Mo-Snaps at CES Monday 2008-01-07
Aloa!!
We are life at CES in Las Vegas presenting mobile snaps at the Berry review site!
Indeed we made it. Some hard days and nights for the team after we got the chance with very short notice.
Hopefully the server copes with the load.
[Edit]Well, the Berry Review uploaded just a few images from their BlackBerry phone, and now they lifted the Mo-snaps widget out.
You can still see the Berry widget on the maufait blog.
[Edit 08-03-01] Not even that is true anymore – I guess I have to keep you updated. Enjoyed it as long as it lasted. Soon the MoSnaps service will leave it’s closed beta for the first launch.
The Mobile Snapshots Saturday 2008-01-05
Ever wanted to keep your friends continuously updated on the great life of yours? Now you can! Oh well, I know you could already snap a picture of your reality using your mobile phone, and immediately send it as an MMS to your friends. And yes, some of you might even send video from your 3G phone.
So what’s the deal? You’d expect I tell you, right?
Indeed, the news is a service at maufait.com to which you can upload your mobile phone images, and have them presented on the web in a nice Flash widget. Now all your friends can follow you on line, as you rush through your life mo-snapping whatever you find significant. You don’t have to MMS them one at a time. Your images are saved at the maufait site and you can include a nifty widget on your own site, to present the mobile snaps. The service is called Mo-Snaps, and I am happy to code the Flash widget.
What’s the catch here? As it stands right now, you have to be invited to participate. The whole thing is in beta state. The upload only works for BlackBerry phones, but development is under way for any Java enable phone. There is already a MIDP application for Java phones, but a test on my SE 810i failed, so there are still work to be done on that application.
Sooner or later this service will work for all of us.
Starting this Sunday the Berry Review will hopefully report from the CES in Las Vegas, using this service.
Have a look!
Edit Your Photos Online Monday 2006-11-13
One of the characteristics of the Web 2.0 era, is the fast emergence of net top applications. Making good on the old SUN slogan, “The Net it the computer”, these applications run on some server anywhere on the globe, and only its user interface shows up on the client machine. No need for installation and immediate access from any personal computer or workstation.
One of the more nifty net top applications I’ve run across lately is the pixer.us On Line Photo editor.
It works like this: You upload an image to the server through their client GUI, and when it shows up, you can start editing away to your hearts content. You may crop and resize your image, and you can adjust its color balance, contrast and lightness. You can make it B&W if you like, and you can apply some artistic filtering to make it look like marble or an oil painting.
You can undo your last change or revert to the original, if you do mistakes. Once you are satisfied with your changes, you click the Save button and download the resulting image. You can choose the image format by clicking a button for JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP.
The application GUI is beautiful and very intuitive, so the learning is shot to none. Before you join pixer.us, you can work with a test image. Go ahead and test the pixar.us Online Photo Editor. I had great fun testing the application. From the test image I cropped out one of the girls, saturated the colors a bit and applied the oil painting filter.
The original photo
The moving Flickr API Thursday 2006-09-14
I like free services like the Flickr image sharing service, and I’m not alone. Not only is it a easy way of sharing your photos with anyone connected to the Internet. You can choose who has access to your images or some of them, you can get them commented on if you are so inclined. And new ways for presenting your images pops up quite often. It’s a popular service and developers come up with innovative applications for selecting and presenting images all the time.
The applications rest on public API:s for authentication, and request for images in different sizes and other criteria, as how they are tagged, how popular they are, who owns the image, and so forth.
There is a problem with this, if the service endpoint, i.e. the URL of the service, is hard coded into the application. For my own flickr badge, called petikr I noticed a whilde ago, that it ceased to show any images. I thought the service was temporarily down, or bogged down. I am ashamed to admit, I didn’t discover until today, that the damage was permanent.
Sorry if you have problems with it! It is fixed now.
I googled for “flash flickr stopped working”, to see if someone had the same problem. Oh, yes. And some of them knew why and had the solution, like Doug Marttila at “Forest and Trees“, author of findr. Flickr changed its service endpoint just slightly.
I wrote a tutorial on how to build your own Flickr Flash Display, in quite a few steps, each having its own demo. all of them was compiled using Kelvin Lucks Flashr wrapper for the API. The API endpoints needed by the application is hard coded into the Flicks class of the library.
I did a lot of experimenting with Flashr at the time, and now I had to find all the correct versions of the example in my tutorial, and recompile them using the same version of the flashr library, updated with the new service endpoint.
That is hard work, and although it is nice not to have external setup files, I think maybe one should. Flash can easily read in data from a text file, XML based or not. It is good for volatile data such as developing protocols or moving web services.
Graffiti for the Web Tuesday 2006-09-05
Among all wonderful things, that pops up on the web, as a result of new standards and standards compliance, my latest stumble find is amazing. Virtual Street Art – Graffiti for the Web presented by Draw Here, is an application, that allows you to draw images on top of any web page and save it in the Draw Here repository. Anyone can go to the Draw Here site to look at the graffiti comments of others. Look at my first attempt to draw on my own site, to get an idea of how it looks.[Edit: Someone killed my image :/]
The application, using javascript and the canvas has all you need to make beautiful graffiti. You can vary the pen size and chose and tune colors from a palette, and set color transparency. You can create and draw on stacked layer and even set the overall transparency of any layer. To easily work on one layer at a time, you can hide and show any layer.
You launch the Draw Here application directly from their site or using a bookmarklet sitting on bookmarks toolbar. You can even include a launch button on you web page, to let visitors draw on any page you want.
If you want to save your work at the Draw Here web site and get it rated, you have to sign up for an account. They have the fastest sign up form I’ve seen. Just type in the user name and password you want in a slick little login form. If accepted, you are already logged in and ready to paint and save your first graffiti comment on any web page on the Net. Ajaxian wise, the page doesn’t even reload.
Sign up/log in and paint my world!
A Flash Browser On the Horizon? Monday 2006-08-21
Is the next browser generation based on on a Flash platform. This article by Matthew David at InformIT, may lead you to think so.
Here is a slightly modified version of his “Lorem Ipsum” demo case for presenting HTML or rather any XML content markup, styled by CSS. Both the XML and CSS are external files, brought together by a short Actionscript in the Flash movie. Both can easily be changed, wihtout touching the SWF. Read the article and draw your own conclusions!
A Decade with Flash Friday 2006-08-11
Flash celebrates its ten year anniversary inside Adobe, its new owner.
Turned down by the same company at its infancy, when its name was FutureSplash, Adobe now has great plans for Flash. It is to become more than just a platform for animations on the web, an application for desktops and mobile devices alike, according to Flash product manager Mike Downey.
In my opinion, Macromedia did a great job over the last years to lay the foundation for these new adventures. Most importantly they made Flash a platform for animations and video delivery, so popular that more than 90% of the browsers carries the Flash plugin.
They changed their obscure scripting language to a really powerful programming language with the introduction and development of Actionscript, an ECMA standard language, which make it possible to do some real programming on the Flash platform. After some strange behavior, mainly due to backward compatibility issues, they managed to turn Actionscript into a truly object oriented language.
Another important boast for Flash as a media platform came with Macromedia’s streaming video format, which makes it possible to serve video in either true streaming mode form a vido server or in what they call progressive download, where video can be streamed from an ordinary web server. If I cannot afford the rather expensive Video server, or I cannot run it with my service provider, I can settle for using just the web server. The user experience is almost the same in both cases.
All this builds a firm foundation for Flash as a media client on all kinds of devices. If you like to hear about the future of Flash from the horse’s mouth, CNet news.com has an interview with Mike Downey. Of course it is streaming video presented in your Flash player plugin.
Flickr Spinnr Now Stand Alone Thursday 2006-08-10
Headzoo and yours truly have released a new version of the Flickr Spinnr. The WordPress plugin has gotten a few bug fixes, to solve problems some users had. If you use a widget aware theme, you’ll be happy to know that the Spinnr is widgetized.
The real news is that the 0.4 version has a stand alone variant. This makes it possible for you, to include the rotating cube in any web site. The requirement is, of course, that you can run PHP on your server.
If you already installed the 0.3 version of the WP plugin, it doesn’t hurt to upgrade to 0.4.
Download it from Headzoo, unzip and upload to your server – simple as 1-2-3. Set options if you like.
Documentation is included in the distribution ( PDF ).
Have a look at the stand alone version here.
Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 4 Thursday 2006-04-06
In my tutorial series “Building a Flickr Flash Display“, I have come to Part 3. Here we go through the code needed to make the images of the display zoom out smoothly, when the user mouses over one of the thumbnails. We’ll also make a version in which the zooming in and out of randomly selected images is done automatically. It is fairly simple to accomplish the smooth and professionally looking behaviors, using the versatile Actionscript Tween class and its easing helper classes.
Please join me to craft a dynamic Flickr display.
Flickr Badge and XHTML, Part 3 Sunday 2006-03-26
Some progress is done on the stand in for the Flickr Badge, as we move on in the Petit Labs. In the tutorial “Building a Flickr Flash Display, Part 2“, we add some interactive dynamics to the image display. The beholder who’s eyes stare at the tiny thumbnails of our Flickered images, will be able to zoom in on any of them, to get a doubly sized version, by just pointing the mouse at it. As before, clicking an image will take the user to the Flickr page for that image. Come on and have some fun!
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