2008 October

Archive for October, 2008

Xbox 360 Avatars

by Josh on Oct.24, 2008, under Gaming

Many Xbox gamers know of the upcoming “New Xbox Experience” (NXE) that’ll be hitting next month on the 19th. Among other new features included with this update, you’ll be able to create your very own ~~Mii’s~~ Avatars to represent yourself online.

It appears that some of these Avatars have begun to appear in the wild, and there’s a possibility that Microsoft may have something in the works social network-wise for these little guys. Each gamertag has a URL that can be used to load a PNG of your Avatar, which I’d imagine is for use on blogs, forum avatars, Twitter, etc. However, if you try visiting these URLs in your browser (except for IE) you’ll just receive a bunch of text, and won’t be able to view the Avatar image, unless you download and save the contents of the URL as a .png file.

I wanted to check out some of these Avatars, and since saving and loading each URL was a bit tedious, I decided to build a quick & dirty Flex app to load the various Avatar images. (Much faster, right?)

Here’s the app: http://blog.joshbuhler.com/flash/360avatars/

You can either select from a list of known Gamertags that already have Avatars, or enter in a Gamertag of your choice. Though, if the Gamertag doesn’t have an Avatar yet, the image won’t load.

(By the way, the skin for the app is the slick Undefined by Alberto Alcaraz, winner of ScaleNine’s Skin to Win Challenge.)

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StateComboBox Flex Component

by Josh on Oct.23, 2008, under Flex

Working on a recent project, I needed to collect mailing addresses, and to get the state info I decided use a ComboBox. I know I’ve done this before in the past, so I went looking for the code defining the list of states so I wouldn’t have to type it all up again, but after about five minutes I gave up and started looking online. After all, I’m sure someone has made one of these things before in the past, right?
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