A blog about User Interface, User Experience, Design, Flash, Product management and all that goes in between.

Many people are having troubles resizing and processing pictures into a profile image (say for Facebook?), there are countless free utilities and apps out there (most of them look pretty shitty..), and also several online services, and now there is another one – mine :)

It’s a flash application that enables you to scale and process an image from your computer, and when you’re happy with it, you can save it to your computer. The application does not communicate with external servers and does not save or send any data anywhere.

As always, it’s a work in progress, I will be adding features and effects as time allows me, but it is fully functional right now. So go a head, give it a shot and create your own profile image, it’s really easy and fast.
Don’t forget to let me know if you liked it!
enjoy :)

This is the public link of this application, in case you want to share it:
http://www.todepoint.com/profyler

* I will be writing some more soon, describing several aspects of making this application, stay tuned.
 

There are many video players in flash out there, lots of them are open too, I’ve found few tutorials out there giving everything you need to know to code a video player. few of them work really nice and heavily distributed (JW Player), others have cool UI, few considered proper integration of keyboard control, most of them don’t. yet none of them has it all. none of the player I saw had the right touch.

So I decided to take the challenge and make a code only (no library assets), lightweight video player, with elegant UI that works as you would expect it to, with keyboard control (starting with play/pause, forward/backwards jumps, the fundamentals, the musts). also fullscreen mode and moving between the screen modes by double clicking a la VLC (which is my favorite video player on the Mac), and of-course buffering.

At the moment the features are:
• Keyboard control: play/pause (space bar); jump backwards/forward (left/right);
• Volume control affecting the volume while pressing and moving cursor;
• Fullscreen-normal by double-clicking the video or dedicated button;
• Single click on the video toggles play/pause;
• Display of position and total duration;
• Clickable progress bar, a click will jump video to position.
• Control bar will hide when mouse leaves stage.
• File size is 20.8k (!!)

Credits:
The architecture was inspired by Mr.doob’s player, but I replaced his video controller with the excellent FLVPlayer by Martin Legris, and added my own touch and flavor

Suggestions are more than welcome, tell me what you think!

Update: I was working on improving the player behavior across platforms and browsers, discovering that events behavior is different on IE from the ret of the browsers. Surprising ha? MouseEvent.MOUSE_OUT added to the stage is not firing on IE, you have to add Event.MOUSE_LEAVE, it still works for the rest of the browsers. This actually solved several oddities on IE, people are still using it? really?!

Update 2: I added spinning loading animation when video is buffering, and moved the duration text to be next to the position text, I guess it is easier for the eye this way.

Flash objects (SWF) can fill the entire Html body, and scale along with browser window as you resize it (it’s done by setting width and height attributes to 100% in the embed tags). However unless scaleMode is properly defined as well, the outcome may look surprisingly bad, the flash content may loose proportions and distort, images quality drops and texts loose readability.. oh man.

Only specific contents should be scaled when the stage is resized, the same way apps handles resizing: an app will redistribute its panels without scaling them, will scale panel background but not the buttons and the controls in it. When the entire stage is simply scaled, the interface balance is disturbed.. and we don’t want that.

So I decided to share: ResizeManager (download) is a very simple scaling engine, a single AS2 class that can easily be modified or extended for your needs.
The manger can control scaling and some basic align options of MovieClips you register to it, so you can scale a background MovieClip to cover the entire stage, and keep another MovieClip centered without scaling. It also adds default definitions for the Stage behavior (scaleMode: noScale, stageAlign: TL), though you can change those.
In order to use it, simply import the class and create an instance of the ResizeManager:

import com.adifeiwel.custom_ui.ResizeManager;

var rm = new ResizeManager();


Then, use method registerMC() to register each MovieClip you want to control (including MovieClips nested within MovieClips, make sure parent MC is x:0, y:0), the registerMC method expects the following parameters:
_parentName:MovieClip (the name of the MoviClip)
_widthUpdate:Number (scaling in percentage from Stage.width, 0 for no-scale)
_heightUpdate:Number (scaling in percentage from Stage.height, 0 for no-scale)
_centerUpdate:Boolean (align MovieClip to center of stage)
_middleUpdate:Boolean (vertical-align MovieClip to middle of stage)

for example (see it here):

rm.registerMC(portMC.mainBG, 100, 100, false, false);
// will scale to cover all Stage

rm.registerMC(portMC.middleMC.middleBG, 100, 0, false, false);
// will scale to take 100% of Stage.width

rm.registerMC(portMC.middleMC.middleContentMC, 0, 0, true, false);
// aligned to center

rm.registerMC(portMC.transMC, 0, 0, true, true);
// aligned to center, vertical-align to middle.

rm.registerMC(portMC.vClip, 0, 80, false, false);
// will scale to take 80% of Stage.height


enjoy : )

Update: You can download the example FLA here.

I was going through the SWX PHP contest entries, and was so happy to find an entry under the API category for the WordPress platform by Benjamin Wiederkehr, it is something I was considering to do my self ; ), and can be really handy for small personal sites or blogs that prefer a customized experience over the standard Html themes – portfolios, galleries, open for commenting – you see the potential..These APIs are best demonstrating the power of SWX, allowing us – flash programers to expand our possibilities and offering without messing with server-side too much – just what Aral was talking about.cool.

I just had the time to watch what was presented in the MX Chicago 2007, apparently much.. hmm, Adobe’s 3D api looks attractive, I guess using intrinsic classes is shorter (20 lines?!) and easier to migrate than the current 3rd party packages, and according to this vid, the performance will be great.
I am also exited about the Advanced Text Layout Support coming in version 10, take a look at this vid, thanks again Aral. After years of neglecting RTL languages (that is Right To Left writing direction – Hebrew and Arabic), and countless crippled hacks that never really worked – finally a solution seems to work good.
And this makes me very happy.