After many hours of work I finally pushed the update for RunPee.com live last night. What’s significant is that the site is all done entirely* with Flex 4/Gumbo bits using Flash Builder beta-2. And let me say for the record that Flex4 rocks! Flex3 is dead to me. :)

[ In case you didn't already know: RunPee.com is a website that informs you of the best times to run and pee during a movie without missing anything vitally important or entertaining. It even tells you what happens while you're away. ]

The primary reason for the upgrade was to add support for multiple languages and regions. Now if you live in Germany you can see the movies listed as they are released in Germany and chose to read the Peetimes in German, or any other language available. Eventually I’ll activate support for all of the following languages: Arabic, Chinese, Czech, Danish, Dutch, English, Finnish, French, German, Greek, Hindi, Indonesian, Italian, Japanese, Korean, Norwegian, Polish, Portuguese, Russian, Spanish, Swedish. The translations are done automatically with Google Translate. I’m looking for multilingual individuals who can help edit the translations that Google does. Let me know if you’re interested.

The secondary reason for the upgrade was that I didn’t like the design at all and wanted to do something a little more Flashy. I was just learning Flex when I first created RunPee.com. In fact it was my first ever Flex/AMFPHP project. So the design and interaction was a bit limited. And the architecture was abysmal. Making changes to the old design was a major pain in the ass.

Now that I’m a little more experienced with what can be done with Flex I wanted to create something a little more visually appealing. And as time goes on I’ll add more fun interaction/animations. Because now I’m learning more and more about Flex 4 and how powerful it is to do amazing things. So keep an eye out. The site will be updated a few times a week leading up to the 360Flex conference, March 7-10, that I’m speaking at about building and working on a project like RunPee.com.

Best of all I’ll be ready to take this site mobile as soon as Slider is ready. I’m on the list to get access to the Slider beta-bits and plan to have the mobile version ready before Adobe has the Flash 10.1 update out. The future is looking bright.

*Actually, the site isn’t entirely Flex 4. I do have an Alert box in there and there isn’t a Spark Alert box yet. And the site admin is almost all MX code because it’s mostly DataGrids.