I'm finally back from my trip to Ireland for a little over a week (a well deserved vacation if I do say so myself) to find a fedex box sitting on my living room table. It's from MM and full of stuff like a T and laptop bag which seems to be of quite nice quality, along with some trading cards for components (two boxes of the same thing so one is going to my partner :D)
So a huge thanks out to the MM flash team, it's these little things I think that really count. Like Jesse said in his blog entry, you don't see other companies doing stuff like this for their users.
I'll try to post again about Ireland, it was a blast really because we rented a car and literally travelled to every edge of the island. Bit expensive all in all but nice. Got about 1000 pics or so to sift through but will post some of the better ones when I get the first chance. Some very beautiful scenery in Ireland, that's for sure.
The long arm of the Japanese government has extended out to my former place of employment, Citibank Private Bank Japan, and crushed it like a grape *insert squishing sound here* (though I doubt you'll see this in any news but in Japan). *update* - You can find the news of this on bloomberg.com Supposedly they will have to shut down within a year.
I must say that I did enjoy my first 3 and a half years of working in a very serious and advanced corporate environment and I learnt a LOT from everybody that works there. I would have to say I am thankful for the training and experience I was allowed in such a short time. How projects work, how corporate companies handle new ideas, technology, ways of thinking and procedures of getting things done. I know for a fact that I am by far not fully versed in the ways of the corporate world but understanding the basics and a bit more sure does take me in directions that can only bring me forward into the success I drive for. I won't comment much on the remaining 8 months as this is when Citi started coming under the harsh scrutiny of the Japanese government for their thieving ways of taking millions from rich Japanese here. All management were, and probably still are, extremely tense and it just wasn't an atmosphere that one could grow and mature in.
Taking destiny into my own hands I immediately surged off into a new yet related direction and seriously couldn't be doing better. Sometimes we all need that extra kick in the arse to get moving in the direction we would rather be going and I think that's exactly what it was. I am not a religious person, but at times I truly wonder what these "signs" are that keep getting sent to me. Do you believe in fate or destiny? I know I do, but it in all cases does require a bit of shaping with your own hands. One extremley good example is literally me being here in Japan... but that's another story so..
As I sit back and reflect on the chain of events that has brought me to where I am right now, it amazes me as it is literally like a set of dominoes lined up just waiting to be knocked over. One thing leads to the next and then the next and it just seems to move forward like clockwork. Unconcious decisions I may have made "on the spur of the moment" fit in, and then fit in again later down the road. Is something steering us all in the directions we go? where one thing that may seem bad or against where we think we want to go really was put in our path to deter us from making a worse decision down the road? Or be forced into a worse situation than the one we may be in at the moment?
Had I still been working at Citi at this moment, not only would I have been miserable and unchallenged, but I would have missed out on all the things that I have experienced and given the chance to do and see now. Which have of course only contributed to my wealth of experience and knowledge which I'm sure will in the end be called into play sometime in the future. I *may* have learnt a little bit more, but the shape that I left the techonology dept in, it didn't seem so to me. Does it all happen for a reason? Yes, I think so :) I cannot wait to see what the future holds for me from here on, and as always wait humbly as new and exciting experiences and knowledge rain down from above like an unending Spring rain.
Just got a mail today from the hosting company about the account that I have this blog on and they have told me that I've reached 90% of my limit of 5GB. I know 5G's isn't much but this account is free so I can't really complain :) But anyways I'm wondering how a blog could possibly use up so much juice and went and looked at the logs (which I barely ever do for this site..) Taking a look around I found that the Macromedia video banner spoof I did (direct link) is extremely popular and has had over 2400 views already with that post alone going over 1700 times viewed... Looking at the referrers I found that people are linking all around the world with the largest amount of viewers actually popping in from China. Thanks for links all, but... this is gonna cost me cash on this free account! So, I moved it over to our server where we get oodles of Gigs to play with :)
I most certainly did *not* expect this kind of reaction from the community, but would have to say that it's nice people are checking it out. I'll most definitely have to be more careful next time I think, and no 2 spoofs in the same month ;)
On a side note, I've agreed to post a detailed article over on flashstreamworks on how I went about this project so if you're interested in a bit more detail then keep an eye on things there sometime near the beginning of next month. I might also be putting up an article on MM's dev area but no word back on that just yet so who knows..
This is most definitely late in coming but to be honest I've been itching to write this review for quite some time now. It's unfortunate that due to a lot of projects and less time to get them done in, things like this have been pushed to the side temporarily though not permanently :)
A little background on myself I think to lay the brickwork for the basis of my review. I'm currently working in the middle of Japan, Tokyo as a developer for Flash and Flash Communication Server applications mainly which also interact with server side technologies and databases. I literally build these types of RIA's for a living. Up until this book I was aware of OOP and had a general knowledge of it, but no idea of the true OOP that is out there with classes, interfaces, strong typing, different types of patterns (though I generally use MVC), inheritance and exception handling. I had never used AS2 before this book, which I finished reading about a month or so ago, so no real knowledge of what is in it. I have a small library of Flash books here, and I can say that I am not easily impressed by the writings of most when they start off with "flash started in whatever year as a whatever... blah blah blah". Solid information, with solid examples that work and I can use in the real world are what I look for in a book. This is the base that I will be writing this review from.
To start off in this review, I'd like to say that Colin has once again written a formidable book for the Flash actionscripting community. This book may be a bit slimmer than his last books that he wrote but in my opinion packs a bigger punch. Not only that, it builds on this last book which is great because he was able to reduce redundacy of making readers read the same things they may have already read. If you are looking to get into Actionscript 2.0 then I would most definitely recommend this book.
On to some details if I may. First off I don't think this book is for the faint of heart or complete beginner to actionscript. There are a lot of details crammed into the pages here and if you aren't on your toes throughout the book it's very easy to get a bit lost and have to backtrack to read up on what is being talked about. Not to say it's hard to understand mind you, but the detail is quite high, making intake of all the information a bit tough. Definitely not a book that can be read in one sitting I think. In fact it took me a good 2 weeks to get through it all where I was reasonably sure I knew what was going on. I then ran through it again covering the areas I was unsure of. Finally at this point I can say that it mainly sits on my desk as a great reference of "how does that work again?" kind of idea.
I should say that there is one thing that irked me is that Colin is quite repitituous on some details of AS2. For example, when you put a data type in a var that was set to a different data type "It will throw an error!!"... yes I got that after the first 10 mentionings of it ;) But! funnily enough, it's this repitition that really got the basics into my head that went on to be the building blocks to things that I really had no idea about. I found the book quite well laid out in that he never really moved on to something that you couldn't build on past chapters or sections to understand. It all has a logic to it that I found was easy to follow, but once again the detail was high enough that I couldn't just swim through it.
Examples! yes, do these too I think. I started off in my usual way of just sitting down on my couch with a drink and reading. No... this doesn't work. Sit in front of your computer and give it a shot. Type it out, see what happens and what doesn't happen. Change them up, play, have fun, make stuff. The examples are great and plentiful, and really push the basics in to move on to more advanced techniques to create good OOP AS2. One example lead to the next, and the next built onto that and so on. Logical and it really helped me see into the ways that a good developer like Colin thinks and works when creating applications in Flash.
To end it all off, I took my new found knowledge and put it to making a component for Flash MX2004. This component is a video player for progressive flv's and is very very close to reaching production status and should be up on 2 live sites by the end of the month. I truly look forward to that as it really shows that getting the book paid off for us as it was actually put towards "real world" applications. I'd have to say that putting this component together really hammered in the topics covered in the book of AS2, creating classes and components as there were lots of times where I was sitting there saying "WTF?? why isn't this working". Open the book, read up on what is really happening and a light comes on.
I'd like to thank Colin again for the reviewers copy that he sent out even after having trouble with O'Reilly actually getting these out to some reviewers. An excellent book and definitely something I recommend to anybody out there looking to get knowledgable in AS2 and learn a thing or two from an experienced developer.
About 3 weeks ago I setup an automatic flash player version detection poll app on the community site (www.3enhancedesigners.com) I run. It's nothing too great but does take advantage of Flash Remoting to get the results into an Access database which then in turn updates the view which is a pie chart.
I've seperated out the types of computers (windows or mac) along with how many of those computers have whatever version of the flash player on their systems. After getting the player version of the computer it sets a shared object so that it doesn't go taking it again. So far up to today there are a total of 2407 entries.
Of those entries to the DB, 2017 are windows and 390 are mac. Quite a difference but it does go to show that maybe macs are catching up a bit? Not sure really as most people who would come to this site are not your average moms and dads really. Most would be designers or developers that are looking to get some help from the community or read up on some tutorials on whatever program they are having trouble with. Even so, I think quite a few people do visit from work or maybe even the family computer, so the numbers might not be too biased.
The numbers on flash versions are as following:
Windows:
version 7.0.14.0 and up: 95%
version 6.0.29.0 and up 5% with the majority at 6.0.79.0 3%
There is one person out there with the version 7.0.35.5.... I think that is Breeze or something..
Mac:
version 7.0.14.0 and up: 93%
version 6.0.21.0 and up: 7% with the majority at 6.0.79.0 3%
With 5 users using the version 7.0.2.0 bit of weird version number there.
Not bad statistics so far. I plan to keep the poll up for a month, then take it down for a few. When I put it back up again for another month or so, I'm quite curious as to what the difference will be. Will it be local, here in Japan, or will the difference also reflect the increase in version internationally too? Not many who can't speak Japanese would come to this site, but who knows... I have seen some translators links in my logs.
Not sure if these stats are useful to anybody, but I thought I'd post just in case somebody out there was curious as to how Japan may be doing. Pretty good I think, and the version penetration can only get better.
When I first saw the new flash video banner a little less than a week ago I was quite impressed with the quality compared with the speed it streamed in. It took me a bit to figure it out, but they are definitely using Flash Communication Server for that. I truly wonder how they aren't burning up their FCS servers having it on the home page with the amount of people that go through there maybe not even watching the whole video. Connections/disconnections.. I did something like that once on my site and FCS crashed the server after about 10000 connections/disconnections or so. It just wasn't cleaning stuff up fast enough. I'm sure they've messed with that part in FCS though so that it doesn't happen to them.
So, on to what I created and why.
The banner that I'm talking about is the one with the blonde girl wandering across looking at the "flash video gallery". This banner they made I found quite impressive and thought to myself "that's pretty cool, great effect on the user and it's not intrusive. It's got an impact yet is not impacting". If you just had the video on there and no girl walking across it would have much less of an effect I think, and if it was just a girl walking across the screen you wouldn't have the "gallery" theme that it is based on.
Not only that, I was extremely impressed with the quality of the video in all, especially with the keying work they did with the girl. Most likely they have an expensive studio on hand with some high end cameras and all the software to do it in. I'd love to know their process and equipment they used, though I have some idea..
While looking at it, I wondered how they got the video so clean yet FLV video files don't support alpha.. did they do it with PNG's? Nope, the whole thing is one FLV, which surprised me because I couldn't see the telltale "shifting" of pixels when graphics are compressed with video. It really did look like the video was on top of the graphics that were in flash.
Thinking on all of this, I decided that I wanted to build the same thing, mainly just to see if I could do it really and how close I could get the quality to the original.
If you haven't seen the real thing, then here it is (reload the page until you get the banner with the girl and "flash gallery").
Mine is a bit different though (It's a guy version... starring yours truly) and the theme is a bit different though the design is close to the same. Unfortunately, I don't have a vodafone phone nor a wrist watch that I can talk to my buddies on, so I had to settle for my Docomo Fujitsu F900iT (which happens to be the latest and greatest model out right now in Japan) to chat it up with video (which it can actually do.. and it's very very cool, but expensive, to have a vid chat on your phone). The second vid is a dragon boat race that I actually competed in a couple of years ago (hell of a lot of fun, I recommend it to anyone) spiffed up with some extra voice stuff I had and some "news" graphics. Here's my version. Keeping in mind this is a "funny" version, not meant seriously in anyway. All fun and games :D It's also not an FCS version (progressive) so if it streams funny, just reload the page 'cause I haven't bothered with preloading or anything (too lazy)
The tools of my trade you ask? Premiere pro 1.5 to get the vid off my Sony T30 handycam. After Effects 6.5 to chroma key the vid of me walking around, warp the vid in the phone and mix a few vids to get the right feeling of a "beach party" plus the mixing of voice and vid for the "flash news". Adobe Audition 1.5 to mess with the sounds a bit to get them the right tone for what would be the phone's tiny speaker sound, and to tone down some of the other voices/sound. After it was all edited together, I then brought it into Squeeze 4.0 to spit it out as an flv (which turned out great!) and then it was off to FlashMX2004 to make up the script to load in the flv, set the button and back graphics. I originally had the back graphics in the video but decided it would be best to just keep that in flash and mask the corners of the vid so that it didn't show outside of the white area. Graphics were all done in Photoshop, but I have to say.. I'm not much of a graphic person...
I think it turned out pretty good actually (not to toot my own horn but...) and I'm quite happy with what I learnt in the process. Taking video, keying, editing it and getting it ready for Flash and the web is quite a process I think, and at times there is quite a bit of trial and error. It takes more time when your comp is bogged down due to too many high-end cpu/memory hogging apps running at the same time, but nothing too bad (playin' with the cats and stuff while waiting for renders...etc). It's not like I haven't done this stuff before, but I found this time to be a bit different. Can't really explain it, but it was like trying to not only achieve a goal, but to surpass it and go the extra distance. No money involved, no clients, just a desire to see a theme, project, idea in my mind come to life. In fact, this idea bugged me so much I ended up staying up the night rebuilding my little studio here and setting up all the equipment, then taking the video! At like 5 in the morning! :D But it's ideas that come to me just as I'm about to go to sleep that really work out. The only problem is that if I don't get up and do it.. I usually forget half of it, and never go about getting it done.
A truly fun experience, and I'm even thinking of making a couple more versions as I've had some seriously funny ideas come to me from friends that I'd like to put in. Spoofs.. like Monty Python. I love those guys.. way too funny.