Aral on Flash, SWX, Flex, ActionScript, and life.
Sussex Digital, the community initiative by my friends Dave and Josh, has just published a page that showcases conferences taking place in Brighton, UK. Currently, BarCampBrighton, d.construct, and Flash on the Beach are listed.
Check out Sussex Digital for all things digital in Sussex!
The other day I noticed that the hundreds of messages you guys had sent to me in the past few months through the Nabaztag bunny widget on my blog had disappeared. At first I thought that it was a problem with the Nabaztag web site, a visual glitch, surely they could not have deleted them? For a web application, deleting user's data without copious amounts of notice is tantamount to shooting yourself in the foot repeatedly while yelling, "Hey, look at how unbelievably stupid I am, I don't deserve to be in business!"
Unfortunately, deleting the messages is exactly what Nabaztag did.
Here's the first response they sent to my support email:
When they are not played again, archived messages are stored for a two months period. We will now extend this period to 6 months (and also explain this rule on the website).
We really do apologize for the inconvenience.
Firstly, this is not an inconvenience. An inconvenience is your site being down for a couple of hours. Deleting people's data without informing them is a very serious matter.
Furthermore, a great number of the messages that were deleted were less than two months old. So I emailed them again and received this response:
Ok, you were refering to messages sent through the API. These only have a lifetime of one day. I'm sorry, but we cannot provide more time for these messages as they can reach (as in your case) a huge volume.
I don't know which is worse, that they delete messages after one day without telling people or that they are so dumb as to save the MP3s of the messages instead of just the text. If they did the latter, they wouldn't have a storage issue. Instead, they choose to give fuck all respect to their user's data and delete their messages.
And, contrary to what their support department maintains, it has not always been this way. My archive had hundreds of messages and none of them were deleted until the whole lot was deleted in one go the other day. They just decided to implement this policy one day and delete people's messages without even the common courtesy of giving us any warning so we could back things up.
This sucks, Nabaztag. And yes, I'm angry.
Some of you put a lot of effort into sending my some amazing messages and I was looking forward to featuring the best ones on this blog. Now they're all lost.
Nabaztag, I strongly urge you to reverse this ridiculous policy and start respecting your user's data.
Until Nabaztag wakes up, if you're using the Nabaztag API or receiving messages on your Nabaztag that you care about preserving, either have the online interface email you (so you have a backup) or save the messages in your own database before making the API call.
I personally apologize from any of you who sent me bunny messages through my widget for not backing them up and safeguarding them better. Like a fool, I trusted Nabaztag. Unlike Nabaztag, I place a great deal of importance on your creativity, time, and effort, whether in leaving me a comment on my blog or sending me witty bunny messages to brighten up my day. (And I really loved some of the clever messages you guys sent to me over the past few months.)
Nabaztag may not be sorry, but I am.
Update: I got another email this morning and it looks like things are changing. Here's what it reads:
I think I have some good news for you.
**None of your messages have been deleted.**
They are all stored, not in your received messages, not in the archived one, but in your sent messages (when using the API, you're the one sending the messages). Go to the website in the 'Sent' tab and you should see them all.
In the future I would also recommend you to turn on the e-mail notification of messages, so that you have also a copy of your messages in your e-mail (oh wait, you already did this).
Well this is a relief. I'm not entirely certain but I don't believe they were there yesterday. I am definitely sure that that's not where they used to be so this is the result of some change at some point (they used to go in the Received messages and I could archive them, in which case they would appear under the archived messages.) In any case, I'm just happy to have my messages back and now I'm going to manually go through 476 pages of messages to copy them for safekeeping. Don't you want my job?
It would be great if Nabaztag could confirm what their latest policy is with regards to messages so that we know and can plan accordingly, especially when building applications that use the API. It is in their interests to keep the messages (as text, not MP3s) indefinitely as it will also mean that people use their web site instead of using other people's sites to manage their messages in the long term.
Update: Well, I just made it to page 30 of 476 and my arms are tired from all the copy and pasting from their web site into Numbers. Can we please have a feature to back up/export these messages? Even if it's just a single page that dumps them all at once so we can copy and paste. This is going to take hours otherwise.
Update: Looks like Nabaztag's support has come through in the end. Franck from the Nabaztag Infirmary just sent me an Excel file with all the messages from the API. Thanks -- that's saved me a few hours of copy and paste! 
I'm going to be adding to the documentation and screencasts in the run-up to the release of Version 1 so expect them to grow substantially over the next two weeks.
As part of the update, I've broken the documentation up into several pages: SWX PHP now has its own page, as do the SWX APIs, and SWX RPC for Flash Lite (Mobile).
Each page is made up of one or more topics. You can leave comments on specific topics as well as on the pages themselves.
I hope the new documentation makes SWX even easier to understand and play with.
The SWX web site now has a new SWX Showcase page dedicated to showcasing your work with SWX. I've added Eugene's experiments from the other day, including a new one he sent me two days ago called Flower Field:
In Flower Field by Eugene, a lovely green field fills with multi-colored flowers that react to your mouse. The flower heads are made from randomly-selected flower images from Flickr.
Have you made something using SWX? Leave me a link to it and I'll include it in the SWX Showcase. SWX is all about making it easier for you to develop data-driven Flash and Flash Lite applications and mashups so get crackin' and share the amazing things you do with the world!
Wordpress lets you create pages that contain static content. The Talks and About pages on this blog are two examples. Unfortunately, until now you could not include posts inside of these static pages. With my new Inline Posts Wordpress Plugin (version 2.1.2g) (2KB), you can!
See the SWX Showcase and SWX documentation pages on swxformat.org for an example of the plugin in use.
Download and install the plugin and you can include posts in pages (and other posts) by entering the Post ID surrounded by double square brackets ([[nnnn]] where nnnn is the numeric ID of the post you want to include).
The ability to include posts in pages is something I've felt the need for several times in the past. Basically, the idea is to use posts as sections within a page, with the post title appearing as the section header.
Most recently, I wanted to create the SWX documentation for the SWX homepage as a series of blog posts. This way, each section could have comments on it and I could easily update a single section by editing a post and change the order of sections on the page by changing the order of simple tags that correspond to the posts. I could also show atomic last-modified info for each section so it would be immediately obvious if any sections drift woefully out of date (something that can easily happen to long pieces of documentation).
Since this functionality didn't exist (and believe me, I searched far and wide on the Internets), I decided to roll up my sleeves and try my hand at creating my first Wordpress plugin. It was not a difficult process once I tracked down the hook I needed to latch onto and blew the relearned regular expressions for the umpteenth time.
That's it!
You can also include posts in other posts using this method (though I'm not entirely sure why you would want to!) And, since pages are really just posts (confused yet?), you can use the Page ID to include a page in a post or a page in another page too if you really feel like that will make your life better!
To see an example of it in use, look at the Wordpress page on this blog as you will see this post included in it. Note that this is the first version of the plugin and I'm testing it out as I go. It's only been tested (and not much, at that) on Wordpress 2.1.2. I've tested it on 2.1.2, 2.3.x, and it's running well on 2.5. That said, use at your own risk!
I hope this plugin will be as useful for you as it has been for me.
If you'd like your wonderful new pages to show up in searches, install the Search Pages 2.0 plugin. The two plugins work together well but you will get included posts returned as well as the pages in which they are included (which is expected behavior). Even if your pages are entirely made up of posts, having them show up in searches within the context of the page is still useful.
Finally, you may not want the posts that you include in pages to appear on the front page of your blog (or perhaps, not even in your site's feed or in the archives). You can exclude inline posts from these places by using the Ultimate Category Excluder (UCE) by Kyle Slattery. Install this plugin and then put all the posts that you don't want to appear on the main page in a separate category (on SWXFormat.org, I chose "Documentation" as the category to exclude). Then, in the Options panel for UCE, check the "Exclude from Main Page?" option next to that category.
For some reason the number of comments on a post is not displaying correctly on Wordpress 2.0.2 (on this blog). It does display correctly with 2.1.2.
The Inline Posts Wordpress Plugin is released under the open source MIT license.
Denise Wilton, Moo's graphic designer and community manager and co-founder of B3ta, mentions the SWX Moo cards in a blog post titled You and the awesome things you do.
How cool! Thanks, Denise!
(I was lucky enough to hear Denise speak at a Girl Geek Dinner here in Brighton and was very surprised to hear that it was one of her first talks -- she's a natural speaker and I really enjoyed the talk. She's going to be back in Brighton in September to give a talk titled Human Traffic with George Oates at dConstruct 2007.)
Update: See these experiments and more on the new SWX Showcase.
In Flickr Fractal, the screen slowly fills up with pictures from Flickr. Click on a picture to see it larger.
In Flickr Desktop, photo thumbnails are flung randomly onto a virtual desktop. Click to drag (and fling) photos around. Double-click a photo to see it larger. Right-click to change the placement of photos (to see only photos, drawings, the last twenty or a random selection) and to go full screen.
In Flickr Word, you type some text and see it displayed using Flickr photos, either as a font, or (as in the screenshot above) with pictures of letters. Right-click to access the various options. In full-screen mode, I was able to use the scroll-wheel (two-finger dragging on my MacBook Pro's trackpad) to quickly change the zoom factor.
Eugene, thanks so much for sharing these with us and, as I mentioned in my comment earlier, I'd love to hear about your experience with SWX and the SWX Flickr API and whether you have any suggestions for improvements.
If you have experiments of your own that use SWX, get in touch with me in the comments or send me a bunny message!
(Check out Eugene's site and click on the airplane to control it with the mouse and pop the balloons. Very cool!)
OK, this one's big, so listen up! There's going to be a Flash Player update today on Adobe labs that changes the game when it comes to web video and audio: Flash Player 9 Update 3 (Beta 2) will be supporting hardware accelerated, multi-core enhanced fullscreen video playback of H.264 video and HE-AAC audio (the compression standards in MPEG-4 and the same standard deployed in Blu-Ray® and HD-DVD® high definition video players).
Why is this exciting?
In a nutshell, H.264 is the same standard being used to broadcast high-definition television by the likes of BBC HD, DirecTV, and Sky HD. H.264 provides great video quality and does so across the bandwidth spectrum from 3G (mobile phones) to HD while using up about half the bandwidth of MPEG-2. And there's already a wealth of H.264 content out there that Flash can now play. Specifically, this includes MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, and 3g2 files. (And even songs from your iPod that are not protected by FairPlay DRM as they're in H.264/AAC format too!)
Here's a quick FAQ about H.264 video support in Flash Player 9 Update 3 that should answer most of the important questions. For an in-depth technical analysis, read Tinic Uro's blog post titled What just happened to video on the web? and for more commentary, read Ryan Stewart's post, Flash Player supports H.264 video, on ZDNet.com.
Does H.264 in Flash Player support alpha channel?
No. Our first implementation does not support alpha channels using H.264, but we plan to implement this feature in the next major release.
Will I be able to put On2 VP6 streams into the new MPEG-4-based file format?
The Flash Player 9 beta will not playback On2 VP6 encoded video in the new file format.
Will Flash Player 9 Update 3 support non-FLV files/extensions?
Yes, with this update, Flash Player will also support MPEG-4 standard container files that contain video and audio data encoded using H.264/AAC, including MP4, M4V, M4A, MOV, Mp4v, 3gp, 3g2.
What are the minimum system requirements for viewing H.264-based content in Flash Player?
The minimum system requirements for viewing H264-based content will be similar to other media players supporting H264 in the market today. There will be a full list of system requirements and their associated playback capabilities posted on adobe.com when Flash player 9 is released.
Will H.264 be included in AIR? When will it appear in the AIR Labs releases?
Yes, H.264 will be included in AIR 1.0. It is expected to be available to AIR developers in a public beta on Adobe Labs later this year.
Will the Adobe Flash Media Server support H.264 content?
Yes, the next version of Flash Media Server will support streaming of H.264 content and AAC content - both live and on demand. More details on this will be released later in the year.
Will there be an updated FLV File Format Specification? When will it be available?
Yes, Adobe plans to make the updated specification available after the final release. The specification will describe the new MPEG-4-based file format container supported by Adobe Flash Player.
When will Flash Player 9 Update 3 ship?
Flash player 9 Update 3 is expected to be available from the Adobe Flash Player Download Center later this Fall.
What parts of the H.264 license are included when I buy Adobe Products?
The end user license to the Adobe Flash Player allows users to playback H.264 content for your own non-commercial use. Commercial use of the Flash Player to decode H.264 video may require a separate license.
What are H.264’s licensing terms?
Licensing terms for H.264 are available at www.mpegla.com and www.vialicensing.com.
What is MPEG LA?
MPEG LA is in the business of offering users access under one license to essential patents for standards-based technologies owned by many patent holders. MPEG LA provides these licenses as a convenience to the market in order to save users the time and expense of negotiating individual licenses with multiple patent owners and the resulting payment of many separate royalties. The licenses offered by MPEG LA include patents that are essential to implementation of H.264.
When does MPEG LA require payment of a use fee or royalty, and do I need my own license for H.264?
MPEG-LA has a number of categories where parties may be required to obtain a license and pay a royalty. Categories include: AVC Products, Title-By-Title Video, Subscription AVC Video, and Internet Broadcast AVC video, among others. Most categories apply to commercial uses and implementations, but some apply more broadly. Whether the license applies to your use; the applicable royalty; and the threshold for application of the royalty varies for each category. You will need to contact MPEG LA or review the license terms to determine if your use falls within a particular category. MPEG LA has posted a FAQ and has a Q&A Department (email qanda {at} mepgla(.)com) for those questions not answered by the FAQ.
I was reading an article on the Guardian's web site when I came across one of the funniest Flash ads I've seen. Unfortunately, I was laughing at it instead of with it
The ad, for British Airways, (screenshot above) scrolls down from the picture to a message but, get this, there's a scroll bar next to it. They used a scroll pane component in a Flash ad! Wow! Talk about overkill (or lazy... or both?!) Refresh the linked article a few times and you might just catch the actual ad.
Regardless, I guess it made me blog it so maybe it's not a bad ad after all!
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