TOKI WOKI. 

Yep, we cooked some!

Eng­lish read­ers: jump straight to the end, and excuse my french!

Jeudi prochain (le 6 mai) je vais par­ticiper à la 4ème Pecha Kucha de Bor­deaux, parmi une quin­zaine d’autres inter­venants. Pour ceux qui ne con­nais­sent pas le con­cept, c’est assez sim­ple : une présen­ta­tion (à la Pow­er­point) avec 20 images et 20 sec­on­des pour cha­cune. Un peu plus de 6 min­utes pour présen­ter ses travaux et ses sources d’inspiration ; ça va vite, ça passe du coq à l’âne (“comme dans une par­touze à la ferme”, comme dirait Fuzati) et y’a des gens intéressants !

Je ne peux pas dire grand chose sur ma pro­pre présen­ta­tion parce que le sus­pense c’est sympa, et puis que je suis encore en train de préparer…

Bref, venez me jeter des pier­res à la gueule ! En plus, parce que vous êtes des gens bien, j’ai invité mon poto Alain Juppé à venir aussi poser son slam ; coup-de-pouce style. Toutes les infos sont sur le site offi­ciel et sur Face­book, fas­toche.

Fais gaffe, la suite du bil­let est en Anglais, retour à la nor­male quoi !

On thurs­day (May 6) I’ll take part in Bordeaux’s fourth Pecha Kucha (France)! If you don’t know what a Pecha Kucha is yet, the PK guys have set up a page for you.

Now I can’t tell you much about what I’ll talk about and what I’ll show because I need to keep up the sus­pense… And even though my slides are set and sent I’m still prac­tic­ing and decid­ing what I’m really going to make out of these 20×20 seconds!

Fun fact? One of the other pre­sen­ters is Bordeaux’s cur­rent mayor!

This post is a techy one, so if you don’t write AIR apps or if you think this wouldn’t be enough to show off dur­ing cof­fee break I rec­om­mend some­thing fun­nier.

Work­ing on a big fat AIR app (more than 400 Mb) I noticed some­thing quite strange: using Encrypt­ed­Lo­cal­Store get/setItem meth­ods hap­pened to be slow, I mean very slow, but like, slow as hell (like 5 to 10 sec­onds per call) but only after launch­ing the app, and not after. Some­thing that I never noticed before ; nei­ther with other AIR apps, nor for this one before I added its heavy con­tent… And the tricky part is that it only occurred with a com­piled app, but not within ADL.

I googled a bit and found this thread which is mainly about the strongly­Bound para­me­ter for setItem, but its last post by Oliver Gold­man rang my bell:

The first time ELS is accessed the application’s sig­na­ture needs to be ver­i­fied, regard­less of whether or not strongly­Bound is set. If strongly­Bound is set, then the sig­na­ture is re-verified as the appli­ca­tion is run­ning. Either way, it’s expen­sive if you have a big application.

Small app: fast, fat app: slow as hell. Les­son learned…

And this is true both for Flash and HTML/JS AIR apps. So if you don’t need your data to be encrypted I highly rec­om­mend using Share­dOb­ject (or else) instead. As far as I’m con­cerned the first calls dropped from 5/10 sec­onds to a few milliseconds.

Bingo.

Dur­ing the last cou­ple of months I’ve been work­ing on a free AIR app for a French community-based site called Weecast. Its pur­pose is to allow users to sub­mit and/or buy screen­casts about your favorite apps and lan­guages (mostly Adobe’s and Microsoft’s, but also 3D ones’, OS’s and more).

Intro­duc­ing the Weecast Player!

The app allows you to browse your videos, watch them (4 view modes), search for more, drop com­ments and stars… I think that’s called an RIA, right? There’s also an offline mode, so you can access all your stuff anytime.

All of this is made in Flex+AIR. The visual iden­tity was made by Weecast ; thanks for the PNGs, folks!

By the way, some parts of it are actu­ally Open­Source, includ­ing:

• Mis­cel­la­neous AIR util­i­ties
• The infa­mous Gra­di­ent­La­bel (for Flex)
• Dynam.ize and BaseOb­ject, for work­ing with syn­chro­nous SQLite databases

If you don’t know Weecast yet I highly rec­om­mend you go visit their site, grab an account and the player, enjoy free videos, and then buy some! Now if you don’t under­stand French… Well, learn it!