after a wonderful redesign, some hours of work (hell yeah, work), some sweat and less party, we finally done it. http://www.meinberlin.de is online. great, lovely, powerful and not seen before.The mixture: some google maps, a great team of enthusastic coders, innovative projectmanagers and a quintessence of design. So the fusion of knowlegde between Urban Media and Lovely Systems created the magazine and map news community portal meinberlin.de - erforsche deine Nachbarschaft. we proudly present it to the crowd.

For the technique guys a overview: python code within zope/zodb, jquery and native JS, mysql databases, and a huge package of ajax bases services.

Clemens Riedl is ceo of the tagesspiegel which is one of Berlin’s major newspapers. About one year ago, Clemens and Thomas Zydek from the Tagesspiegel teamed up with Lovely to start thinking about aspects of web2.0 in the newspaper industry and how the future of the news market might look like. Clemens is not only a great thinker he also had the guts to go for one of the ideas. Thats great stuff and i have to say that not so many companies have the guts to do what Clemens did. I think the result is great and i am very happy to announce the first release of beta.meinberlin.de.

Together with Soenke Sprink, Andreas Pflug and Chrstoph Eich from the tagesspiegel team, our boys Armin Wolf and Stefan Holek done a great job. The portal is still in very early beta, you need firefox to get everything done and it needs improvement on every corner but i love it already. I think it is one of the best bits of lovelyness so far.

So whats the thing with meinBerlin?
meinBerlin is the local bazaar for berlin where people meet and generate gossip and news of the day. The thesis is that ultra local gossip is more important to you than big news are, because it touches your local environment. Of course, ultra local gossip is not equal to localized news generated by journalists and editors. So the question is how to generate gossip… well, that is what meinBerlin is here for.
Since the Lovely team is not living in Berlin we located ourselves on the airport where we touch down when traveling to Berlin. We are still trying to arrange ourselves into the shape of a hart…. if you sign up and you are not located somewhere in Berlin, you might want to help us to get the heart done in airport tempelhof.

Check it out and let us know how you doing. We will do the best to make the next release of meinBerlin better and smarter.

I had hard troubles to actualy make it run in all browsers for communicating between Flash and Javascript. Some browsers allways hat the trouble that the Flash var was not set because they where not able to connect correctly to the flash object via the DOM.

I found out, that you need to take care, that your object tag which embeds the Flash file should have an ID, but no NAME attribute. But your EMBED tag should have a NAME, but no ID. After that it worked just fine in Windows IE/Firefox and Mac Safari/Firefox

code example:

<sc ript language="JavaScript">
<!–

function startBrowsing(){
// tells flash to start with browsing
if(window.fuploader) window.document["fuploader"].SetVariable("startBrowse", "go");
if(document.fuploader) document.fuploader.SetVariable("startBrowse", "go");
}
//–>
</scr ipt>

<input type="button" value="browse" onclick="JavaScript:startBrowsing()" />
<br />

<object classid="clsid:d27cdb6e-ae6d-11cf-96b8-444553540000" codebase="fpdownload.macromedia.com—swflash.cab <http://fpdownload.macromedia.com/pub/shockwave/cabs/flash/swflash.cab#version=8,0,0,0>" width="220" height="300" id="fuploader" align="middle">
<param name="allowScriptAccess" value="sameDomain" />
<param name="movie"
value="upload.swf <http://localhost:8080/@@/flash_resources/upload.swf>" />
<param name="quality" value="high" />
<param name="bgcolor" value="#f8f8f8" />
<param name="wmode" value="transparent" />
<param name="FlashVars"
value="target_path=uploadfile <http://localhost:8080/uploadfile>" />
<embed src="upload.swf <http://localhost:8080/@@/flash_resources/upload.swf>"
flashvars="target_path=uploadfile <http://localhost:8080/uploadfile>"
quality="high" bgcolor="#f8f8f8" width="220"
height="300" name="fuploader" align="middle"
allowscriptaccess="sameDomain"
type="application/x-shockwave-flash"
wmode="transparent"
pluginspage="www.macromedia.com—getflashplayer <http://www.macromedia.com/go/getflashplayer>" />
</object>