Randy Troppmann

at the Yahoo! Gallery which showcases hundreds of applications that use Yahoo! technologies.

Am I the only one who thinks its inevitable that the town of Two Hills, Alberta will get a Hooters franchise?

We just got back from Disneyland (first time for me) where my wife, 8yr old daughter and I spent marathon days exploring the parks. It was an awesome time and a nice break from work.

On Monday (18.09.2006) I presented at EFUG and my topic was RUNNINGMAP.com and the use of Yahoo! Maps. Grant Skinner chaired the meeting and talked about recent news he gathered from the recent FlashForward conference. One very exciting tidbit was that his company in conjunction with Metaliq has been hired by Adobe and is developing what will be the V3 components for Flash 9. This is an amazing coup for him and good news for the rest of us. A couple years ago his group (including the notable Phil Chung) created GLIC which has since been rebranded as mCom and is being sold by Metaliq. These components were developed because the Macromedia V2 components were widely maligned due to bloated architecture, overly complex inheritance chain and difficult skinning procedures. I am a user of mCom components which solve these issues. Since the V3 components will require a complete rewrite to take advantage of AS3, the new components will be even better and a huge step forward for components that come bundled with Flash.

With increased traffic on RUNNINGMAP.com has come increased cost of hosting. My friend was hosting the site on his co-located box for free. But for the last several months my site has been shredding his bandwidth so I decided to move to a new host where bandwidth cost is cheaper. My friend did not kick me off his server … he is stoked that the site is getting a lot of traffic. The move was done carefully since there is data and middlewear involved. All went well for the most part. One drawback is that new mySQL DB would timeout on executing SQL dump from the old DB so I had to split the file up into about 5 chunks. Also, the chat app is down for the moment.

Consequently I have been thinking about a business model around this site to generate some money since the site is now costing money. For the short term I have added a donation button. There have been 4 donations to date. Interesting to see a minor drop in traffic since I added the donation button. I have no way to know if the two issues are related.

Also notable is that Permalinks has been updated so it now remembers the map mode. This was necessary because some of the new foreign city maps added are available only as Satellite View and Permalinks was defaulting to Map View when a route was loaded from the DB. Not anymore!

The Yahoo! Maps Team has added satellite imagery for quite a few cities around the world. This means that RUNNINGMAP.com is not bound to North America anymore. And my home town Edmonton has been added!

Read more…

Yesterday I launched a new version of RUNNINGMAP that features a new look, a new logo and a new feature: Live Chat. Clicking the “live chat” button will cause a window to slide down where you can log in and chat real time with anyone who happens to be logged into real chat at this time. This feature is an experiment more than anything right now.

A blog post by Vince Maniago from the Yahoo! Maps Team speaks about their favorite map mashups:

“Randy Troppmann’s Running Map is a stunning and useful implementation of our AS-Flash API that allows you to plot your running, walking, or cycling route to determine how far you’ll be going. We’re especially proud of the way Randy has integrated his controls around our map to give this mashup a unique feel.”

Additionally, RUNNINGMAP is listed under “Editors’ picks” on Yahoo! Gallery

I’ve read many lists like this. Over at .Net mag they put together a killer list of 20 tips. My favourite: #8. IE Box Model Hack. Check it out!

I use the mCom components for Flash 8 development and I came across a problem when combined with masks: the text disappears. Examples and solution:

just a button (no mask)

button with mask. Notice the label has disappeared. It is showing only half of the button because the mask is doing its job, silly!

Here the label is back. It is an issue regarding embedded fonts and this is how it is fixed:

1. add a font to your library; Verdana for example
2. under Linkage for this new library item click off "Export for Actionscript" and "Export in first frame"
3. add these lines of code:

import com.metaliq.controls.UIObject;
UIObject.setStyle("embedFonts", true);
UIObject.setStyle("fontFamily", "Verdana");