squidder.com: good ideas: April 2008 Archives

Faust: Use flash, skip deal with devil.

By Jon on April 23, 2008 12:21 PM

We're late to the game as usual on this one, but if you've ever had a client who wanted MAXIMUM standards complacency and compatibility, its time you checked out Faust flash augmenting standard, evangelized by the future-loving folks over at space150.

Basically, its a really clever way of passing the content that you're overwriting when you use SWFObject directly into the flash. Super clean and requires only one data call. Handy for things like navigation bars, which while fancy in flash, can also easily be viewed (and indexed) without flash. Hats off, space150, hats off.

Users to Adobe: "make some noise", "raise the roof"

By Jon on April 11, 2008 3:13 PM

If there's one thing that could be a ton cooler in AS3, its the audio capabilities. Yeah, we've all had fun making spectrum analyzers, but that was back in the hazy, drug riddled days of 2007. This is 2008 and 2008 demands better audio stability and features.

That's where the "Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE" (sic) campaign comes in. Besides yelling at us, the project aims to end the spotty performance of the existing Sound packages, as well as push for some new, and nifty sounding (HA!), features for the next round of flash.

Bulk loader makes other loaders cry

By Jon on April 10, 2008 4:01 PM

Bulk loader is an excellent open source package for managing multiple file loads in AS3. Supporting a wide variety of file types (xml, swfs, images, sounds and more) as well as multiple progress indications (files loaded / total files, weighted percentage and beyond), it's hard to imagine writing a big, asset heavy project without it.

Generating website thumbnails from flash

By Jon on April 9, 2008 7:32 PM

Crazy sounding, I know (I know!). And a few months ago, I would have told you that it was in fact crazy. But that was before I found baluga.net's webthumb.

Almost offensively easy to use, Webthumb's API works off a simple xml query that you can make from almost anywhere. It's very easy to set up a lot of the finer details as well, including how the thumbnail is cropped, delay before taking the thumbnail and of course the size -- indeed, you could just have a full view the site as opposed to a thumbnail.

The service is free to try out, with a 100 free credits a month (one request counts as one or more credits depending), though additional ones are quite reasonably priced. And while I probably wouldn't recommend generating a thumbnail each time from the flash, there's certainly no reason you couldn't set up a cron job using flash or VRML or whatever the kids are into these days.

Make downloading from YouTube easier, nerdier.

By Jon on April 9, 2008 11:21 AM

Lee Brimelow, of TheFlashBlog fame, has posted up a neat AIR app that lets you easily download videos from YouTube in their original flv format. Good example of something that really works well for AIR - more often than not, people make AIR apps out of things that should really just be on the web (you need to make that countdown timer into an application? really?). Next steps: convert to quicktime and add to iTunes.

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