This morning I discovered that someone added Runningmap.com as an example to the Wikipedia entry for “mashup”. I am a big fan of Wikipedia and I am flattered. I categorically state that I did not make the entry nor do I know who did it. As a matter of record, here are some noteable web references (that I played no part in posting):
Other than being shameless self promotion (hey, it is my blog the point of this post is that the viral nature of the web is quite interesting. It’s a new kind of “word-of-mouth.” And I think it is indicative of substance. I much prefer this than trolling and spamming running forums like other owners of similar sites do. One particular owner of a similar site to runningmap has posted “me too!” comments on at least 5 different high profile news or blog posts about Runningmap. That is annoying.
UPDATE: It looks like my Wikipedia fame has come to an end. On November 28 someone removed the “unencyclopedic examples” which included runningmap.com.
I was encountering some odd beviour with the Flash drawing api with RUNNINGMAP and my hunch was that it was caused by drawing the lines too far off the stage. At the behest of Tom Ortega (360Flex Deity) I built a little experiment to test my theory, which is shown below.
If you leave the default x and y values and click “Move the Blob”, the Blob will move 200,000 pixels to the right (off stage, somewhere in Saskatoon). You should see that the line connecting the two balls gets really fat and dragging the orange ball around will show that Flash is not painting the stage properly. My tests with RUNNINGMAP show this painting error occurs when a line is 25,000 or more pixels off-stage.
The first thing I hear you saying is “Who wants to draw 25,000 pixels off-stage anyway?” Uh, me. RUNNINGMAP allows you to draw routes on a map, which may get fairly long. As the user drags the map to new geography, the lines get further and further off-stage. This experiment proves my hunch was correct and I have since fixed the bug in RUNNINGMAP.
I also now know there is virtually no limitation for placed moveiclips. You can play with the x and y values and repeatedly click “move the blob” to cause the Blob to move further and further away. You can reliably move the Blob 100 Million pixels in either direction. Sometime thereafter the value crashes and is assigned a value of -107374182.4. Clicking reset shows that this is not unrecoverable. We now know how big the Flash universe is. Just don’t expect to draw all over it.
Check out this post to get the goods on Grant’s new Spell Checking component for Flash, Flex and AIR. This is great stuff. You can see it in action in BUZZWORD which is new kick a** web based word processor. In fact Adobe liked BUZZWORD so much, they bought the company. If you have ever tried to build a rich text editor in Flash, you will know what a @#$% it is to do right. Spell checking? Forget it! Sick, Grant.
the point of this post is that the viral nature of the web is quite interesting. It’s a new kind of “word-of-mouth.” And I think it is indicative of substance. I much prefer this than trolling and spamming running forums like other owners of similar sites do. One particular owner of a similar site to runningmap has posted “me too!” comments on at least 5 different high profile news or blog posts about Runningmap. That is annoying.
