Tip for using SWFAddress and GoogleAnalytics together
March 4, 2007
Just a quick tip to save you a few minutes if you plan to use SWFAddress (as far as I know currently the best browser-back-button solution for flash) and GoogleAnalytics (for tracking) in a flash project:
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Flash Video Tip 3: Stopping a FLV from downloading
March 3, 2007
When you set the contentPath property of the FLVPlayback component in Flash 8 it immediately starts (progressively) downloading the flv. Normally this is the desired behaviour but sometimes you don’t want the flv to take up bandwidth because there are currently other loading processes. Some time ago I read an article at Flashcomguru on how to generate a thumbnail preview of a video and stop the download process. While this should work if you manually create your NetConnection/NetStream object, the technique described there (trying to load a non-existent flv) doesn’t seem to work with the FLVPlayback component.
Here’s another approach (code is just on frame 1 for this demo, should be put into a class though):
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Visit the permanent link to “Flash Video Tip 3: Stopping a FLV from downloading”.
Flash Video Tip 2: Syncing a FLV between two SWFs
February 28, 2007
Here’s the next flash video tip: It’s about how to synchronize a flv file between two separate swf files. First question is: Why would you want to do this? Honestly I can’t think of too many cases where you would do this but there’s one case where it can be appropriate (and coincidentally it has happened in one of our last projects ;):
Flipping book applications – you certainly know what I mean with flipping book applications (they seem to be quite popular with lots of companies): Online magazines where you can interactively turn pages by dragging the book corners to flip through the pages. Most of them consist of two separate swf files for the left and right page and it can be quite challenging to load / initialize / time things if you have much communication and interactivity going on between the two pages.
What options are there if you want to show a flv that runs synchronously on separate swfs (or in the special flipping book case: the left half of the flv runs on the left page and the right half on the right page)?
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Visit the permanent link to “Flash Video Tip 2: Syncing a FLV between two SWFs”.
Flash Video Tip 1: Calculating an optimal buffer size
February 27, 2007
Sorry for not posting much the last weeks/months… This article is the start of a few tips about flash video and deals with calculating the buffer size for a flv video.
If you want to display a flash video file you have primarily three options:
- Ignore the user’s bandwidth and just display the version you have encoded, use an estimated buffer size
- Display different versions of the same file (e.g. a low, medium or high version) depending on the user’s bandwidth, use an estimated buffer size or additionally calculate the optimal buffer size
- Display a reasonable encoded version and calculate an optimal buffer size depending on the user’s bandwidth
Visit the permanent link to “Flash Video Tip 1: Calculating an optimal buffer size”.
New WM Team website
December 5, 2006
The german Flash agency WM Team from Hannover have launched their brand new website on 1st December. One gets really impressed by the affinity for lovely small details on every single page. Make sure to watch the kick-ass intro where the guys from WM Team present their new claim »Showtime for your brand«. So do not skip the intro! ;)
Visit the permanent link to “New WM Team website”.
Scrybe – An awesome new Rich-Internet-Application
November 2, 2006
If you haven’t already read it on some other blog or web magazine:
There’s a new Killer-RIA which is called »Scrybe«. It’s a flash-based (at least I’ve read that it was done in Flash – but actually it doesn’t matter if it was done with AJAX or Flash) calendar-powerlists-thoughtpad application. They have a Youtube video on their site which shows the great user interface and workflow – this is what you can really call a »Web 2.0 application«.
Visit the permanent link to “Scrybe – An awesome new Rich-Internet-Application”.
Voodoo IO: Connecting flash to hardware devices
August 13, 2006
Finally we have time to blog about this (being officially on holiday since a week :). A few weeks ago we were invited by Wolfgang Spießl, a friend of mine and student of media informatics at LMU, to take an active part in a user study. Wolfgang and Nicolas Villar, main developer of Voodoo IO hardware devices, built a system to connect those devices to flash (the whole project is supervised by Hans Gellersen from Lancaster University and Albrecht Schmidt from LMU – yeah, lots of names and links ;).
So what exactely is Voodoo IO?
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Visit the permanent link to “Voodoo IO: Connecting flash to hardware devices”.
FlashPlayerTrust: Some flash security notes
July 29, 2006
If you never delved into flash security stuff, this might interest you: Probably you know that since Flash 8 you can choose between “local access” and “network access” in the publish settings, i.e. your exported flash movie can access either local data or remote data. If your local flash movie loads both a local xml file and remote data from a live web server (e.g. via amfphp) and you test the movie in the standalone player or the browser, you get this flash player security warning (you don’t get the warning if you test your movie in flash or if you deploy your movie to a web server).
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Visit the permanent link to “FlashPlayerTrust: Some flash security notes”.
Superb penalty shootout flash game
May 29, 2006
This is one of the coolest flash games I’ve seen so far: Boooming
It’s a penalty shootout game which is controlled via telephone and your voice – the louder you scream “booooom” the stronger your shot.
It’s all presented in a very cool flash interface (shots are analyzed, integration of flash video etc.) – must have been great fun coding this flash game.
So…go boooming and shout as loud as you can :).
Link found via Werbeblogger
Visit the permanent link to “Superb penalty shootout flash game”.
Download: AS 2.0 star rating class
April 19, 2006
Just wanted to quickly post an as 2.0 class. It’s a rating component which can display any number of customizable labels and rating items. In the example below I’ve used the common stars as rating items but you could use any other graphics (just go into the fla, modify the ObjectRaterItem symbol and put in your own graphics).
The ObjectRater class has an init method that accepts the labels as an array and a setRating method that accepts two parameters: totalRating and numRatings (e.g. if you got the totalRating and numRatings via the getter methods and stored it somewhere you can initialize the ObjectRater later with those two values). If you click on a star the rating is automatically added but you could also provide another button, combo box or whatever and call the rate method manually.
The class fires a few events and has some getter methods to display all rating infos (rating, roundedRating, totalRating, numRatings…). Just look at the demo file. You can download it in the download section.
[Additional Note: It's currently compiled for Flash Player 8 as there's a DropShadowFilter in the ObjectRaterItem class. If you want to compile it for Flash Player 7 just remove the DropShadowFilter in the init method...]
Visit the permanent link to “Download: AS 2.0 star rating class”.