Posts Tagged ‘Open-source’
Flash vs HTML? What is wrong with you people??
Published by Ronny on June 4th, 2009 in Flash, General, HTML. 3 comments And I’m dead serious.
Let me start by saying that I am a passionate Actionscript Creative (if someday I might grow up, you can call me a Flash developer but not just yet) and I absolute love the web as it exists today. I love HTML and CSS. I even like Javascript (a bit) (it’s not my favorite, but we get along pretty good). So don’t go off thinking I’m taking sides.
What are we talking about today?
Earlier this week, Serge Jespers wrote about Adobe vs the open web, which kinda looked like a Flash vs HTML5 article from a distance (because let’s face it: The Adobe platform on the web is mainly the Flash platform). I had a lot of conversations about that in the past and the one thing I have come to conclude is that you can’t actually compare those to each other.
Not even remotely.
So to what should we compare it then?
People keep referring to the features that the Flash Player offers and which the developer might want to use. And then their statement goes on with ‘You can’t do that with HTML!‘
Of course you can’t! There are thousands of things you can do with Flash, which you just can’t pull of with HTML, CSS or Javascript. But if you really want to compare Flash and HTML, you gotta do it right:
Flash Player vs FireFox ( or IE or Safari or Opera or any other browser)
Timeline and Actionscript vs HTML and Javascript (and CSS if you really want)
(Please, stop throwing those vegetables at me… Thank you.)
Wordpress Theme SuperMini reloaded
Published by Ronny on January 15th, 2009 in Open-source, Wordpress, download. 15 comments A long time ago Smashing Magazine listed 100 of the best Wordpress themes. That list totally kicked ass to be honest. At one point I decided to restyle my poetry site. I took a look at their list and when I found the SuperMini theme, my choice was immediately made.After I downloaded the theme I realized a lot of features were missing: No searchbox, no searchresults page, no archives, no global archives, no blogroll support, no pages support, no 404 pages and a few design flaws…
I actually went on, and built those things myself. Later on I wanted to contact the orginal author (Patrick Behrend) of the theme to send him my updates but by the time I got to send my mail, his site was down and he completely dissappeared from the web. I never received an aswer regarding the theme updates I sent him.
By now the original download isn’t even online anymore, and Smashing Magazine disabled the link to the SuperMini theme (as it is a 404). So I recently decided to finish the theme, and translate it back to English and re-publish it. I thought the initial theme was awesome, and I figured it would be cool if other people would be able to actually use the completed theme. Read the rest of this entry »
Visualizr source
Published by Ronny on January 7th, 2009 in Actionscript, Flash. 3 comments A few people asked me for the Visualizr source. I always said I’d post it on my blog ‘pretty soon’… Well… It’s not pretty soon, but at least I didn’t totally forget about it. Anyway here’s the Actionscript class I made in a Flex Actionscript project
I did some pretty naughty things in there, but it worked out the way I wanted it… So be nice :p
Make sure you have got the MP3 tracks in place 
You’ll need at least one. Make sure you change the tracknames too.
Playr 2.0 is here!
Published by Ronny on December 18th, 2008 in Actionscript, Flash, Open-source, download. 2 comments It almost took me an eternity, but at last it’s there: Playr 2.0 is ready.Playr is a Flash Actionscript 3 class built to take the heavy lifting off your hands when building any kind of music player appliction in Flash, Flex or AIR. I put a lot of work and time in this project, and I think the result is amazing: Playr is hands down the easiest way to do so!
I’m very happy to finally release this. A lot of people helped me test it and gave me feedback.
That helped me a lot, and changed a lot of features. Special thanks to all of you!
I’ve put up a dedicated site for Playr where all of the information, code examples, downloads are gathered.
Head over there to read more about it!
More info:
Playr site: Click
Download Playr 2.0: Click
Playr 2.0 documentation: Click
Playr 2.0 is coming!
Published by Ronny on November 12th, 2008 in Actionscript, Flash, General, Open-source, Projects. No comments I just wanted to update you guys on how the update for the next version of Playr is progressing.In the past week, I’ve been pretty busy adding the finishing touches to the features and fixing the last few bugs that popped up. Most of the last-minute changes are a result of using the class in one of my own projects.
It’s then when I realized I’m missing some key features like adding the music directory, and some properties of the PlayrEvents. I also added some ear candy like fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods.
On a more functional note: I’ve abstracted the playlist to an independent class. So now you’re provided with lots and lots of ways to customize and manage your playlists.
The shuffle mode is now smart. In English that means the playlist remembers what songs have played and which ones haven’t.
Finally I’m happy to tell you guys won’t ever have to write an XML playlist file yourself. I’ve got a PHP4 and PHP5 version of PlayrDiscovr which reads a directory and returns the corresponding XML listing the tracks and their properties.
On top of that, I’ve got some help from other people (I still need to contact you guys) who are willing to help me out with building PlayrDiscover in ASP, Ruby and Python.
Even though I’m listing all of the new features, the Playr class is still the easiest way of implementing any kind of sound-feature in any Flash/Flex/AIR application. But the simplicity shouldn’t be a limitation, which it isn’t: you’re still able to build full-feature media-playing applications.
One of the little challenges I still have to tackle is the Tween problem. I’ve implemented fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods. Those methods actually tween the volume property of the Playr instance. The problem with that is when using the Playr class in a Flex project, you get a cool error message telling you it can’t import fl.transitions (which is the class package for the Tween class and the easing package).
I still haven’t figured out how to work around this problem. If any of you have any suggestion on this problem, feel free to tell me about it.
I plan on releasing Playr 2.0 in the coming week (or 2) depending on PlayrDiscovr impementations, final changes, demo’s and site development (yes, I’m building a dedicated site for Playr ) Feel free to suggest other implementations you’d like
