Monthly Archives: June 2007

Recent BETA Items of Interest

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So, to delay my unavoidable participation in the initial “Flex/AIR/Flash” waterfall effect, I’ve waited till now to post anything about the massive new beta releases that have been available since last evening.

Flex Builder 3:
LOVE the new CSS design view. LOVE IT! I’m sure there are plenty more features of direct interest as well, but this is the one that really opens things up for me.

I initially came from a design background and gradually evolved into a developer as necessity demanded and curiosity gnawed. Having both design and development tools in the same IDE makes for a truly integrated experience. This is something those of us coming to Flex with a solid history of Flash development can really appreciate.

I’ve always found Flex Builder to be a bit too pricey to purchase for Fractured Vision Media. Until a few weeks ago, no clients had approached me concerning Flex specifically. With all of the new features in this version of Flex Builder, and the increased popularity of Flex over the past few months, it may become more difficult to avoid a purchase when Flex Builder 3 is finally released later this year.

Adobe Integrated Runtime (AIR):
Nice new additions since the Apollo alpha. Drag and drop, clipboard, PDF, auto-update, SQL DB, connections monitoring… all great stuff. Not much time to use it yet- documentation says SWF files which are part of an AIR app will not need to rely on crossdomain.xml files… my experience is quite different :(

Why can’t I grab stills from a rtmp stream??? Please fix this, Adobe!!! Fix it in the general Flash Player as well for regular SWFs. If I own a Flash Media Server stream, and I own the SWF file accessing it, there should be some way to allow me access to the BitmapData.draw() method!!!

Flash Player 9 Update 3:
Taps into the GPU? Dual processor support? Multiple fullscreen enhancements? Almost more excited about this that all the rest!

Apple Safari 3:
For Windows??? Weird…

Never much liked Safari on OSX- now people will be using it on other platforms too? What a nightmare this will be for debugging JavaScript…

Flash Media Encoder is Nice! *mostly*

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Just had a chance to test the Flash Media Encoder and was pretty impressed. We’ve been using Flash Media Server for our VOD materials but have gone to QuickTime for live events. The main problem with FMS with a live stream is that it will only broadcast using the Spark codec and not VP6. FME changes that by allowing a VP6-encoded stream to be bounced off of FMS and broadcast to client apps.

We tested a stream from FME capturing both a live camera feed and a DVD source and sending them out to FMS for reception by client machines This was only a test to see how well this solution would work in the situation of a live event. Like I mentioned previously, I was very impressed with the quality of result and have no reservations doing a live stream via Flash now. There are a few points-to-note picked up during the process which I will list here:

  • Will not work on Windows Vista :(
  • Seems to be very good at picking up various video and audio sources
  • Could use some advanced preset customization settings

Regarding my last point, there is a “presets.xml” file within the FME application directory that can be edited to allow for custom presets. The only drawback here is that you cannot perform custom mods on-the-fly as you must restart the app to pick up any XML changes.

A great beginning and I’m looking forward to version 1.x… or native support for VP6 in FMS3 so I can write my own capture app.

Messing Around with Twitter

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I’ve taken some time today to experiment with Twitter using the ActionScript 3.0 API that is available. It’s a very simple class library and, as such, pretty easy to build a widget around. One thing that has bothered me a bit is the seemingly lengthy amount of time the services take to update the API feed once a new status event has been submitted. Maybe things are just slow on their end being a Saturday- but having any sort amount of delay in the feed broadcast would effectively cripple a service which is supposed to be immediate and timely.

I’m unsure how useful the Twitter service will be… right now it’s more of a novelty and an excuse to have some fun with AS3. Although, there are some projects coming up which will involve the integration of social network components- so I’ve begun to research various services. I have to say, Twitter is the only one that seems remotely useful so far!