Hey readers. I haven’t been updating in the last few weeks for personal reasons. I’m back now.

I’m working on a release version for my first public AIR app, and on a redesign for this blog to match a little better with my new portfolio.

I’ve just made my first commit to GitHub, and it consists of a modified version of as3syndication lib that will work in the Flash IDE. You may recall that earlier I proposed the fix and offered the files here. Now, if you prefer, you can just go to my profile at GitHub.

The people may now rejoice.

I’m pleased to formally announce the relaunch of my portfolio at www.agitcraft.com. It’s been a long,  winding, mostly poorly organized effort on my part consisting of numerous missteps and restarts. I’ve technically been working on this iteration of the site for about 4 months (from scratch), although I’ve been grinding away at redesign efforts both with this domain and with my previous portfolio at altpixel.net for well over two years now. To give you a vague idea of how long this has been brewing, the svn I’ve been working out of is currently in revision 381 after going through at least 4 branches, and I’m the only person developing this.

I’d also like to take this opportunity to give credit where credit is due:

• Jack Doyle for the greensock tweening platform (which makes all the animation in the site possible), without which I’m sure I would have gone crazy long ago.
• The entire Papervision3d team for their excellent 3D package, which powers the 3D “solar system” motif that I use to display my interface.
• The team of developers who’ve thus far worked on as3syndicationlib. There were a couple issues I ran into, but they were minor in the long run and they certainly don’t take away from the fact that I was able to parse and consolidate 5 feeds in real time with only a few lines of code. Awesome!
• The developers of PureMVC, for making a framework that has literally changed the way that I work on large projects and made my site possible.
• Matt McInerny at the League of Movable Type for providing the fantastic “Raleway” typeface I’m using both in my logo and for section headers.
• An anonymous sound fx provider at flashkit.com for providing the ominous intro tune that plays when the site loads. I say anonymous because I was inattentive when I grabbed the audio and forgot to take note of the name/location of the file I snagged. I dug around today but could not, for the life of me, find the file on there. If anybody recognizes it let me know and I’ll give a proper shout out.

The wealth of libraries and tools freely available is part of what makes Flash such an exciting platform to develop for. I certainly could not have completed a project of this scale without them.

Anyway, if you like the site let other people see it. If you have problems with it let me know. I’m hoping this remains a growing work rather than a one-off showpiece.

This is how I do it.

I’ve just updated Vidiot to use the Sprint 10 release of Adobe’s OSMF, and I’ve added a bug fix that will allow streaming video from Edgecast.

To view a demo, check out my original post. The latest files, along with a sample application, can be found by clicking here.

Now that Flash CS5 has been released (I have yet to obtain a copy), I’m looking forward to looking into my most highly anticipated feature: The XFL file format!

Lee Brimelow has a new post up where he explains what the new format is and how it works.

Thibault Imbert just released the first chapter of his forthcoming eBook, “What Can You Do With Bytes?” I’m excited. You should be too.

On a side note, how does one pronounce “Thibault?” I’m guessing it sounds something like “Tee-Bo.”

I’ll be releasing the very earliest version of an AIR app I’m working on some time soon. I have a huge list of features that I want to provide for it, and the first release won’t get near accomplishing them, but thanks to a tutorial I checked out today I feel confident offering incremental upgrades.

What tutorial did I read? This tutorial on providing automatic update functionality to AIR apps! Many thanks to Greg Wilson for the super-easy tutorial and useful sample files.

Recently I spent some time setting up Red5 on my web server. If you’re familiar with the project, and if you’ve attempted to set it up yourself, you’re probably aware that this is no easy feat. The team behind Red5 is notorious, in my mind, for not maintaining their project page very well (at all), so many of the links that should direct you to helpful content don’t actually go anywhere.

Anyway, to make a long story short I did eventually get the bloody thing installed. How do I celebrate? With a demo for you to sink your teeth into?

Not yet.

Instead I spent a few minutes today customizing my Red5 welcome screen and the demos page associated with it. Allow me to present you with a before and after.

Before:

Original Welcome Screen

Original Samples Screen

After:

Welcome to Agitcraft Media Server

Check out the Sample Apps!

For the most part these are just simple modifications of the pages that are included in Red5 by default. In practice, they’ll only really be seen by me, but the little things count.

Apparently the developers working on Adobe’s OSMF have just released Sprint 10. So much for my Sprint 9 based video player. I’m going to get to work on updating it to use the latest release.