Software, Fitness, and Gaming – Jesse Warden

Blog

  • Jonathan Boutelle on Flash & AJAX

    Nice to see people speaking about their development experiences, ecspecially when using AJAX & Flash together, something that makes absolutely no frikin’ sense to me. This gives a great insight into how people who are not Flash devs expect to use Flash, and how they expect it to work in their project flow. Fascinating stuff.

    Since I’m a Flasher at heart, I must respond to his points.

    Sockets: XMLSocket is an alternative to Flashcom. It’s been in Flash since 5, and like AJAX’s XMLHTTPRequest, both send and receive XML strings, except XMLSocket in Flash is a persistent socket and allows for server-push instead of the simple request/response. There are a lot of free & professional socket servers out there for this, EXTREMELY cheaper than Flashcom, ecspecially Flashcom 2 since that pricing model doesn’t really facilitate data-only applications anymore.

    Additionally, Flash Player 8.5 has binary sockets built-in; expect existing binary socket servers to see a re-surgence in use, and new ones built just for Flash server alternatives.

    Rapid Development: “if your code needs to change quickly, or if it needs to be ready in a few weeks, Flash is a poor choice.” Huh? I’m obviously subjective because I’ve been a Flash developer for years, and my HTML skills languish. As such, doing things in Flash, to me is quick, easy, and flexible, whereas me doing HTML & JavaScript goes a lot slower.

    I will agree, though, that Flash has it’s code too tightly meshed to the GUI; Flex is indeed faster for prototyping form based applications, and the flexbility has increased 10 fold since your code is not tied to how you lay out your GUI.

    Text handling: While I agree text usability in Flash blows, mainly from an integration standpoint, it’s rendering rocks. If you use device fonts, it is extremely readable, even at lower font sizes (14 and below). Unfortunately, the IDE’s default behavior is to use embedded fonts, which has lead to the “Flash shows blurry fonts” impression, which unfortunately is the fault of developers, not the technology. Additionally Flash Player 8’s font rendering engine rivals that of PDF, even with small font sizes.

    Again, it’s really great to read these types of articles; both from the AJAX dev comparisons to getting insight into how developers use the tools & their expectations of them.

    Flash: what is it good for? (absolutely something!)

  • Widget Forge Website Launches Today

    Back at BellSouth, we were creating alternatives to Central to get Flash on users’ desktops to enable us to provide them with our services and BellSouth’s branding. It was pretty fun, and I got to explore a wide array of technology during some R&D phases.

    One of the alternatives to Flash + mProjector, or Flash + Custom C wrapper was Kapsules. Kapsules is a runtime that allows the creation of desktop widgets that all run in a common runtime engine, much like Konfabulator. Developing for it, however, coming from a Flash background, sucked. While it supported a plethora of scripting languages (JScript, JScript.NET, Python, PHPScript, PerlScript, RubyScript, VBScript), writing ActionScript 1 style code in JScript, while familiar, blew when you were used to ActionScript 2.

    You were also starting from ground zero. While the API is nice in terms of tools to draw and utilize interactivity, there is no framework, and no set of components. Additionally, while PNG’s render really nice with transparency, boilerplate drawing code makes it extremely diffucult to do anything cool looking animation wise without a lot of scripting; either a quick and dirty “git r done” mentality, or a “create an animation engine” endeavor.

    Either way, they have a pretty cool, and lasting community. While I think the system requirements will put a lot of people off (Windows 2000/XP only, must have .NET 1.1 runtime installed), it’s still a great place to get inspiration from, and see a comparison of how different scripting languages are written to do the same thing if you read the developer documentation.

    Developing this way certainly makes you appreciate Flash.

    Widget Forge

  • Screen Capture Driver for Flashcom

    Fabio Sonnati just found this screen capture driver that is free for personal use. I tested it in Flash 8 using:

    my_vid.attachVideo(Camera.get());

    I then right clicked on the SWF, went to Settings, chose the Camera tag, and chose the “VHScrCap” driver from the list of Camera drivers, and walla, I could see my Flash movie in Flash.

    Opening the SWF from my desktop, I could then see my desktop. I’m having challenges getting specific settings from the driver, but that’s becaues I’m rusty with Flashcom, and it doesn’t come with them in the program itself.

    Naicu Octavian pointed us to iuVCR from iuLabs, which has a video driver settings panel.

    Now you can capture your desktop utilizing Flashcom without being a h@X|\|0|3! (i.e. Video card out via S-VHS cable to capture card in on another computer that has a SWF that selects the Capture Card driver in the settings list, and broadcasts that to a localhost Flashcom server… whew!)

  • All Your Private Ryans Are Belong To Us

    Counterstrike text, Saving Private Ryan movie images. A l33t D-Day. I love it.

    Via RaZoR.