SOME RANDOM DUDE

A while back, I wrote a small article about why I felt Silverlight should fail. The writeup generated a lot of good conversation and a bit of ire from Silverlight supporters (such as this example) so I thought it would be beneficial to write a followup. Let me try to make this clear, I am not a Flash fanboy. While I use Flash to pay the bills, I have written about my concerns with Flash. It is my belief that use of Flash on the web (and other RIA technologies) will continue to dwindle as open-source solutions that provide similar solutions take their place. Even if Silverlight usurps Flash (something I greatly doubt), there may not be much of a kingdom to reign upon once they do. I think Adobe sees this shift, I am unsure if Microsoft does.
(more…)adobe, air, browser plugin, cross browser, cross platform, flash, flex, javascript, microsoft, open source, ria, silverlight standards

I am putting more work into my Layout Organizers project for various reasons. First, this code has already been quite helpful on a couple projects. Second, it is going to be worked in to a really cool open source Flex library. There are still a ton of features that need to be added and issues that need to be resolved, but progress is definitely being made. I spent time working on more primitive layout organizers that will be more helpful on everyday projects. The four new organizers are not anything fancy, but they will most likely be the most used out of all the ones I write.

(more…)actionscript, as3, demo, flash player, lattice, layout organizers, open source organizers

A ton of political current events are in this week’s links. Considering the theme of this blog, I do not get into politics as it would be radically off-topic. Still, the weekly links opens the door for a broader range of subject - something I hope you as the audience enjoys. If you would rather have more web-based links, please let me know and I will find a way to make that work in this format.

Enjoy the links.

(more…)911, actionscript 3, airplane graveyard, airport security, album, anti war, audience, big business, blog, bush, cd, chore wars, college, court, current events, earth2tech, environment, environmental blog, executive branch, firefox 3, fit pc, global warming, google, google maps, harriet miers, hdr, hell on earth, house, housework, hummer, illegal, infowindows, internet tv, iraq war, jail, Keith Olbermann, law, links, makingroom, military, mindquarry, miro, mitt romney, motor physics, open source, passchendaele, photograph, Photography, plane, politics, prince, public broadcasting, republicans, riaa, rpg, scooter nap, terror, terrorism, textbooks, troops, tsa, uvsc, web based, webcuts, weekly, wwi, yahoo yahoo maps api

Silverlight has been quite the buzz around the internet lately. Microsoft’s new product explicitly takes aim at Flash as they try to take on the rich media arena. Up to this point, Flash has basically stood alone at the top as the rich media standard for the browser. I will explain why, from my point of view, I do not see Silverlight changing that reality any time in the near (or far) future.

(more…)adobe, adoption, browser market, buzz, DRM, flash player, flash player plugin, flex 3, flv, future flash, internet explorer 6, internet explorer 7, internet users, media arena, media companies, microsoft, microsoft product, netflix, netscape internet explorer, new product, open software, open source, open sourcing, penetration, ria, rich internet applications, rich media, silverlight, software companies, swf, tamarin, video on the web, video sites, video websites, web developers, web development community, wmv file youtube

Yesterday, I published a video visualization experiment that used a color sampling engine to drive realtime data-driven abstractions of a video. I promised that I would release the color sampling class with some documentation and an example. Well, I was fortunately enough to have a chunk of time to do just that.

The color sampling class has been documented and gone through an optimization pass. Depending on the implementation of the sampler, performance can begin to get relatively shaky. Nonetheless, the video sampling was able to sample and spit out results at a fairly impressive pace.

Download the Actionscript 3 color sampler class (Licensed under the GNU Public License).abstractions, actionscript 3, as3, color sampler, color sampling, data driven, flash, flash actionscript, free download, gnu public license, implementation, open source, optimization, realtime data, sampler class, video color, video sampling visualization