Posts Tagged work
Who Says the Crowd Has to Be Right?
Posted by SimianLogic in blog on 11/10/2008
(Image lost in the Great Update of 2009)
When I’m not making games, I’m still cranking away on my day job–Piqqem. Eric Schonfeld did a review of the site on TechCrunch last Friday, so I thought I’d respond with my own two cents on the company. Clearly I’m a little biased since I work there (and wouldn’t be if I thought it was going to fail), and it certainly doesn’t hurt that I know where the site is headed. I should also point out, though, that these are my own thoughts on the site and not the “company line” (assuming we had one). Read the rest of this entry »
Microsites as Ad Filters: Meet Stockmoose 2.0
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 07/25/2008
(Image lost in the Great Update of 2009)
When I originally tossed the Stockmoose up a couple of months ago, it was mostly a prototype–one that had taken a single evening to produce, and one that was based on a single request to my artist girlfriend: “Can you draw me a moose with a tie?” Well, now it’s finally back with a new coat of paint, some basic anti-gaming measures, and a few other things to spice it up. The “borrowed” Yahoo stock charts have been replaced with our own proprietary charts, and each stock now has a sort of miniature info card so the choice isn’t based solely on name-recognition. We also created a list of 25 Silicon Valley stocks that most people around here have probably heard of–just to make it a little more engaging. Some of the early results are actually a little surprising. In our SV25, TiVo is actually pretty close to the bottom while Netflix is near the top. Based on what I know of the two, I would’ve actually assumed this to be the opposite of what would happen.
Meet the StockMoose
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 05/06/2008
(Image lost in the Great Update of 2009)
Another day, another kooky web idea. This time, it’s the Stock Moose. We’ve had a lot of debate at work on how to gather data, how to present that data, and how to make that collection/presentation process engaging enough that someone might actually enjoy doing it just for the sake of doing it (rather than tying it to some future promise of “Oh, we’ll give you an edge on the trading room floor”). Back when the college football season was in full swing, Yahoo! introduced what they called the Team Ranker. The concept is incredibly simple: pick two teams out of a hat and display them both (with perhaps a few bits of useful info such as a win-loss record or… a stock chart). The user simply has to click on the one they think is better. Period.
Whichever team (or in this case, stock) has the best win percent is rated as #1, and the rest are sorted accordingly. The system was far too simple to game, at least for football. What this usually meant is that earlier in the day (when the East Coast is awake and voting) highly ranked teams in the SEC and other eastern conferences dominated the rankings. When it got later in the afternoon, teams with East Coast fan bases slipped in the rankings while PAC-10 teams rose into the top spots. This is unavoidable for something like football, where fans are fiercely loyal to their own teams over all others–but is the same true for stocks?
Would users on the East coast sway the list towards East-coast stalwarts like Coke and Home Depot while the West coast might favor silicon valley darlings over all others? It’s hard to say–especially considering that I limited the field to the Nasdaq 100, which is primarily dominated by tech stocks. Read the rest of this entry »
To Roth or not to Roth?
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/13/2007
Even though there’s only two of us here at work (well, actually our first of two interns started yesterday… but they only work 20 hours a week), our acting CEO has asked if we want him to set up a 401k. I’d already gotten the ball rolling on a Roth IRA over at Zecco (paperwork filed at least), so unless he implements some sort of match program I guess I’ll just stick with that. In the meantime, I thought I’d give my first impressions of Zecco. Read the rest of this entry »
Piqqem in FlexApps on flickr
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/10/2007
A little while ago at work, we switched veins from “Totally Super Secret” to “Shhh, don’t tell too many people, but we’ll give out a few accounts.” The bosses didn’t want any press releases or newspaper articles just yet, but my co-worker and I spent a couple of days seeing if there were any slightly-stealthy ways to get some word out. I had stumbled across Ted Patrick’s FlexApps component a couple of months ago, so this seemed like a perfect excuse to test it out. There hadn’t been any new posts since April, so there was a chance that the group (even though it’s only run by one person) was defunct–but that didn’t deter me. I’d sort of forgotten all about it until this morning my boss sent us a link asking who’d submitted them (in a “good job” sort of way).
Compiling a Stock Flex Component.
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 12/09/2007
I work a lot with MXML, but even I still think there’s a little bit of chicanery going on when it comes to getting it to play nice with the other kids. Due to all the various problems that normal TextFields have with image support (via htmlText), at work I decided to replace the stock Rich Text Editor with a custom-built version that uses an estended TextArea instead of the stock TextArea. Because the extended TextArea is literally an extension of TextArea, I hoped I’d be able to just grab the source for the RTE, copy it into my source tree, fix the package, and swap out any references for the mx:TextArea with my own. So that’s what I did… only for some reason I decided to test this as a standalone instead of trying to immediately integrate it with our other code. The new RTE file compiled with no complaints, but whenever I ran it I wold get a Run Time Error (the OTHER RTE): Read the rest of this entry »
ToggleButtonBar fix
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 11/07/2007
I’m working on adding Header controls to my version of the Flex Rich Text Editor, and I noticed that the ToggleButtonBar doesn’t… exactly… work. I dug into the source and saw why. When using the “ToggleOnClick” property, the TBB does some funny stuff that it’s parent, the regular ButtonBar, doesn’t really care about. While it’s possible to set the TBB’s selectedIndex to -1, this doesn’t actually get transmitted to the parent ButtonBar. This means that, while the TBB deselects the item properly, the parent BB still think you have the same thing selected. Which means you can’t click on it again until you select something else and then come back to it. Read the rest of this entry »
Adobe RIA Dev Camp
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 11/07/2007
On Monday, I headed up to San Fran for one of Adobe’s little community events: an “Adobe Rich Internet Application Developer’s Camp.” I have to say, I really liked their corporate digs. Besides the 2-man behemoth of a company I’m working at now, I’ve worked at Electronic Arts and been to several events hosted by Apple/Google/Yahoo (to name a few). I could probably fill an entire post on the differences (perceived by me anyway) between the corporate cultures of the various mega-corporations, but I’ll keep it to a minimum by saying I liked Adobe’s HQ a lot better than any of the others I’ve been to. And free beer didn’t hurt, either. Read the rest of this entry »
YUI Not-Tabs
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/30/2007
Unfortunately, the Flex RTE has been back-burnered for a bit while I work on more pressing things at work. I’m currently using YUI’s tabs for something, but don’t really like them… So I’ve been tinkering around with an alternate tab-like interface. The concept is somewhere in between tabs and an accordion structure. Basically, we’ve got lots of text boxes. Rather than make our users choose which one they want to display, I want all of them to start out in a blog-like “preview” mode. Clicking “more” would expand that one box while shrinking the others. Clicking “back” (or an icon) would take you back to the multiple-pane view. I guess this is more of a tree-like data structure than true tabs or accordians. Read the rest of this entry »
Flex RTE Part 2: Faking mouse:hover
Posted by SimianLogic in Uncategorized on 10/22/2007
Before getting into the meat of my post, I suppose it’s all right to now mention that I’m working at a site called Piqqem. As of last week we’re no longer officially in “stealth,” but we’re not quite ready to go into full-on publicity-seeking mode yet, either. The RTE code I’ve been working on is for our “Piqqem Notes,” a wiki like section for all of the stocks we cover.
See also: Flex RTE Part 1: Link Buttons
I’ve actually skipped an installment on converting real HTML to what flash considers HTML and converting the gobbledy-gook that flash considers “HTML” into real-world-usable HTML. This installment, though, (mostly) fixes one of the more annoying features of the Flex Rich Text Editor control. The new code hasn’t yet been integrated into my code from Part 1, just in case someone wants to see the “simple” example.
The Flex CSS support actually covers a:hover, but there’s no way to use CSS with an editable TextField, which means the RichTextEditor control doesn’t inherently support mouse hover states. The only indicator you get that you’re mousing over a link is a hand cursor–but there’s no built-in way to see where that link points to. Read the rest of this entry »