Times Reader delivered by AIR

Check this very cool Adobe AIR app from New York Times. Newspaper now can have a much better online/offline experience. And best of all, there is a free version.

http://timesreader.nytimes.com/timesreader/index.html

Windows Mobile 6.5 and Flash Lite

I have been testing a beta version of Windows Mobile 6.5 on my HTC Touch Diamond phone for the last few days. I found out that the IE Mobile comes with Flash support up to version 8. I am also happy to note that the Flash Lite Distributable Player is working well so far. Way to go.

A No-Frill Flash Video Player from FlexDaddy

I have always wanted a simple standalone Flash Video player to come from Adobe. The Adobe Media Player (AMP) does provide a good video experience but very often all I want is a light-weight player that starts up fast and play the video. Don’t care about all the other fancystuff.

While I am still waiting if and when Adobe will come up with a clean player, my colleague Andrew Spaulding (aka FlexDaddy) only has to spent a couple of hours this week and has created the player that answers my need. I have now set this as my default flash video player.  It is too good to let it pass unnoticed. So here is the link if you want to give it a try. Highly recommended.

http://www.flexdaddy.info/air/flvplayer

Checking Flash Application Against Color Blindness

I came across this free 3rd party application (from Fujitsu) which I found very useful when testing your application for people who may be color-blinded. It is very easy to use and useful to have. Check this out:

http://www.fujitsu.com/global/accessibility/assistance/cd/

I miss the Layout Table and Layout Cell in Dreamweaver

As of Dreawmweaver CS4, the Layout Mode feature has been deprecated. I didn’t think much of it until I was asked to give a presentation on HTML mail. As support of CSS is severely limited in many mail clients, creating HTML mail is back to using Tables unfortunately. If I can choose between the regular Table object and the Layout Table object, I would pick the layout Table object anytime.

There are some good people who are promoting the web standards for mail clients. I wish them best of luck. I hope one day in the not too distant future, I may truly forget using Table for html layout. You can read more at: http://www.email-standards.org/

Transparent Flash Video overlay on html page

I was asked today how to create a web page with transparent flash video like that in : http://www.livefaceonweb.com/samples.aspx

It was actually quite simple to do that. Here are the basic steps:

1. Use a green/blue screen video with After Effects CS4. Do a chroma key with the Keylight effect.
2. Render the video as flv (On2VP6) and make sure you select the `”Encode Alpha Channel”box.
3. Bring the flv into Flash CS4 and make an swf file.
4. Add the swf into your web page using Dreamweaver CS4. And set wmode as “transparent”. BTW, Dreamweaver CS4 now has better code when importing swf.

That’s it. Simple.

Streaming Flash Video onto Windows Mobile phones

In my previous post, I mentioned that there is the Flash Lite 3.1 distributable player available at the Adobe Labs. I have since then built a few Flash Lite apps and tested on the HTC Touch Diamond phone which is running WM6.1.

One application was to stream video from the Flash Media Server 3.5 with the video stream coming from my webcam captured with the Flash Media Live Encoder.

Initially I couldn’t have rtmp connection on my Touch Diamond and I wonder what it was. Turned out I could connect if it was via WiFi but not 3G. Apparently the rtmp protocol may have been blocked from the operator (Telstra)

But even with WiFi, the playback was very slow and indeed no audio came out from the phone. On further investigation, it was because I have unintentionally set the audio codec as NellyMoser instead of MP3. But once I changed it back to Mp3, everything streamed beautifully.

The code is something like:

var my_vid:Video;
var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();
nc.connect(“rtmp://myDomain.com/myApp”);
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc);
my_vid.attachedVideo(ns);
ns.play(“myStream”);

Fullscreen flash movie playback

Someone at a recent seminar asked me about how to set swf to play in fullscreen mode. The way to do this is simple. Flash movie playing inside a browser can be activated (user interaction) to play in full screen. The simple way to do this is create a button (say fullscreen_btn) that user can click to activate full screen. The following code is an example:

fullscreen_btn.addEventListener(MouseEvent.CLICK, doFullScreen);

function doFullScreen(e:MouseEvent):void
{
 stage.displayState = StageDisplayState.FULL_SCREEN;
}

Then publish the swf and html using the “Flash Only – All Full Screen” template which will put a parameter “allowFullScreen=true” for both <object> and <embed> tags.

Note that (1) the full screen mode must be user activated, (2) as soon as the flash movie loses focus it would revert to Normal mode and (3) text input is disabled in full screen mode except when it is an AIR app.

There is a devnet article that described it in greater depth:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/articles/full_screen_mode_print.html

Adobe releases Flash Lite 3.1 distributable player

Adobe has just released the Flash Lite 3.1 distributable player for Windows Mobile and Symbian phones. This allows developer to build and package Flash Lite application that user can install on their phone with a single click. If Flash Lite 3.1 player is not installed on their phone, the Flash Lite player will download over the air (if you are in US, UK, and a few other countries for now) or can be downloaded from computer

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/distributableplayer/

I have tested it with my HTC Touch Diamond and it works perfectly. First I used the Adobe Media Packager to package my flash lite application and it created a cab file. I transfered the cab file to my phone and clicked to install the app. The app then appeared in the program menu which I could click to activate.

Note that this player doesn’t replace the Flash Lite plug-in for browser. I am still waiting for the IE mobile to support Flash content site. Hopefully that should come soon too.

Getting InContext Editing to work with IE 8

At present, ICE doesn’t support IE8 yet. It will eventually but for now if you are using IE 8 (RC1), you can still access ICE editing by turning on the compatibility view of the website you are editing. The feature is available under the Tools menu of IE8.

To try out ICE, go to: http://incontextediting.adobe.com/

To try out IE 8 (RC1), go to: http://www.microsoft.com/windows/internet-explorer/beta/worldwide-sites.aspx

NB: Google Chrome at the moment is not supported either.