Posted on by

“A lifestreaming thing that lets you see it all in one place”

Skimmer. The next Adobe AIR app and the hard work of many individuals over the past 6 months. It has been amazing to see this application turn from design into reality. This is a summary of the technologies used and some of the lessons learned throughout the development of Skimmer:

Skimmer

Skimmer

The first decision was easy. Use an MVC framework, more specifically PureMVC. This application was estimated in the thousands and having a backbone was very important. We spent the extra time upfront developing a solid structure which ended up helping out immensely when it came to bug fix and adding new features. Creating new views became a snap when the data providers that accessed third party API’s were completed.

The second major decision was to use a SQLite database to store content locally. This allowed for fast filtering of data and pre-processing of information. It also greatly improved the load time of the application since we only needed to gather new information.

Thirdly, we decided to use image caching for all of the commonly used images to improve load times. This increased the application start up and allows for fluid transitions between images in slide shows. By extending a bulk loader class Skimmer is able to first check the local cache before making any requests to the internet for images.

One of the major challenge was working with the third party API’s. The API’s for Flickr, YouTube, Twitter, TwitPic, Facebook and Blogger had varying levels of documentation and support. Flickr had the most feature rich API while Facebook had the most difficult API to work with. Many of them had third party AS3 libraries to use for interfacing with the service that we used as a base.

Another challenge was in skinning the flex components. The application was not designed to look like an AIR application, which is a good thing :) This, however, did create some interesting problems along the way. We used a combination of CSS, class inheritance, overrode drawing methods, and even created some custom flex components.

You can download skimmer here:
http://www.fallon.com/skimmer

A shout out to everyone that made this happen:
AL KELLY, BRENDA FOGG, CHRIS WIGGINS, DAVID SCHWEN. EXTENDED TEAM: ANDY GUGEL, SIERRA BRAVO, ANDREW WATSON, BEN DOLMAR, BLAGVOST DACHEV, CLAYTON SMITH, JON REXEISEN, KARSTEN LUNDQUIST, KONR NESS, KRIS SZAFRANSKI, MARK SEEMANN, MANISH SHRESTHA, MATT TONAK, MICHAEL WOODS, MINH VU, ROBB THOMAS, THOMAS O’NEILL.

Feel free to post any comments or questions you have about Skimmer.

http://mashable.com/2009/03/24/skimmer/

18 thoughts on “Skimmer”

  4. I’m looking forward to trying it. I was able to download and install it but each time I try to register I get “You have entered an invalid username or password, please try again”

  6. Pingback: Sambal Belachan 2.0 » What’s up?

  9. I am in Pakistan and the download link isn’t working….Any idea when this DNS integration will be completed or if an alternate download link can be provided, that’d be great

  10. The DNS issues have been resolved and we offloaded the install file onto another server to handle the volume of downloads. Hopefully this will resolve all issues.

    Cheers,
    Chris

  11. Pingback: Look what we helped Fallon build | Inside the Nerdery
  12. Pingback: Sierra Bravo & Fallon Team Up to Produce “Skimmer” | Kurt Schmidt

  13. How can this be a branding campaign by Fallon if they had other people concept and create it? It seems like none of it was done inside their offices. Plus I got tons of errors when I tried downloading it yesterday.

  14. The app was launched along with a completely new website and logo for Fallon. Chris Wiggins and Brenda Fogg both played an integral part in the creation of this application. We communicated with them on a daily basis. The whole concept and direction of the application came from them.

    Due to the size and complexity of this application there are bound to be bugs. We have been working very hard this week to resolve bugs and plan to release an update (1.1.70) by the end of this week. Once we have resolved all of the items on our plate we hope to open up an area for users to report bugs.

  15. It’s missing a must-have for me: The ability to be logged in to multiple accounts on one service at the same time. I manage multiple profiles on Twitter and Facebook for my organization so I need easy access to all of them. Digsby handles this brilliantly.

  16. I tried to install skimmer but i get this mysterious error: “This application cannot be installed because this installer has been mis-configured. Please contact the application author for assistance.” Any ideas??

  17. My sister was getting the same error and it was because she did not have Administrative privileges on the computer she was using. After logging in with an Administrative account the application installed correctly on the machine. After the first install any of the computer users can use the application but the first install, and subsequent updates, all require admin privileges. This is a limitation of the current version of Adobe AIR. Hopefully they will add support for allowing installations for non-admin users in the future.

Comments are closed.