WordPress Automatic Update Plugin Cures Blog Hosting Fatigue

Let’s face it, keeping your own hosted WordPress blog and plugins up to date is a major drag. It’s the type of tedious work that just begs for a big fat easy button.
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Jing Pro – A “Full Metal” Flex Video Player

This is a little “inside the devigners head” piece that explains some of the conceptual thinking behind the Jing Pro MPEG4-AVC Video Player (there’s also a sanitized version over at the Jing blog).

The player was built with Flex (easy to tell as I never quite got around to creating a custom preloader) which makes her a bit of a pig file size wise, but having a mature framework and consistent approach to component creation was worth it in my opinion (I should add that the Google Analytics lib added a bit to her heft).

Besides being a branded experience, the player does some neat scaling tricks which makes it behave a lot more like an HDTV. Feed it a SD / HD stream and it elegantly handles the scaling and position (pillarboxing, letterboxing and windowboxing in video parlance) of the video. This makes it much easier to embed because you can make the video fit anywhere (big video, small blog post–no problemo). So throw on your flak jacket and check out this “full metal” homage to the Jing Pro video player.
Go fullscreen to see the video in full 1:1 pixel clarity.

Flex Basics – The Script Tag

Grasping the simple things is often the hardest part to getting up and running with Flex. For example, a friend of mine who I’ve been trying to pull over from the dark side (.Net guy) asked, “I’ve got an MXML Application with a button in it that I’d like to bind to a method–where’s the code behind.”

The simple answer of course is to point him to the “script” tag (let’s just forget code behind support was ever added to Flex). Rather than typing up a long winded response I made a quick and dirty Jing video to “show him around” Flex’s script tag (no deep explanation, I’m just teaching by “doing”).
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Jing Pro + FTP: A Complete Solution

Back when Jing was born and was all-SWF-all-the-time, I did a little tutorial and provided a few files that allowed you to easily setup up your own server that returned html links with the video embedded and Flash Player detection turned on. Now that Jing’s gone pro that solution won’t work with MPEG4-AVC files, so I dropped everything and reached back into my bag of tricks to produce a new template just for those tasty MP4 files (includes a video player, php page and some Flash detection files). (more…)

Pixel Bender + Video = Killer Runtime Effects

I’ve been playing with Pixel Bender a bit and noticed that there weren’t really any examples (I could find) that illustrated effects being applied to video. So I gathered together a whole slew of kernels from the interweb, downloaded a copy of Dancing Matt and shoehorned them into a media player that allows you to select and apply the effects during video playback. (more…)

After Effects Spotlight Effect

*Update*

I highly recommend you check out a much more recent tutorial I did that illustrates how to use After Effects’ built-in 3d spotlights.

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Sometimes you really just want to emphasize a particular area in a screencast which means if you’re like me its time to dust off your favorite compositor (After Effects in my case) and add a little visual magic. This short screencast (2:40) gives you a leg up if you’re chasing this technique. (more…)