I finally found a little bit of time to try out Adobe Apollo. My first attempt was mearly just to get one Apollo application up and running, so I decided to do something simple. PhotoCam takes your webcam stream, allows you to take a ‘snapshot’ and save it off to the hard drive as a JPG. You can download the source or try the application out. Besure to have the Adobe Apollo Runtime pre-installed.
I must say, I really do like Apollo. I used the Flex Builder Extensions to author with, and it was just so easy to code and get working. I was expecting a few problems, being an Alpha product, but everything just worked! And if you’re a Flex developer, than you’re in luck; apart from the Apollo specific libraries, you’re basically coding a Flex Application!
Filed under: apollo, flex, web 2.0
Every so often you stumble across an idea which is really quite simple, but actually does some good in the world too (a WIN WIN). I’ve recently come across such a project, which is an extension of the popular captcha concept.
Most of us use captchas daily; simply put, it’s an image containing a smudged word in which you need to type and get it right before you can move forward. It’s used in blogging applications all the time (when you’re posting a comment for example) and is used to determine if the user is a human or a computer (computers struggle to decipher the word in the image correctly).
Anyway, reCaptcha is a project in which the captcha image is a word from a scanned book that the computer can’t recognise and therefore needs to be deciphered. Humans can do this, computers can’t. We’re deciphering things for the sake of security anyway, so why not put our deciphering skills to some use!
It’s an interesting read, and there’s more to it than you first think. One of the problems they had to overcome was, if the computer couldn’t read the word, how would the captcha system clarify if the user got the decipher right?
What’s even better is that it’s completely free! It’s one of the better captcha implementations I’ve seen too, as it allows for audio challenges. There’s a few platform specific implementations of it including a nice version in ColdFusion by Robin Hilliard.
technorati tags:recaptcha
Filed under: technology, web 2.0
