Third Eye Entertainment Blog 3ee.com

Our Mobile Site is Live!

Ryan Sadwick — Fri, 30 Jul 2010 21:33:26 +0000

We’ve finished up our mobile site for Third Eye Entertainment. It uses the same database as our normal website, so any time we update our data, the mobile site gets updated in the same push!

So far, we’ve extensively tested our mobile version with iPhone and Android phones. We enjoy the results so far!

If you’re interested in a mobile site for your company, feel free to contact us!

Third Eye Entertainment

Tippie for Android, an advanced tip calculator.

Ryan Sadwick — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 08:27:42 +0000

We just released Tippie for Android. Another tip app you say? Tippie isn’t like the rest you see on the marketplace. Tippie can calculate tips just like any other app, however Tippie has the ability to save your tip entries. You can modify them at any time or even remove them. Great for going paperless since you can store the receipt on your phone. You can also e-mail the receipt without having to type anything… Tippie does it for you!

Rate your dining experience
The fun aspect about Tippie is the rating system. The five star rating system is fully customizable so you can define each star with a tip percentage. If you had such a great or nasty experience, you can enter the tip percentage manually as well.

You can also select rounding options, either round the tip up or down… or don’t round it at all and have it display the exact amount. Having these options are offer flexibility depending on what you want to do.

Tippie allows you to split the bill between the number of folks in your party, in case all of you decide to go separate.

All the information you give Tippie can be saved: the rating, meal price, number of people in your party, and of course all the settings are saved. So when you load a specific tip, Tippie displays it right there for you!

It’s free
Tippie is a free app and only displays one ad on the bottom of the main screen. If you like our app, please feel free to click on the advertisements.

Here is the qr code you can scan on your Android device:

Apple and Adobe: a toolbox fight

Ryan Sadwick — Fri, 09 Apr 2010 18:56:36 +0000

Apple’s move to not allow apps developed on other platforms has sparked a great deal of debate. While some understand that Apple wants to protect their product and only allow Objective C and web apps (jQuery, Javascript web apps are accepted when using the webkit view), others, especially Flash/Flex developers see this move as a slap in the face.

I understand both sides. If you’ve ever been interested in developing an iPhone app and you happen to use a PC: you’ve hit a brick wall. You need a Mac to develop iPhone applications. I realize you don’t have to use their IDE, however to test your mobile app, you should be using the emulator, which is mac based. Taking take into consideration alone, to me, is no surprise why Apple has made this move.

What it’s really coming down to is a toolbox fight. Flash isn’t always the right tool for developing a website. Objective C isn’t the right tool for building a desktop application. Developers like certain tools and know which one is right for the job. Some developers may only have a few tools in their dev shed while others have several to choose from.

My point is, there isn’t always a perfect solution. Sometimes you may need to use multiple tools or just a single tool. What makes you a good developer is solving the issue of what tool you’re going to bring out. But this is for certain, tools don’t die. There are many companies out there that still have Cobol and Fortran developers on their staff. Many corporate companies still use IE6 and there is a large number of developers that still specialize in IE6 hacks.

Programming basics is the same in any language, you’re just using different syntax. You could give me lists of benchmarks of why Flash is better than Silverlight or why HTML renders faster on Internet Explorer but those platforms, languages, packages will always be tools. I like filling my dev shed with different tools. Using Python for this job and Flash for another: that is the joy of being a developer for me: I don’t have to limit myself to one single tool for the job.

Get connected. Our social media sites.

Ryan Sadwick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 23:00:28 +0000

Connect into our social media networks:

Twitter: Follow us on Twitter. We’re into development and that’s what we talk about.
Linked In: Connect to our Linked In network. Meet new people! Browse through our recommendations.
Facebook fans: Become a fan and receive information on new products and connections!
Active Den products: Our Flash and Flex products. Great quality, perfect prices.
3EE Insight: Join our mailing list for the latest info on our products and services. We also offer discounts through our mailing list as well!

Android Academy Developer Register

Ryan Sadwick — Tue, 09 Mar 2010 20:00:29 +0000

We’ve signed up with Android Academy and posted our development register:

http://www.androidacademy.com/your-details/userprofile/ryguy

Whether you’re looking for a developer or want to be listed, this is a great tool for both worlds.

Number Stepper with Android SDK.

Ryan Sadwick — Thu, 14 Jan 2010 21:11:42 +0000

I’ve been having so much fun learning and working with the Android SDK. It reminds me of working with Flex… using xml layouts to design each screen and using Java to develop the functionality of mobile applications.

I’m developing my first app that will actually do a few things and I have a screen that needed an number input. So I wanted a number stepper. I found that there isn’t one available that is public. (There is one in Internal but I’m not going to touch that!).

So, I decided to learn how to develop my own components by creating a number stepper:

Android Number Stepper Component

It has four parameters:

Default value: the number that will show when the control is shown

Minimum value: the limiting lowest value that the stepper can “step” to

Maximum value: the limiting highest value the stepper can reach

Step amount: how much the number stepper increases or decreases (eg. increase by 4).

I read up on creating compound components over at the Android Dev site. So the component is actually made up of 2: EditText and Button.

To use it in an activity, I simply use a List to display the component. My NumberStepperView class extends LinearLayout and uses an XML layout to call the up, down and EditText controls. I use a Base Adapter that can use the ListView, as per the screen shot above.

Here is how I pass in the 4 parameters:

nStepper.add(new NumberData(defaultValue, minimumValue, maxiumValue, step));

I’m very pleased with how easy it was to create a compound component.

Source
Main Activity: TitleScreen.java
NumberData.java
NumberStepAdapter.java
NumberStepperAdapterView.java
Layouts:
main.xml
steplist.xml

In the next few weeks, I’ll share more Android development, such as jumping to a new screen and getting the user’s input from that activity through an intent and bundles. We’re currently in the process of developing future Android apps, so stay tuned for more insights!

Our labs sector

Ryan Sadwick — Wed, 30 Dec 2009 20:40:47 +0000

We’ve officially opened up our 3ee labs!

This section of the 3ee.com site is where our testing, playing, and fooling around with new/old experiments take place. Sometimes, even a case study here and there. We needed a place where we can play, learn, and talk about our findings. So 3ee Labs is now here!

What is our lab made out of?

The content is created/edited through a free wordpress account. We didn’t want the whole wordpress paid account package since we like rolling our own framework. We didn’t need our whole site to be a wordpress blog, only a tiny part of it, so a paid account wouldn’t do us much good.

Our site reads through our wordpress account’s rss feed and does a little parsing. It grabs all the topics and links them on our 3ee Lab Topic page. From there, you can click on the topic you’d like to view.

Clicking on a topic will expand to the actual story. The script parses the rss and displays the title, date, story, and any media attachments. Then it lists the categories that we created in the wordpress blog.

Another great addition is: it works across all browsers.

The part we like.

We enjoying using WordPress to edit and create new content, so why not use it? The clean UI, easy to insert media elements (not to mention web space to upload images), and it has code tags! We’ve also used this type of setup for a few clients as well: where they had a WordPress blog and wanted their posts to appear on their own website.

While we don’t show the comments directly on the site (you have to go out to the wordpress blog), we think this system is in a good place right now. We’d also like to extend this system to others as well, so feel free to contact us for more information on our WordPress To Website plugin!

Technical specifications:

php and Javascript is all that is used. If your site uses asp or Cold Fusion, we offer those flavors too!

Case Study: TCI Redesign Service

Ryan Sadwick — Tue, 29 Dec 2009 22:39:18 +0000

A new client approached us and told us they were very unhappy with their current site.

Going deeper into our conversation, the owner had been updating their individual pages inside an old version of Dreamweaver.

Eek.

The old site

This wasn’t going to be one of those easy, quick, and dreamy redesigns by simply editing a css file. While the site was designed somewhere in the year 2007, it reminded our development staff of sites we used to create in the late 90s:

No css, if there was, it was in-line, which elements were named: ‘style10, style34′

Some of the images were SWFs Flash files! Why? We still don’t know.

Half of the text was text, the other half were images with no alt tags. (Not search friendly at all)

Every time the owner wanted to add a new product: open dreamweaver… yikes?

The list goes on but we’re not listing these flaws to embarrass the original developer, it was developed by AT&T. I was expecting more from the amount the client said he had paid: we had to list these flaws for ourselves to see what we could keep or write from scratch.

Our redesign

We wanted the owner to really give us input on what he wanted his site to look like. We wanted the owner and the entire company to be happy about their website. A site they want to mention, a site they want to spend some money on advertising, a site that represented their company.

No more using Dreamweaver to update content: A nice admin client form that uses php and mysql to edit ALL content.

External CSS files we can change on the fly.

Often times, they come out with a new product. We developed an easy way to insert and modify their product lines.

Components that do their job and only their job. We don’t have to update 400 files to edit a line of text.

The feeling of doing something right and getting positive feedback

Positive feed from the client is always great. Sure, our client had a few changes, but were very minor and only took seconds to minutes to complete.

Our redesign services are popular. You can see why, we really enjoy the work we develop. We really want others to see what we can do, especially if they’re unhappy with their site.

Check out their new, redesigned site at http://trademarkcosmetics.com

Sunday-based Calendars

Ryan Sadwick — Tue, 08 Dec 2009 18:29:24 +0000

We’re currently getting ready to release a new Sunday-based calendar application for St. James House of Prayer.

The application has the ability to switch between different views from a Sunday-based to a full blown calendar. The events can be stored in a back-end, which can either be from a mySQL database, xml, or json datasource.

Here’s a sneak peak of what the application looks like in Sunday-based mode:

Flash Version

The application’s code base has been ported over to an Flash Actionscript 3 MVC application. Here is a preview of an early version:

We hooked in some tweening as well when the calendar is created and a pop-up that appears when you click on a day.

Here’s a small preview of the mvc triad using a custom, lightweght mvc framework:

private function completeHandler(event:Event):void {


			var model:IModel = new Model(xmlLoader.getXML());

			var controller:IChangeHandler = new Controller(model);
			//Composite view

			var view:CompositeView = new VideoView(model, controller);

			view.x = 100;

			view.y = 50;

			addChild(view);

//Register root view to recieve not from the model model.addEventListener(Event.CHANGE, view.update); }