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Announcing the Australian Flex Developer Derby winners


Adobe Flex

Adobe

 

Created:
23 October 2006

Adobe and Builder AU recently teamed up to create the Australian Flex Developer Derby, which was based on the original Flex Developer Derby contest. They received many engaging and innovative applications. In this contest, developers used Adobe Flex 2 to build rich Internet applications with Adobe Flex Builder 2, the Flex framework, and Flex Data Services. Thanks to those who submitted their applications and showed us what is possible.

If you are new to Flex, read Flex 2: Enabling the Next Generation of Rich Internet Applications or visit the Flex 2 product page for more information.

The judging panel contained key contributors to the developer community (non-Adobe participants). Using a points system, the panel compared each submission on the following criteria:

  • Originality
  • Ease of use
  • Design
  • Use of Flex features

Read more about the winners for each category and check out the winning Australian Flex applications below.

Product configurators/self-service guided applications

Applications in this category allow configuration or filtering of a service or product, changing the visual presentation and associated data to guide the user to a more informed decision.

Winner: Harald Krefting, Byron Bay Accommodation Finder

Haral Krefting created the Byron Bay Accommodation Finder (see Figure 1) as a student project for the Bachelor of Multimedia Arts programm at SAE Byron Bay. The project had to follow special guidelines (PDF, 20KB).

Byron Bay Accommodation Finder application

Figure 1. Byron Bay Accommodation Finder application

Runner-up for this category:

Wayne McFetridge, My Tasting Notes Wine Tracker

Components and gadgets

Applications in this category use components or user interface gadgets in an intuitive and appropriate way to increase usability of DHTML or standard web applications.

Winner: Hilary Bridel, Flex 2 Spell Checker

Hilary Bridel created the Flex 2 Spell Checker component (see Figure 2) using the Google spell checker.

Flex 2 Spell Checker component

Figure 2. Flex 2 Spell Checker component

Runner-up for this category:

Bill Lane, Image Museum: Editor Demo

Data dashboards

Applications in this category provide a live, visual window into business processes or snapshots of business intelligence that drive insight in a variety of configurations, potentially from multiple applications or databases. Ease of use and the ability to save or print views is also paramount because the target is usually a business user who has specific reporting milestones.

Winner: Ben Robinson, CF Monitor

Ben Robinson created a real-time monitoring system you can use to monitor ColdFusion servers—with averages—shown through graphs, amount of bytes in/out, requests in queue and running, database hits, and page hits (see Figure 3).

CFMonitor application

Figure 3. CFMonitor application

Runner-up for this category:

Marc Castles, Flex File Manager

Communication/collaboration applications

Applications in this category allow two or more users to work together in real time and in context to achieve a specific objective. Where users have to communicate, the application entries are required to have audio, video, and text.

Winner: MobiMarketing, goFree SMS

With goFree SMS, you can send SMS to your friends through an easy-to-use interface and contact list (see Figure 4). Send your messages internationally, as long as your friends are in an ad-sponsored region. The application uses a gateway.

goFree SMS application

Figure 4. goFree SMS application

Runner-up for this category:

Tim Stewart, Trak Jam 101 Cybermixer

Just freakin' cool (a.k.a. wildcard)

Applications in this category don't fit into any of the other categories.

Winner: Nathan Vale, AT2 Booking System

This demo from Nathan Vale shows how Flex 2 can be used to deploy rich user experiences that extend beyond the discontinuous, page-to-page experience of HTML web applications (see Figure 5). Implementing an "all on one page" interface, along with clever use of animation, the AT2 Booking System application moves seamlessly from one state to another, making for a continuous user experience that engages the user from begin to end.

The AT2 Booking System application

Figure 5. AT2 Booking System application

Runner-up for this category:

Hilary Bridel, Australian Weather Observations

Overall winner

The lucky winner of the LG Plasma (overall winner) is Nathan Vale, AT2 Booking System.

We're really excited to see all of the examples that developers are building with Flex 2. To submit your own application for consideration in the Showcase Gallery, e-mail ria@adobe.com with the following information:

Name:
Personal URL:
Application description:
Application demo URL:
View source URL:

Please note: At this time, we cannot host developers' application demos on our servers. Please publish your compiled applications on your own site and provide us with the URLs. You are not required to provide the source of your application; however, if you wish to help the community by letting them know what you did to create the application, enable the "View Source" menu item when compiling your Flex 2 application, and publish the view source output to your server.

About the author

This content was authored by Adobe Systems, Inc.