Shaykh Al-Flash Amir Memon on the Flash Platform

If you google "FLV Player" you get several different FLV players that the community has made. A friend of mine recently asked me if there are any that I have had a good experience with, and I was surprised that he was even asking me this given that there is the Adobe Media Player (AMP).

But yeah, I just wanted to point out to people out there that AMP (Adobe Media Player) can play FLVs!!!

I've tried it on only Windows so far, but I'd think it can play FLVs on all three major platforms (win/mac/lnx) since there is an AMP available on each.

1. Install Adobe Media Player from here: http://get.adobe.com/amp/ (click at the bottom of that flash box)

2. On Windows, right-click an FLV file, hover over "Open With.." then select Adobe Media Player.

3. And bada bing, you've got your FLV playing.

I can't remember, but there was a specific reason (having to do with CS4 compatibility or something) that they didn't register .FLV's default player to be AMP, but I'd imagine you can do that manually if you don't want to do the right-click->open with... thing.

Developers: If you don't like the idea that you have to install AMP (which serves many purposes other than just playing FLVs), you can probably make your own lean FLV player using AIR. If you do, it'd be super cool if you open sourced it, and shared bins. Just a thought.

Posted by Amir Memon at 9:42 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/releasenotes.html#features_ocre See "Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access"

I've been wanting this feature in for the longest time... and now it's in the flash player (currently in beta).

Basically now you can create Flash games that go in full screen mode and be able to use certain keys that are often used by games. We had initially prevented keyboard access altogether for security reasons... like phishing... but i guess you can't really phish too much out of arrow keys, space bar, enter, etc.... but you can make some great games this way.

Hope you guys like this new feature :-)

Posted by Amir Memon at 4:03 PM | Permalink | Comments (0)

http://www.infoworld.com/archives/emailPrint.jsp?R=printThis&A=/article/08/01/21/03FE-25-tech-failures_1.html

Interesting list. Ipod imitators, vista, 64-bit PCs, Netscape 6, and DRM are all on there.

I don't agree with all of it though, for example, the concept of a paperless environment. At Adobe (and at old school macromedia for that matter), we REALLY do have a paperless environment. I mean of course we have a standard laser printer / fax machine like any other office environ, but the vast majority of our communication is paperless. We use wikis heavily and (of course) pdfs. In college i remember reading about "The Paper Paradox" which basically said that computers and networking are supposed to reduce paper, but because of the ease of printing, paper consumption has actually increased. To that I say that it takes not just the technology needed to go paperless, but also a generation that grew up paperlessly. If students were to turn in their essays via PDF and/or Word docs, they'll grow up doing the same. And besides, look at what craigslist has done to the newspaper industry. But yeah, it's still debatable.

Also, I use vista at work, and it works fairly well if you disable UAC. My computer is freakin' fast though (at the time of this writing). Vista does make HW installation smoother (even though the article says the opposite), and trouble shooting works pretty well too. I used to use google desktop, now i use vista's native searching, which i like a little better since its native. The task bar is a little less buggy. I don't like the new start menu (even though a good friend of mine worked on the usability research for it)... too much clicking. But yeah, i could have lived with XP. I can't wait until like Ubuntu or some other Linux becomes a lot more user friendly (and Adobe AIR could be the answer to this when we release a Linux version by the way).

Posted by Amir Memon at 9:57 AM | Permalink | Comments (0)

This is some crazy awesome stuff, it's a Google Street View on steroids. They turn the world into a virtual reality 3D game, and make it possible to collect all kinds of data in the map... this is truely next-gen stuff. And guess what, it's made in flash and Papervision 3D. Papervision 3D is a set of 3D libraries for flash written in AS3.

Check out the video:

Posted by Amir Memon at 9:17 AM | Permalink | Comments (4)

http://www.linerider.com

Ever make a really awesome Line Rider track, and wanted to share it with your friend so that they could not only view it, but can also work on it themselves?

well you can, it's really easy, and here's how...

Continue reading "Line Rider : share your track with your friends" »

Posted by Amir Memon at 10:04 AM | Permalink | Comments (2)