Category Archives: Flash

Iteration Is Not Inherently Good

What happens when you lower transaction costs to the point that making “interface” changes becomes an unremarkable effort? You get more change and less discipline. In some cases the results are positive and in others, not so much as Danah Boyd points out.

In the software industry we often pride ourselves on iteration and view the [...]

User Interface + User Experience = Brand

The realization that targeted branding is actually very close to user interface design was hammered home as I read through an old Danah Boyd post.
Danah Boyd on personalization within the context of tailored branding:

Bret Victor on context-sensitive information graphics:

One of the reasons Flash has been so important to the brand conscious on the web, is [...]

MP4Box MPEG-4 / h.264 Metadata, Cutting & Merging Tool

If you are looking for something similar to flvtool2 or flvmdi, or you are a command line junky then I strongly encourage you to check out MP4Box. MP4Box has a ton of capabilities, but I’m just going to highlight 4 fundamentals:

Read file info (basic metadata).
Split or cut files.
Merge two or more files.
Convert to iPod.

Read basic [...]

SWFObject 2 / Google Search Mystery

I spent about 15 minutes in the Google Code twilight zone this morning. For some reason when hitting the SWFObject 2 Google Code repos (via a Google search) I wasn’t finding anything on the wiki, downloads page or any source in the repository.
An empty wiki page.

Downloads MIA.

I tried to hit the SWFFix dev blog to [...]

Kimili, WordPress, Relative Paths And The Base Attribute

Embedding complex SWF content in WordPress which loads or references other content can be bit tricky. Often the embedded SWF is hosted in different directory than the WordPress page that contains the embed code which means simple relative paths often fail. The reason for this is that SWF files, by default, assume the page in [...]

HTML 5 Video Element Is A Bad Joke

I’ll say it if no one else will–the video tag in HTML 5 looks to be a bad joke. Leave it to a standards body to turn back the clock and give us the same garbage that nearly killed Web video in the first place.
From Mike Chambers’ blog post on the topic:

Can anybody honestly come [...]

We Have Ubiquity and Rich Tooling — What’s Next?

I spend a lot of time ‘trawling’ the web, often just getting swept up by the tide and coasting from information island to information island. Yep its a time sink, has a hugely negative impact on how much sleep I get and isn’t terribly efficient. The operant conditioning of link surfing keeps me going long [...]

Empowering Content Creators, Not Platforms With H.264

I’ve been spending quite a bit of time pitching h.264 lately and have ended up developing a stump speech (more of an elevator pitch really). If you’re in the same boat and are looking to develop or refine an h.264 pitch of your own I’ve made a generic version of mine available below (runs 1:45). [...]

ActionScript is Cool — Yegge of Google Said So

Steve Yegge posted a must read transcription of a talk he gave at Stanford on dynamic languages. On the last question of the day he gives a great plug for Adobe’s Evolutionary Programming model and ECMAScript Edition 4 (ECMAScript Edition 4 was the basis for ActionScript 3, the language of the Flash Platform).

If you’re a [...]

A More Open Screen (Project)

Red Monk’s Michael Coté has the most comprehensive and deepest analysis of Adobe’s Open Screen Project to date, including a look at how it plays against the other gorillas in the pen — Sun, Microsoft, Apple and Google. Strangely there was no mention of Tamarin, Mozilla or ECMAScript. I’ve always thought that Adobe was making [...]