The purpose of this game is to teach secondary students the relation of plate tectonics to land formations and natural disasters; the relation of weather to erosion, sedimentation and geological stratification; and the relation of plate tectonics and erosion to stratification, uplift and depression of rock layers. The goals of this proof of concept video game are:

• Provide opportunities for high school students to learn about geology and biology in a realistic context.
• Create awareness of the educational value of simulations.
• Encourage teachers to use simulations as an educational tool.

The video game is programmed using Adobe Flash and leverages the use of As3isolib. As3isolib (v1.0) is an open-source ActionScript 3.0 Isometric Library developed to assist in creating isometrically projected content (such as games and graphics) targeted for the Flash player platform. As3isolib includes utilities, primitives and views.

The National Institute of Education, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore (NIE) is a national teacher training institute in Singapore which is an integral part of the Singapore educational service. The Singapore education system has been referred to as being one of the most successful educational systems in the world. This is, in part, due to the sound educational policies and research in the shaping of curriculum and management practices for schools. The NIE’s mission is “To Excel in Teacher Education and Educational Research.”

Anden Solutions is dedicated to delivering custom-made, high quality, and affordable system solutions. The company specializes in designing and developing Rich Internet Applications, simulations, and educational video games. Anden Solutions’ headquarters are located in Florence, KY, with an additional development center in Cordoba, Argentina.

American Traffic Solutions, Inc. (ATS) provides innovative and superior road safety camera and automated toll collections programs focused on their clients’ safety, mobility and enforcement needs. Their mission is to deliver the most effective technology and services that reduce operating costs or generate revenue to pay for its use.

Anden Solutions is dedicated to delivering custom-made, high quality, and affordable system solutions. The company specializes in designing and developing Rich Internet Applications, simulations, and educational video games. Anden Solutions’ headquarters are located in Florence, KY, with an additional development center in Cordoba, Argentina.

In order to use this library you must first download it from the official site: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/squiggly/. The Squiggly package includes several flash libraries (swc), some dictionary files, and a few examples of the libraries integration using Flex, AIR, and actionscripts.

This post will guide you through the creation of a small Spark project that will use the  AdobeSpellingUIEx.swc file to enable spell checking on a text area component.  You should use the AdobeSpellingUI.swc library if you need to implement Squiggly for ‘mx’ components.

1. Let’s start by opening Flash Builder and creating a new Flex Project named FlashSpellCheck.
2. Add a TextArea to the main application with id=”txtArea”.

3. Copy the AdobeSpellingUIEx.swf file from the SquigglySDK\libs folder you just downloaded into your project “libs” folder.
4. Copy the dictionary files to your project. By default the dictionary files go to the root of the project. For bigger projects it’s advisable to place them somewhere else. In this case we’ll use an “assets” folder. You will need to copy the content from the SquigglySDK\src folder from the unzipped package. There should be a file called AdobeSpellingConfig.xml and a folder called dictionaries.
5. Tip 1: Squiggly looks for the dictionary config file inside your project root. Since we placed that file inside the “assets” folder, we need to let the library know about this new location by calling the spellingConfigUrl method on the CreationComplete event of the application:
   SpellUI.spellingConfigUrl = "assets/AdobeSpellingConfig.xml";
6. Tip 2: The AdobeSpellingConfig.xml also looks for the rules and dictionary files to be inside your root/dictionaries folder. Since we moved everything inside the assets package you will also need to edit this file and update the paths for the ruleFile and the dictionaryFile.

7. Tip 3: By default web servers won’t allow flash to load the ruleFile and dictionaryFiles that have extensions “aff” and “dic” respectively. In order to work around this issue without reconfiguring your server you can rename those two files and give them an “xml” extension. Remember to update the AdobeSpellingConfig.xml accordingly. In our case this file ends up looking like this:
   <LanguageResource language="English" languageCode="en_US" ruleFile="assets/dictionaries/en_US/en_US_aff.xml" dictionaryFile="assets/dictionaries/en_US/en_US_dic.xml"/>
8. Our last step consist on telling the SpellUI class which visual components will implement the spell-checking, in this case the TextArea. We also do this on the CreationComplete event:
   SpellUI.enableSpelling(txtArea, "en_US");

You can download the source code from here.  And this is the demo file we just created. Feel free to make some typos:

American Traffic Solutions, Inc. (ATS) provides innovative and superior road safety camera and automated toll collections programs focused on their clients’ safety, mobility and enforcement needs. Their mission is to deliver the most effective technology and services that reduce operating costs or generate revenue to pay for its use.

Anden Solutions is dedicated to delivering custom-made, high quality, and affordable system solutions. The company specializes in designing and developing Rich Internet Applications, simulations, and educational video games. Anden Solutions’ headquarters are located in Florence, KY, with an additional development center in Cordoba, Argentina.

Minus-10 Software LLC is dedicated to producing the most efficient, effective and evolutionary software to support debtors and their professionals throughout the reorganization effort. Founded by individuals who have worked in the industry for nearly 20 years and have produced some of the most innovative software in the industry, Minus-10 is uniquely positioned to produce the next generation of support software. Characterized by a focus on productivity and shared resources that makes the most efficient use of professionals, both within and outside the debtor, this next generation software will further advance the art of reorganization.

Anden Solutions is dedicated to delivering custom-made, high quality, and affordable system solutions. The company specializes in designing and developing Rich Internet Applications, simulations, and educational video games. Anden Solutions’ headquarters are located in Florence, KY, with an additional development center in Cordoba, Argentina.

This article, initiated at Midnight Coder’s request, is a short tutorial about Remote Shared Objects (RSOs) and how to use them from either the client or server side. It guides users in the development of a small application based on a simple word game that will access and modify RSOs using from client-side (ActionScript) and server-side (C#) code using the WebORB Integration Server to marshal the communications between client and server.

More information of this tutorial, as well as an example of the live application and access to the source code can be found here: http://www.andensolutions.com/index.php/blogs/add-a-word-game/.

Midnight Coders, Inc is a leading provider of integration technology that enables universal client-server connectivity for desktop, browser and mobile clients. Developers from around the world use their technology to easily expose services, data and media located in private data centers or the Cloud. Their technology enables businesses to deploy their rich applications to market faster with greater business success. They are the creators of WebORB.

This application can be easily customized and integrated into any website so you can design graphics for print materials such as postcards, labels, t-shirts, etc. This application can also interact with online carts such as Volusion.

In addition to the web interface, Anden Solutions has also developed a back-end application that lets administrators upload/change backgrounds, fonts, and/or clip art. Using this back-end tool the administrator can also create templates for new products on the fly.

You can interact with a limited version of this application here.

An RSO is an object that lives on the server. It resides in the scope of a messaging application clients connect to. More than one client can connect to an RSO and all of them will access to the data in the RSO. We used WebORB for managing the RSO and providing access to the RSO for various clients.

We came up with a small online version of the “Add a word” game that uses RSOs to build a sentence as well as manage user turns. The object of this game is to add a word to a sentence, one user at a time, and eventually come up with a very long sentence (that still makes sense).
Consider the following example:

• Two connected users begin a game of “Add a word”.
• The application assigns turns to each of the connected users.
• User 1 starts the game by typing “My”. Once User 1 submits a word, it is the next user’s turn. The application automatically disables the submit button for the first user, and enables it for the next user.
• User 2 types “house” and clicks Submit, passing control back to User 1
• User 1 types “is”, and so on.
• During the game, the RSO keeps track of the content of the sentence. At this point it will read “My house is”.

You should note that there’s no need for a server-side code to create this simple application, especially if you just want to add words to a sentence stored in the RSO. We just added a bit of complexity to the programming to showcase that either the clients (ActionScripts) and/or the server (.NET C#) can access and modify the RSO.
This simple example demonstrates how to use Remote Shared Objects and WebORB together.

You can download the code (C# and ActionScripts) from here.

Florence, KY –

NeedsFirst.com was created to bring awareness to, and build community around, the needs of disadvantaged people throughout the world. Best Products Available believes that by providing for basic needs first, you will help someone experience the power of God’s generous and providing love allowing them to dream again and evaluate their spiritual condition.
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Anden Solutions is dedicated to delivering custom-made, high quality, and affordable system solutions. They specialize in designing Rich Internet Applications, simulations, and educational video games. The company’s headquarters are located in Florence, KY, with an additional development center in Cordoba, Argentina.