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A tale of two conferences - part 1 of 2
In the past three days I've been to two conferences. One was the Future of Web Apps (FOWA) conference in Kensington, the second was the Talk About Local Unconference 2009 at Staffordshire University.
It's going to take a bit of time to write up so here's the first part, devoted to the first day at Fowa...
FOWA 2009 - the Future of Web Apps
There is nothing as inspirational as the story of success, or so goes the theory behind trade and business conferences.
Creating an RSS feed player (step one) [UPDATE]
I've had a go at making my own RSS players before in Flash, but tended to give up as soon as it involved getting into the nitty-gritty of parsing the XML, with references to children and all that malarkey.
Then there's applications such as Google's Ajax Feed API which is pretty much useful in most situations when I've need to get an RSS list into a web page.
Here's an example on The Sentinel website.
I've decided to have another go at it for two reasons. 1) Just to prove to myself that I can. 2) to learn some basic principles that I can use for building more sophisticated projects all based on XML scripts.
The player below is my first attempt at building a reader using one of Flash evangelist Lee Brimelow simple-but-brilliant video tutorials.
As you can see, the package works, but there is all sorts of extraneous HTML junk that I'll now need to sift through to make it fully useable.
If anyone can show me a really simple way of parsing through the gubbins then great. If not, I'll keep scratching around until I find something that works
UPDATE: Just one attribute was needed to make the change. Instead of feeding the XML feed into a clip with the attribute movieClip.text, it should have been movieClip.htmlText and then it works. Even brings in pictures.
Web links for March 10, 2009
Is this man really juggling a shark? Website Cracked.com has found out how this and five other 'WTF' pictures were created. It's The True Stories Behind 5 Famous WTF Images. It's certainly worth a look.
Flash problems: resolved with a little help from Senocular
Flash problems: resolved.
I remember some advice that if you can't work out a problem by thinking and thinking about, try sleeping on it. And it's worked - in a way.
I posted yesterday my frustration about some actionscript that I wanted to use in developing an interactive map, although the code kept returning errors.
Answer: a quick post to Actionscript.org allowed me to explain my problem.
Flash troubles: Error #1010 and #1069 [RESOLVED]
Another frustrating afternoon trying to extend a map using actionscript 3.0.
Essentially, I've created a series of buttons to which I've added event handlers to the .CLICK, .MOUSE_OVER and .MOUSE_OUT states.
What I want to do then is use the syntax of
buttonvariable.addEventListener(MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT, onMouseOut);
To send each handler to a single function which will then deal with each event accordingly.
In the case of the onMouseOut function, I was hoping to use something like
function onMouse (e:Event) :void {
Flash AS 3.0 custom video player code
Finally, after a week of trawling forums, running traces and generally stumbling around in the dark, I've finally got my code for a working custom video player. For anyone who is interested, here it is. Next to get the scrubber bar to scrub...
stop();
var videoInterval = setInterval(videoStatus, 100);
var amoundLoaded:Number;
var duration:Number
var playTime:Number
//if someone clicks back to home button, do just that.
mainBtn.addEventListener (MouseEvent.CLICK, returnHome);
function returnHome (e:MouseEvent)
{
ns.pause();
gotoAndStop("main");
}
Actionscript 3.0: grappling with error #2001
I'm grappling with some code to make a custom video player work in Actionscript 3.0 at the moment, but not getting very far.
This is the code:
stop();
var nc:NetConnection = new NetConnection();//this establishes a connection to the internet
nc.connect(null);//this tells Flash that this isn't a Flash Communication Server project
var playPause:Boolean = new Boolean(); //setting up the play/pause control
pauseVid = false;
var ns:NetStream = new NetStream(nc);
var meta:Object = new Object();
meta:onMetaData = function (meta:Object)
{
trace(meta.duration);
Actionscript 3.0: a steep learning curve
Arrgh! I'm trying to broaden my skills by creating some Flash-based packages for the website. I've created one which is a simple newsmap which I want to upgrade to include an RSS feed reader. The problem is that the newsmap was written in Actionscript 2.0 and the code for the reader is in Actionscript 3.0, and the two don't go together easily. I've managed to upgrade the map part to run in AS 3.0, but the reader part just doesn't work. You can see the full newsmap/rss reader package in this link.
Get stuck in
If you want to learn something new, there's no better way than getting stuck in and having a go. That's what life is about, yes?
Anyway, having been tempted for some time to create my own website I've finally decided to take what little site-building knowledge I've got and take the plunge.
I'm a print journalist by training, but I've also dabbed in video and audio, as well as a touch of Flash and web-design.
Photos
