKey – Geographic Information Without Limits

SpatialKey LogoToday I’m proud to announce the launch of SpatialKey, the geospatial information visualization product I’ve been working on with our fantastic team at Universal Mind. I’ll make a bold statement that I stick by: this is the best web-based mapping product in existence. Today we’re releasing a “technology preview” that gives you a little glimpse at what we’ve been working on (just to whet your appetite until we release the full product).

Quick links
Before I explain what SpatialKey is I wanted to give a few quick links because I know a lot of you are going to have your ADD act up before you read the rest of the post.

  • SpatialKey Gallery – lists a few dataset/template pairs that we think tell great stories. Read the descriptions of the datasets and then launch the app to play with the data yourself.
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    San Antonio Prostitution hotspots

    San Antonio Prostitution Crimes – This link will jump you straight into exploring the prostitution crimes in San Antonio from Jan 2006 – July 2007. Check out how clearly the heatmap points out the corners that are the hotspots in the city.

  • Growth of Walmart – This link will load the Walmart dataset into a playback template that lets you click play and watch Walmart take over America.



Beyond points on a map

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Overwhelmed with markers

We’ve been seeing the same tired approach to web-based mapping for years now. Everyone throws markers on a map. You want to track crime? Throw a bunch of markers on a map. Little pin markers work fine if you’re showing a few data points. Want to see the location of Starbucks within a 3 block radius of your house? Use markers. But what if you want to see the total sales of all Starbucks worldwide? Or all crimes for the past 10 years? For the whole country?

SpatialKey uses some of the most advanced visualization renderings for geospatial data that have ever been seen on the web. The focus here is on aggregate renderings: heatmaps, thematic grids, graduated circles. 1,000 markers all piled on top of each other doesn’t help anyone. What you want to see is density or sum total value. SpatialKey focuses on rendering aggregate data in meaningful ways. We can show you a heatmap of the entire country and let you visualize any number of data fields. You want to see the heatmap represent total sales of all stores in the region? No problem. You want to see average house price over the past 10 years? We can do that.

Heat Map Heat Grid
SpatialKey Heat Maps SpatialKey Heat Grids

We haven’t seen innovative technology in this industry since Google let you drag the map. (I actually vividly remember that moment when I first dragged a Google map and my mouth started to water). It’s time to move beyond points on a map.

Your data doesn’t have limits
Try adding 10,000 data points to a Google Map. I dare you. What happens? If you’re using the “My Maps” feature of Google Maps, you’re limited to only show 200 points at a time, then you have to page through your data. And to top it all off you’re limited to a whopping total of 1,000 data points in the entire data set. So you get to page through 5 pages of data and only see 1/10th of your total data set anyway. If you create your own application with the Google Maps AJAX API you’re going to have serious performance problems when you get up into a few hundred markers. We think that’s ridiculous.

SpatialKey breaks through the limits of previous mapping technology in two ways. First, we’re simply faster. Flash can process and render data far faster than JavaScript. We can render 10,000 data points in a matter of milliseconds. You simply can’t do that with any JavaScript API out there. Second, we’re smarter. We aggregate data to produce heatmaps instead of just trying to overlay markers one on top of the other. Fundamentally, a massive dataset is an information visualization problem, not a technical one. You need better renderings to convey massive amounts of data, and that’s what SpatialKey delivers.

This is just the beginning
This is a technology preview. That basically means we’re showing you some cool stuff, but we’ve got way more up our sleeve. We’re looking for feedback on what we’ve got, and we’re hoping to get you excited about what we’ll be rolling out. We’ll be releasing new versions of SpatialKey Personal that will let you easily import your own data (if you’ve got an Excel file with addresses you can drop it right in). We’re also going to be releasing SpatialKey Enterprise, which lets you load a data set of any size (millions and millions of points). And then we’ve got a third product that we’re launching called SpatialKey Law Enforcement Dashboard, which is an enterprise version of SpatialKey specifically targeted toward police departments (includes special law enforcement reporting templates). And in the meantime we’ll be rolling out some more example datasets for you to play with, so keep an eye on the SpatialKey blog.

So go check out the SpatialKey Gallery and play with some data. We’re looking for feedback during this phase, so if you have any suggestions or (god forbid!) you run across bugs, please let us know by emailing feedback@spatialkey.com.

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Uncategorized

Why did I stop blogging?

I haven’t been blogging like I used to. It’s been a month since my last post (and that was just a silly cartoon). I’ve been thinking about why this is, and there are some typical expected reasons (busy work schedule, extra non-work commitments, a recent move, etc etc). This is all part of why I’ve fallen off the blogging wagon, but it’s not the whole story. This post is a bit of a dive into my psychology, trying to get at why I blog and where I’m trying to get to in my life. This isn’t a technical post and it’s not really even about Flex. It’s about me and my brain and my feelings. So if you don’t like mushy crap, you can stop reading.

First, the standard stuff:

  • Intense work
    I took a full-time gig with Universal Mind and we’re about to launch the product that I’ve been working on for a very long time. It’s one thing to work on a consulting gig where you walk in, do your shit, and get out. This is different. This product has so much of my time and energy invested in it. It’s my baby, and because I’m so invested, it consumes more of my mental time than any consulting project ever did. It’s not like I work 100 hour weeks for UM, I work normal hours. But my head doesn’t shut off when I commit my night’s changes and walk away from the computer. So that means I’m thinking about Flex for a huge portion of my non-work hours.
  • Writing Flex for Dummies
    Flex For Dummies basically took over my weekends for 7 months of my life. I wrote from Friday night to Sunday night (our deadlines were Monday and I usually turned in a chapter around 1 am). I didn’t go out, I didn’t go on weekend trips. And the last thing I wanted to do was blog. But that process is over and the book’s about to come out! I now have my weekends back, but I also have a new appreciation for my free time. I used to do a lot of blog posts over the weekends, now sitting in front of the computer is the last thing I want to do.
  • Moving in with my girlfriend
    It’s been about a month since I moved from San Francisco to Berkeley and moved in with my girlfriend. So I was dealing with the whole packing and moving thing, and also adjusting to the new living situation. Things have been fantastic since moving in, and this is another reason I’m not blogging as much. After a day of work I’d much rather go to dinner with my girlfriend and spend time hanging out with her instead of sitting in front of my monitor writing code.

So that’s all the stuff that I’d tell you if you asked me why I haven’t been blogging. “Man, I’ve just been so busy, I can’t find the time.” There’s a lot of truth to that, I certainly don’t want it to sound like I haven’t been busy. But largely the “I’ve been busy” excuse is bullshit. So why haven’t I been blogging?

I’m not hungry anymore.

Now we’re getting to the meat of this. I’ve been thinking about what drives me to blog and reflecting on the past year and a half. I’ve had a crazy ride. I went from being an unknown kid learning ActionScript and Flex to being a semi-famous-within-a-very-specific-geek-circle, book-writing, highly-paid, influential expert (and yeah, clearly you can tell that it’s all gone to my head). And it all happened in a year. My salary multiplied, I was speaking at conferences, I had a book deal. That’s some seriously crazy shit. That wasn’t entirely my plan from day one, although as things started picking up steam I started aiming higher and higher. I wanted to be famous. I wanted people to think I was good. I wanted to be in demand, to be sought after.

And so now what? What’s the next step? I’ve got a stellar job, I make bank, my book’s about to come out, I’ve got a reputation I’m proud of, and I’m being flown halfway around the world to speak at a conference. The people that I thought were rockstars, that I learned so much from while I was getting started (and still do every day); they all know who I am now (some of them are even good friends).

I used to be so hungry to prove myself. If someone had a coding problem they couldn’t solve I wanted to be the guy who showed everyone how to do it. I wanted people to stop and say “woah, where the fuck did this guy come from?” And now that I got that I guess I feel a bit drained. That fire to be the best, to be known, is dampened. I’m not saying I’m the best, I’m just saying I no longer care like I used to.

The Tech
There’s also a technology aspect to this. I’m starting to feel like I’ve taken Flex as far as it will go. I started proving small things; how to make little components, or how to hack some piece of the Flex framework. And I rode that until I knew Flex inside and out. I hit every brick wall (I climbed over or busted through some). And it was all so challenging and rewarding. I was unlocking secrets, uncovering things people didn’t know. But in terms of intellectual curiosity I’ve exhausted Flex 2 and 3. Of course there’s always new stuff in Flash Player 10 and Flex 4 that is going to be really interesting. But my interest has been shifting. I don’t want to solve small problems with a component or with a framework. I want big problems. I want new problems. I want real problems. I want to solve something that’s not just a technical detail.

I’m not ditching Flex or ActionScript. On the contrary, I feel like I’ve gotten to the point with the technology that I’m supposed to be: Flex and ActionScript are just tools to solve problems, not problems in themselves. When I started blogging Flex was a problem I was chipping away at, hacking together examples and tweaking the framework to get it to serve my needs. Now I want to move beyond that, and take on problems that are information problems on their own, and Flex just happens to be the best tool I have at my disposal.

The Next Step
I’ve been reading a good bit about information visualization as a field of research and soaking in as much as I can. The product I’ve been working on for Universal Mind takes geographic information visualization to a level that nobody’s done yet on the web (I put the “on the web” qualifier there, but I hope we’re working on stuff that pushes limits for any software, online or offline). And that’s just scratching the surface. There’s a ton room for innovation in the geo space. It’s a field that has so much potential but is stifled by a few big players and their ideas about how things are supposed to work. So I’m hoping I can help shake that up a bit. But geospatial information is just one small piece of the whole pie. I want to visualize everything. I want to create new ways of seeing data. And this is a field without limits. There is no end to the possible innovation.

So in the months ahead I hope to use this blog as an experimental proving ground for my forays into data visualization. I’m doing a lot of this for work, which is awesome because that means I get paid to do interesting work, but it has the downside that I often can’t share code. I imagine there will be more posts that are examples of what we’ve done (videos or live apps) that don’t show exactly how we did it. That sucks, but I think there’s still a lot to be said for showing off inspirational stuff. I’m also going to be trying to refocus on blogging small experiments in data visualization.

So if you’ve made it this far I’m impressed you read through my psycho-babble ramblings (or maybe you just skipped to the end looking for something worthwhile). From here on out I’ll probably keep the “dive into Doug’s head” type of posts like this to a minimum, and get back to blogging cool tech.

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Flex/Flash/Actionscript

Description of my Flash on the Beach session: Decompiling Flex and Flash

speakerbadge_200_120_e.gifI’ve just posted the title and description of the session I’ll be giving at Flash on the Beach, which is happening September 28-Oct 1 in Brighton, England. My session is titled: Decompiling Flex and Flash. Here’s the full description (which you can also find on the FOTB site):

In this session we’ll learn how to decompile ActionScript 3 SWF files and peek inside other people’s code. Decompiling a SWF is often seen as an evil tactic that should be punishable by death, but regardless of your moral opinion, every SWF you create can be decompiled into often beautifully readable source code. If you’ve produced something cool, chances are someone has decompiled it (hell, chances are I’ve decompiled it myself).

In this session you’ll learn what you get when you decompile a SWF and what you don’t. We’ll cover how far you can get piecing a decompiled application back together and I’ll share a few real-world stories of how decompiling has proven invaluable in my development career.

This session will focus on ripping apart some large-scale Flex applications and diving into the source (we’ll see if I can get sued by the end of the session). I’ll cover some Flex-specifics that are important when you decompile a Flex app (Flex framework classes, generated MXML code, data binding code, etc). But decompiling AS3 SWFs is just as applicable for SWFs produced in Flash Authoring as well, so there should be plenty of information for everyone.

And for all the paranoid folks out there, in addition to decompiling code, I’ll also cover a few techniques to protect your source code to make it harder for people to steal.

I hope to see some of you in England!

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