Waypoint

Vinereader is an innovative newsreader application that creatively displays today's latest news in any subject. I built the application using the Adobe Flex development framework, and it served as a useful focus of mine as I was learning the technology over the past several months.

Given its robustness and seamless cross-platform capabilities, Flex has proven to be well suited for developing a rich internet application such as Vinereader, especially considering the dynamic and data-driven nature of the user interface.

The data presented in Vinereader is obtained from Newsvine, which is an exciting source of news with a mixture of community-driven content and news wire stories. Newsvine makes its structured news data available through RSS feeds available to the public, and Vinereader consumes this data strictly in a non-commercial manner.

As of today, Vinereader is available for anyone to use by clicking this Vinereader link. I hope you find it as enjoyable as I do to see the interesting stories that appear on the screen throughout the day.

There always has to be a first entry to a blog, and this is it for me. This blog was created because I wanted to document my journey up the learning curve of Adobe Flex technology. I already have a solid foundational understanding of Flash and other web technologies, but I'm eager to upgrade my skills to the amazingly robust Flex platform.

However, just focusing on Flex would be too narrow of a subject, so this blog is meant to record a broader journey that includes all things related to building engaging media experiences. Also, there will be interesting sidetracks noted along the way, but I'm expecting many of these to grow out of their initial characterization with the hindsight afforded by the passing of time.