Porting Stockastica Application to AIR
Now that Stockastica is fully ready, I have been working on porting the Stockastica Flex application to AIR.
Porting any Flex application to AIR involves changing the <Application> tags to <WindowedApplication> and adding an XML file. It is painfully simple. I did spend some time adding features that are specific to a desktop application.
We also spent some time modifying the CSS properties to give it a customized look( though I am pretty sure I managed to ruin even the plain vanilla look ). It felt weird knowing that I was modifying the presentation layer of a desktop application using CSS. But it works flawlessly and I was really impressed, especially after I had gone through the harrowing experience of styling and skinning the Silverlight app. Using XAML resources is not as intuitive as using CSS.
Here is a screencast of Version 2.0 of the App I finally prepared after porting it to AIR. I am sorry about the large resolution. Will post another one on a lower resolution soon. Hope you like what you see. Please leave your comments below. I would love to hear any suggestions.
Buzzy
Stockastica Version 1.0
Things couldn’t have gotten better.
Almost an year back, Buzzy had developed this App Stockastica, a virtual stock market game using Visual Studio, retrieving live data from Nasdaq.com. It retrieved the Quotes of 20 companies, and displayed them wherein, users could buy and sell stocks using virtual bounty. At the end of the day, the person with the biggest net assets won $50 real money from the organizers! The UI was simplistic, and minimalistic. But then thats what you can do when you are on a self motivated project with a deadline of 4 days, and you have no idea whether the idea is feasible.
That was then. Thanks to Raghu, Technical Evangelist, Adobe Systems, Bangalore, who came to our college and held a 2-day workshop on Flex, we got a bit into Flex. And then, we decided, we would go for developing the App in Flex this year. A few months later Flex 3 was released, and we got a free copy of Flex 3 for students, and started out building the App in Flex 3.
And here it is- Version 1.0 of Stockastica.
[ The Screencast is made using Jing, which is a recent discovery, and which is awesum too!]
[ P.S. We ARE still working to better the Plain Vanilla look, getting more and more confused, every time we tweak it 
]
