Archive for the ‘Technology’ Category:
gotoandlearn.com – Flash CS4 Feature Tour
Lee Brimlow has added another great video tutorial to gotoAndLearn that leads through some of the great new features in the new Flash CS4.
Tinic Uro answers flash player performance questions
Tinic Uro (Adobe Flash Player Engineer) has yet another great writeup in relation to performance and flash player. His latest article answers a lot of questions and comments Ajax-heavy developers are making against flash. Understandably Tinic defends his software, I guess I didn’t expect him to agree with those stating flash is a CPU hog.
Decide for yourself. Personally, I’m going to trust an Adobe Software Engineer instead of the typcial company Javascript guy that always tries to shit on flash. There is a time and place for both.
Adobe will announce CS4 on September 23rd!
Mark your calenders! Adobe will be announcing future release information for the new CS4 suite September 23rd. There is a special web broadcast that you can sign up to watch.
Mozilla Labs » Introducing Ubiquity
Ubiquity for Firefox from Aza Raskin on Vimeo.
WeatherVision3D
CornFlex has coming up with a neat way to incorporate Papervision and the new GoogleMaps api. It is a little primitive, but has a lot of potential. This would be a really cool screen saver.
space150 dials in the Mobile Development with workshop!
space150 is hosting a mobile development workshop in Minneapolis, August 11th. The cost is FREE with advanced RSVP. Yahoo, Nokia, and The Weather Channel are just a few of the great sponsors they have lined up.
Don’t miss this great opportunity to listen to some great speakers including the former CMO & President for Sprint PCS: Check Levine!
Streaming Server Bandwidth Calculations
A very important part of streaming any type of media is the bandwidth. You want to stream the best quality possible, but keep the stream constant. This can be a very tricky thing since all your users will most likely not be at the same connection speeds. Adobe has a great article on the math behind calculating different kinds of bandwidth for one-to-many (video on demand) setups and many-to-many (video conference) setups.
[ via Adobe FMS Dev Center ]
MyDeco 3D Room Planning
The guys over at specialmoves have launched a new site for mydeco. The site is the brain child of Brent Hoberman, who also started lastminute.com. His vision was to revolutionize the way that people shop for their home.
Site is built in Flex and uses a flash 3D engine (Papervision?) to render the real-time 3D views of your layout.
[ via theFWA ]
2D Google Maps Driving Simulator feels like GTA 1
The guys over at Geoquake have taken the new Google Maps API for Flash and created a 2D driving simulator. It is super cheesy and doesn’t have any obstacles, but is still pretty neat. Your even able to choose between 4 different vehicle types.
Feel free to skip this demo and just download GTA 1 or 2 from rockstar, at least that game comes with rocket launchers and moltav cocktails.
FiV Video Platform
The FWA Theater recently opened it’s doors and is showcasing a new interface called FiV. This new interface/platform is developed by Fantasy Interactive. It has the typical Fi look and feel that has plagued made a name for Fi for years. The FiV system seems to be a great fit for those that have a lot of video content and need to have it organized and easy to navigate. With the rise in bandwidth speeds, more sites seem to be gearing towards video content. The only catch that I can think of is a site that can handle/afford the bandwidth of a system that has massive amounts of video content will probably have the budget and need to design their own system. Could you imagine Hulu using this system instead of their own?
This would be a great tool if it was cheap (think Slideshow Pro), and could handle smaller amounts of video content gracefully without looking empty. Future potential could then be an online video editing suite add-on (think Slideshow Pro Director) and Live Video stream support.
I don’t believe this system will take off to quickly, but has a great potential.
30 Great Websites for Developers
Web developers have to stay sharp, the technology changes constantly and if you don’t keep up, you get left in the virtual dust. Six Revisions has put together a pretty comprehensive list to help you fill up your Google Reader. Granted this list is mostly design/interaction orientated, I still find it useful for inspiration and to get a clear view at what others are doing. Feel free to check out another list from the same author that is basically the same thing, but with different sites.
[ via Digg ]
Google Maps API for Flash
It’s finally here! I have yet to really dig into it, but Google claims it does everything the Javascript version does.
Adobe Flash Player 10
Adobe has posted their first set of features for the new Flash 10, codenamed “Astro”. This news is Adobe’s release of the public beta for the Flash Player 10.
“Adobe® Flash® Player 10, code-named “Astro,” introduces new expressive features and visual performance improvements that allow interactive designers and developers to build the richest and most immersive Web experiences. These new capabilities also empower the community to extend Flash Player and to take creativity and interactivity to a new level.”
Adobe has posted a demo and some videos of the lead PM for the project discussing and demoing (in video) some of the new features we are all quivering for. Native 3D support, brand new text and character engine, advanced filter techniques, and of course the new optimization techniques. Personally, the first and last of that list are the most important. With the release of Flash Player 9 and AS3, developers saw a major spike in performance. With Adobe Flash Player 10, most of the heavy lifting won’t be left to the browser, instead it will use the GPU to do the processing. This should result obviously better performance. I would assume that the browser Flash Player will run much like the Flash IDE.
Ryan Stewart has a great in-depth writeup/review available.
Read the article
Check out the demos and videos
Get the new beta player
Fade Flash DisplayObjects without the overlay!
Problem: Having DisplayObjects overlap and fading alpha. The result is the two objects alphas combining in the overlapping regions. This creates a nasty overlay that will show all the layers below the top most. This is because flash fades all the clips inside the DisplayObject, not the container clip as a whole.
Solution: All you need to do is set the container clip BlendMode to LAYER (BlendMore.LAYER). The Zedia Flash Blog has put up a straight forward example of the problem/solution.
[ via Zedia Flash Blog ]