To round off this series of blog posts about the MAX Unawards application I thought it would be fun to compile some outtakes and bloopers.

Oh… And here are a couple of fun facts I didn’t tell you yet ;-)

• Wim didn’t bring any black shoes to the studio so he’s wearing my sneakers. They were at least 3 sizes too big ;-)
• I spend a total of… wait for it… $700 on this application. The majority of that was for the studio rental.
• We rented the golden jacket.
• We bought the golden shirt.
• Wim took the golden shirt home and apparently his daughter absolutely loved it.

I had a lot of fun creating this application and I hope you have at least as much fun watching the videos and creating your own MAX Unawards video! And now… If you haven’t already created your own MAX Unaward now may be a good time to do so! All you need is an internet connection and a webcam. Just point your browser to http://max.adobe.com/widget!

Life in a Day
A few weeks ago YouTube and Ridley Scott announced a new project called Life in a Day. They asked everyone to record one day: July 24th. 80.000 videos were submitted to the project and YouTube just launched the official gallery which is viewable as a 3D sphere or a simple tiled list.

Vacationer
YouTube also launched a new branded travel channel. The new YouTube Vacationer travel channel includes videos with travel tips and advice from experts from National Geographic, Travel Channel, Howcast, and more. It features videos from Caribbean, European, U.S. and Canada, and “exotic” destinations. The interactive “Vacation You” feature allows you to create your own video for your dream vacation… Oh man… Watching these videos made me realize how much I’m in need of some vacation time… Until then I guess YouTube’s Vacationer will have to do… ;-)

Flash on!

Hello from Amsterdam! We have just launched the new version of Flash Media Server at IBC conference in three different versions: Streaming, Interactive and Enterprise. See comparison matrix (help me choose).

The features I am personally most excited about are:

- 64-bit support which brings tremendous streaming power!

- P2P/RTMFP support with server-side API, you get the same access to P2P network like Flash Player client, plus you can create a stable point from the server, very useful for distributed objects and databases. Next to that, you don’t need to use Adobe Stratus rendezvous-server and you can start building your own commercial P2P apps.

- Multicast support - stream multicast in H.264/on2 VP6 right from the Flash Media Live Encoder as well as control and manage multicast streams from the server. This also brings new possibilities to IP only multicast and multicast fusion (combination of application-level multicast and IP-only multicast).

- CentOS support

- Absolute timecode - to sync audio and video from different channels + combined with multibitrate streaming

- HTTP streaming - new delivery choice

and more…

Check Flash Media Server homepage for more details.

Read about other things we are launching at IBC.

Yahoo Taiwan and Hong Kong just rolled out a new feature for their search box. A new Flash based application allows you to hand-write your search queries.

Typing search queries in Chinese can be challenging especially for new computer users because it requires memorizing Chinese character mapping rules. Even experienced computer users don’t remember the mapping for all Chinese characters. The handwriting feature lowers the hurdle for people searching on Yahoo! Taiwan and Yahoo! Hong Kong.

This is another great example of how powerful Flash has become and how Flash has become so much more than a video player or animation tool! More info on Yahoo’s Search Blog.

UPDATE
Flexdude (a commenter from Beijing, China) informed me that Baidu (the most popular search engine in the Chinese language) already added the same feature a few months ago. Baidu also uses Flash.

Ubuntu 10.10 will be released in October, 2010 but if you want to check it out now, get the beta.

If you missed the first 3 parts of this series you may want to start there. In part 1 I talked about how we recorded the footage for the MAX Unawards application and how After Effects CS5 and Premiere Pro CS5 really helped me save tons of time. Part 2 explained how the personalized video segments were done with the help of cue points. And part 3 explained how it was all put together in Flex and why I actually chose Flex for this application. Today I’ll talk a little bit about the playback and recording modules in this application.

Playback
In yesterday’s post I explained how modules work and how easy it is to work with modules in a Flex application. When you create a new module in Flash Builder it will automatically compile into a separate SWF file. The playback module contains all the logic needed to play the main video as well as the personalized segments. There are two VideoDisplay components on top of each other. On top of those are the personalized segments. I already explained that I brought them from Flash CS5 as a Flex component. That way they behave exactly like any other component making it very easy to use databinding and control them with ActionScript.

The main video also has a transparent segment. When the acceptance speech starts you actually see the second VideoDisplay component, which is below the main movie. I did that so you can see the static noise before the acceptance speech starts playing. But we already talked about that. ;-)

When the entire video is done a few options slide into frame. It also shows a Coverflow-like list component with the thumbnails from all the recordings. The list component is actually a standard Flex 4 List component. Thanks to the extremely powerful new skinning model you can display your list items in this Coverflow-like way. The list layout was created by the very talented Flex developer Xavi Beumala, who works in our Spanish office. You can find more information and the source code on his blog. It’s amazing to see how powerful the new skinning model in Flex 4 really is. I actually used a lot of skinning in this application and it’s astounding how easy that has become. With the logic and skin completely separated from each other skinning a component is child’s play.

The playback view is some 250 lines of code. The cue point handler function alone is already 50 lines of code ;-)

Recording
This one module was probably the main reason why I chose Flex in the first place. It would have taken me a lot of time if I had to create all these validators, state transitions, and components from scratch. There are four different states in this module. The first state is where you select or enter your Unaward. There’s also a refresh button that gets a new random Unaward from the database. This is again one line of code that calls out to the ColdFusion back end. The result event handler takes care of the rest. In the second state you can start recording your acceptance speech. I first detect all available webcams on the user’s system and ask the user to choose the one he wants to use. When the users clicks on the “Start recording” button the application connects to a Flash Media Server. The FMS hosting is provided by Influxis. I know I said this before but if you ever need any FMS hosting Influxis is your best shot. Not only are they a great bunch of guys to work with their custom FMS admin panel will get you up and running in record time. With just a few clicks you can add your new FMS application on your server instance and you’re ready to go.

Once the user recorded and accepted his acceptance speech he goes to the third state in the module where he can enter his contact details. When he submits his details the module shows the last state which is just a confirmation that the details have been submitted to the approval queue.

Every single video goes through an approval process. When the user submits his video the admins automatically get an email alerting us that there is a new video posted. In the custom admin application we can then check the user’s details, play the video, and create a thumbnail. The admin actually creates 3 different versions of the thumbnail. A small and large version but also a version with an overlay. When you add the Unawards application to your Facebook page this third thumbnail is used in your news feed. It’s just a static version of what looks like the actual application.

When a video is approved in the admin section the user gets an email and a tweet gets… ehr… well… tweeted. This is a late addition to the application. I noticed some emails got stuck in spam filters and never reached the user. Email is just broken. It’s incredible what you have to do these days to send out email that actually reaches the end user and not his spam box. That’s why I decided to also ask for a Twitter account name in the registration process. The ColdFusion service behind the admin back end sends out an @reply if the user has entered his Twitter account. As an added bonus you can follow MAXwidget on Twitter to get updates on the latest Unawards winners.

Tomorrow’s post will be the last in this series. I’m making a blooper reel including some unused footage… So… Be sure to check back tomorrow! ;-) In the meantime go and give yourself a MAX Unaward! Also… If you have any questions about this application feel free to ask them! Just leave a comment. I’ll also be doing a session on personalized video at MAX! So if you haven’t registered yet make sure you do that today!

Flash Player 10.1 is now beginning to ship in volume on many smartphones.    Many of you may have seen the attached full page Motorola ad which ran on Friday in the NY Times, the Wall Street Journal and USA Today.  There are other similar ads being planned by major carriers and handset manufacturers.  This is the culmination of years of co-development to migrate Flash (not just Flash light) to the mobile.  Some have criticized Adobe for not doing this earlier but the reality is that the technology just wasn't ready earlier (hardware, software and infrastructure).

Original post at http://technoracle.blogspot.com