WidgetCircles™ PersonalMediaBook™

When WidgetCircles™ approached me to develop their PersonalMediaBook™ (PMB) software I was immediately interested. I hadn’t before seen a product quite like what they were proposing. In addition to creating something that didn’t already have a presence in the market place, the project promised to be significant in scope requiring the full breadth of my skill set.

Not only did WidgetCircles™ want the product developed in Adobe® AIR™ but it would also require a database backend. This was exactly the kind of project I was looking for when it came along. I was able to use my entire skill set from my Flex/AIR experience as well as my experience developing client/server applications.

The WidgetCircles™ PersonalMediaBook™ is in a nutshell a virtual scrapbook. PMB users can upload photos and videos into a personal book along with text entries. The software appears as a book on the desktop and opens to reveal pages just as a real book. The user can add and remove pages at will in different sections and adding content is accomplished via drag and drop. There is also an area with sticky notes allowing readers of the book to leave short notes to the author. Pages in the book are flipped revealing the contents that have been added by the author. The flipbook component itself wasn’t developed by Cafe Silencio but rather was developed by Ruben Swieringa.

Cafe Silencio was responsible for developing the application using the Adobe® AIR™ platform and designing a system that would implement the features WidgetCircles™ wanted in order to realize their vision. Cafe Silencio designed the database schema as well as the middle tier in order to ensure the system not only functioned as designed but was scalable and secure.

One of the more interesting features of the PMB is that video files can be dropped onto the video pages and the videos are uploaded to the server and encoded into Adobe® Flash flv format so they can then be viewed in the book using the Flash video APIs. One of the most challenging aspects of the project was the coordination of the video uploading and encoding. Crafting a server side script that could accommodate the various video codecs and successfully encode them into the Flash flv format wasn’t completely straight forward but the end result makes for a valuable user experience for the end user. The user doesn’t have to know anything about video codecs or conversion he/she simply needs to drop a video file onto the one of the video pages in the book and everything else happens automagically.

The interesting challenges that this project presented made it a genuine pleasure to work on.