journal

Image USA Today

Ralph Lauren’s interactive shopping window display made a big splash upon arrival last summer and apparently has been in use throughout the year in different locations (Manhattan, Chicago, London). Wonder if anyone has actually bought anything using the application: the physical store is right there, after all. Would it work if installed at bus shelters and selling home-delivered groceries?

Just in time! flickr implemented a crossdomain.xml on their flickr image servers. This finally allows to use the BitmapData.draw() command with images downloaded from flickr.com without having to route it through a proxy on your own domain first. Unfortunately their api was getting flooded and started slowing down on me considerably, like sloooooow.

One thing you have to watch out for if you are going to adapt your old AS2 code to these changes is that it is not enough to just download the images directly. You will have to instruct Flash first to download the new policy files from the flickr servers whenever it tries to access them. Since flickr distributes its images across several servers that have different domains like http://farm2.static.flickr.com, http://farm3.static.flickr.com and so on the easiest way to accomplish that is to use the MovieClipLoader class and to set its checkPolicyFile property to “true”. This will instruct Flash to check for the crossdomain.xml file automatically on the respective server. Attention: In order to do that you will have to publish your files to Flash Player 9 since Flash 8 doesn’t support that property.

Here’s a simple AS2 example:

import flash.display.BitmapData;

var holder:MovieClip = createEmptyMovieClip(”test”,0);
var mcl:MovieClipLoader = new MovieClipLoader();
mcl.checkPolicyFile = true;
mcl.loadClip(”http://farm2.static.flickr.com/1395/776413036_ea6bf98846_m_d.jpg”,holder);
mcl.addListener( this );

var holder2:MovieClip = createEmptyMovieClip(”test2″,1);

function onLoadInit()
{
var bm:BitmapData = new BitmapData( holder._width,holder._height,false,0)
bm.draw(holder);
holder2.attachBitmap(bm,0);
holder2._x = holder._x + holder._width + 2;
}

The alternative way would be to use System.security.loadPolicyFile() but you will have to do that for every farm that you access - it is not enough just to load it from http://static.flickr.com/crossdomain.xml

AS3 way of doing it

Whoa! Finally… Microsoft has released Silverlight. And not only does it run again on my mac (it broke when I updated to Safari 3 Preview), but the install was super easy. They’ve also released 1.1 Alpha for developers, announced a version for Linux called Moonlight is coming soon, and released a video encoder Expression Encoder.

The Deets:

• Built-in codec support for playing VC-1 and WMV video, and MP3 and WMA audio within a browser. The VC-1 codec is a big step forward for incorporating media within a web experience - since it supports very efficiently playing high-quality, high definition video in the browser. It is a standards-based media format that is implemented in all HD-DVD and Blueray DVD players, and is supported by hundreds of millions of mobile devices, XBOX 360s, PlayStation 3s, and Windows Media Centers (enabling you to encode content once and run it on all of these devices + Silverlight unmodified). It enables you to use a huge library of existing video content and provides access to the broad ecosystem of existing Windows Media tools, components, vendors and hardware.
• Silverlight supports the ability to progressively download and play media content from any web-server. You can point Silverlight at any URL containing video/audio media content, and it will download it and enable you to play it within the browser. No special server software is required, and Silverlight can work with any web-server (including Apache on Linux). We’ll also be releasing an IIS 7.0 media pack that enables rich bandwidth throttling features that you can enable on your web-server for free.
  Silverlight also optionally supports built-in media streaming. This enables you to use a streaming server like Windows Media Server on the backend to efficiently stream video/audio (note: Windows Media Server is a free product that runs on Windows Server). Streaming brings some significant benefits in that: 1) it can improve the end-user’s experience when they seek around in a large video stream, and 2) it can dramatically lower your bandwidth costs.
• Silverlight enables you to create rich UI and animations, and blend vector graphics with HTML to create compelling content experiences. It supports a Javascript programming model to develop these. One benefit of this is that it makes it really easy to integrate these experiences within AJAX web-pages (since you can write Javascript code to update both the HTML and XAML elements together).
• Silverlight makes it easy to build rich video player interactive experiences. You can blend together its media capabilities with the vector graphic support to create any type of media playing experience you want. Silverlight includes the ability to “go full screen” to create a completely immersive experience, as well as to overlay menus/content/controls/text directly on top of running video content (allowing you to enable DVD like experiences). Silverlight also provides the ability to resize running video on the fly without requiring the video stream to be stopped or restarted.

Well today I’ve started a new job at ichameleon/group. I’m pretty hyped about the whole deal, they definitely feel like a good bunch. Anyway, wish me luck!

Adobe published the latest Flash stats, showing that as of June 2007, the Flash Player had more than 90% reach. From today, Flash Player 9 and AS3 should be the preferred format for publishing Flash content.

The latest Flash stats shows that Flash Player 9 is reaching the magical limit of 90% distribution - a number sought by many content providers. Mature markets, US and Europe are just above 90%, Asia is just below. The numbes are just as expected, but it also means that since this number is from June 2007, Flash player 9 should be well above 90% since the time of this survey.

This means that there is no more excuses to not learn Actionscript 3 and reap the benefits of the speed increases in Flash Player 9. Keep in mind that Flex 3 will be fully based on actionscript 3 and the Flash Player 9, so this is the standard for the months to come (and there’s more fun just around the corner…)

Read the full stats here…