Archive for July, 2007

Grails and Ext Experiment: A GPS Track Viewer

Monday, July 30th, 2007

I have been experimenting with a web application framework called Grails for a while. It is a great way to get a new application up and running very quickly. While I don’t know much about Ruby, I suspect its productivity gains are similar to Ruby on Rails and follows the “convention over coding” paradigm.

I also own a GPS, which I use in my car and on my motorcycle. It came with an Windows application that lets you upload and download information such as waypoints (points of interest) and tracks.

I thought it would be an interesting experiment to combine Grails, GPS track data and Google Maps. I even threw in a great client side Javascript library called Ext, which has great looking UI controls and AJAX support.

I plan to post some articles on how I got Grails and Ext working together with AJAX and JSON formatted results from the Grails controllers.

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Posted in Grails, Groovy | 1 Comment »

Create Your Own Multimedia Tutorials

Sunday, July 8th, 2007

From time to time, I have run across web sites that include multimedia (both video and audio) tutorials that demonstrate how to use a feature of an application or to perform some task.

I often imagined creating similar tutorials or demonstrations for applications I’ve developed but didn’t want to spend hundreds of dollars for an application that would enable me to do so.

Recently I came across an application called Wink, which is free and available for Linux and Microsoft Windows. With Wink, you can capture screen shots and mouse movement then add text boxes with an explanation and or record a narrative describing the actions in the tutorial. Wink is able to save your tutorial as a Flash file, a standalone EXE, a PDF file and other formats.


Since some people just will not read a manual, perhaps a set of short tutorials might just be the answer. Check it out.

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Posted in General | No Comments »