Here’s the version with a black background and the same one with a light background.

With any project, there is always a feeling that the design can be improved, but given the time constraints, I left the design work with the intention on revisiting it in the future (!).

The next step was to mark up the basic html page with a simple gridded design and then use Bootstrap css to speed up the process of styling the page. To start with I used actual content, with a plan to replace these metrics and values with placeholders. The final aim was to make the page completely dynamic so that for example, I could swap the summary data for a player based on broad roles, eg goal keeper, defender, midfield or forward.

Once the content had been defined, I modified the css to mimic the original design. I kept the css within the html page initially, purely due to the convenience of editing it. This is the html5 version. Note that the charts in the page are still image placeholders. Again the plan is use d3.js to load in the match data and process it to provide dynamic charts for each player.

Another aspects of the design work was to rough out some ideas of the structure / navigation pages for getting to the player page (with pencil and paper). At the moment the work is purely to play around with the technology and try some experiments in visualisation, but it also balanced with the eventual need to refine the data into a understandable/presentable form. (All stuff for the parts bin)

That said, the next part is to spend some more time playing around with d3 and the data. The plan is to build on the heatmap, and track a player’s position through a game and be able to see how they move around the pitch during a game.

Still no word on the #MCFCAnalytics, though I assume the January transfer window is the one of the busiest time of the year for football analysts…

I did a quick scan of other data visualisations using the sample data. The Guardian Data Blog has a couple of interesting chalkboards and there appear to be a few blogs out that that I need to look into.

I also found the Opta developer project and signed up for that – apparently they are planning to make a different set of data available to developers this month, which sounds promising.

In the meantime, I pulled together some basic positioning data and had a play around with miso and Mike Bostock’s Data Driven Documents – d3.js as a way of learning how to use the technology. Here’s a first stab at a heatmap.

One of the areas that the MCFC Analytics project is interested in, is position specific metrics. With that in mind, I took a step back from the development work and put together a sample infographic design to use for player measurement from each game. It still very much work in progress at this point, and I imagine it will change significantly when I get my hands on the data to see what I can extract. One thing that springs to mind immediately is tracking players movements off the ball. This would be essential in calculating the distance a player travels during a match and also their speed.

Click the cropped image to see the full graphic.

One obvious extension piece would be to map out set pieces to show player’s positions at each event and provide an animated step through control to see how each event plays out.

Another idea is to build up the player profile through the season and track the player’s performance at home and away games.

Also remember to keep the existing copy of the SDK so that you can go back and run any existing projects with their corresponding SDK versions.

I’d already installed the library via nme (haxelib install actuate) and I was able to import the code in FlashDevelop, but couldn’t build the swf. After much searching, I found some info from Joshua Granick

First include the library in the NMML project file:

<haxelib name="actuate" />

Then in FlashDevelop, go to Project > Properties, pick the Compiler Options tab and expand Libraries. Add the new library (“actuate”) on its own line. Adding it to your project file is all you need to compile properly, but FlashDevelop still needs you to add it in your project settings in order to get code completion.

The command to transfer the .apk is:
adb install pathTo/yourPackageName.apk
After the .apk is installed for the first time you may get an error message when you try to install it again: Failure [INSTALL_FAILED_ALREADY_EXISTS].

The adb requires a flag to re-install the app:
adb install -r pathTo/yourPackageName.apk
Note that this keeps any existing app data.

To uninstall the app:
adb unistall yourPackageName.apk
More information can be found on the developer site (http://developer.android.com/guide/developing/tools/adb.html) and also via the command line adb help

Some of the Flash-based English language games I created a few years back are being used in the Hong Kong Special Administrative Region. I don’t really expect to be flooded with requests for work, but it nice to know that the resources still meet a need.

Hopefully they will bring in something like the 30, 000 US visitors that use them every month

I tried to modify the Eclipse launch Configuration as follows:

Open Window>Preferences>Run/Debug>Launching>Launch Configuration.

Check the “Filter checked Launch configuration types:”

Then scroll through the list to “XSL” and check this box too, but the issue remained whenever the XML file had the focus.

The solution I used was to change the launch configuration by opening Window>Preferences>Run/Debug>Launching, and then checking the “Always launch the previously launched application” box.

Configuring it to use the Android Developer Tools (ADT) plug-in was also very quick and easy. The developer guide is really clear and easy to follow – nice work!

I’ve run through the samples and got some Paint on the Canvas, but I miss Flash’s smooth vector shapes Next stop vector graphics…

But before that, I’ve installed the color theme, picked a nice dark theme (“inkpot”) and turned off the bold text.

As part of the initial system check the exe will allow you to install the necessary drivers (and you don’t actually need to install the sync app.)

Compared with some reports, it has been quite quick, with the whole process taking a little over two weeks, so perhaps things are speeding up at the test house.

There are another two currently being reviewed.  All three apps are compiled to run as AIR for QNX, were very easy to port from existing AS3 applications and fun to make. I can’t wait to get my hand on an actual Playbook. I’ve had to work around the gesture events for one of the apps, and plan to modify them all to suit the specifics of the Playbook development.

My first app: