Friday, March 28, 2008

Problems with High end phones

Source: Wikipedia
I switched from a low end nokia 1100 to a much advanced Nokia N72 recently.

Though N series comes power packed with a lot of features, typing SMS on it is a pain.

Why is it that all these high end phones make life difficult for users?? Another bizzare effect of this is that Application developers who want to develop applications that will require a bit of typing.

Say for instance mobile versions of EQO,EBuddy, HeySan..
These clowns had made it so painfull to type for a long time on the mobile...

With the mobile phones market fetting more competitive,
I am sure that the company that makes it easy for one to type sms withiut hurting one's fingers will have an edge..

Not the one that targets to make science fictions come ttue with that little device..

Vengu!

Thursday, March 27, 2008

Flex Interview Questions

A few interview questions on flex,

1. Is it possible to make httpService Requests synchronous?
2. I need to load an image from flickr into my application. Do I need a crossdomain.xml file on flickr?
3. What is the difference between httpService and Data Service?
4. How do you generate random numbers within a given limit with actionscript?
5. Have you built any components with actionscript? If so explain how you did it?
6. How do you implement push on a flex applications?
7.I am going to add images into a tag. How will it resize itself?
8. What is a resource Manager??
9.What are the similarities between java and flex
10. What is the dynamic keyword used for?
11.How do you implement push with flex data services?
12. What are the methods called when a UI component is intialized?
13. How do you implement drag and drop on components that do not support ondrag and ondrop?
14.Can you write to the file system from flex?
15. What is a drag manager?
16 . HOw do you call javascript from Flex?
17. How do you use a repeater?
18. what are three ways to skin a component in flex?
19. How do you use css styles in flex?
20. What is the difference between sealed class and dynamic classes?
21.what is MVC and how do you relate it to flex apps?
22.what is state? what is the difference between states and ViewStack?
23.how does item renderer work? How do I add item renderer at runtime?
24.what keyword allows you to refer to private variables of a class?
25.how polymorphism works on actionscript?
26.how do you overload functions in actionscript?
27.what is dynamic keyword used for?
28.what are sealed classes ?
29 what are runtime shared libraries?
30.What is caringhorm ? how do you use it?Have you worked with Cairnghorn?
31.What keyword allows you to implement abstraction better?
32.What design patterns have you used? in Actionscript and java?

Try to get answers for these.
You can be me :-)

Friday, March 14, 2008

How meebo works? (My guess of how they might be doing it!!)

We all know how useful and good meebo is.

The web based instant messaging client is a big brand now on its own and has been growing exponentially after it received funding a few months back.

Just out of curiosity, I started digging into the possible ways that meebo might have been implemented.

After a few minutes of research I think I have a vague idea of the components involved.

1. At the heart of meebo's backend is the open source API called libgaim which is under the pidgin project now. So technically anything that pidgin can support will be supported by meebo too :-)

2. Wrappers that write to a socket. The libgaim api sends signals that can be registered to callbacks that handle the signals. I believe the signals are being written to a port.

3. Direct Web remoting / Flash based remoting. This is the layer that perfoms the task of the web based client getting the messages that are being written to the socket from the wrappers that listen to gaim signals.

4.A small UI layer with Ajax frameworks like dojo/scriptaculous that gives you that cool look and feel.

Off course there might be hundred of tweaks that meebo would have done , but this I see is the core engine

There you go. :-) If you can do this , you can have your own version of meebo for your company, office.

Thanks,
Venkat