marcelfahle.com

On MultiMania 2008 in Kortrijk I was, instead of watching the cool presentations, hanging around the FDT Booth all the time, geek taking with lots of people on programming, cool projects and, FDT of course. What I didn’t realize at this time is, that I was already kinda presenting or „evangelizing“ people to use FDT by showing it’s power and possibilities.
So Powerflasher asked me if I wanna do the same stuff a more regular and serious way, as an official FDT representative, or evangelist (God, I love that word ;)). First stop: FITC Chicago. And that’s where I’m heading right now.
I think representing FDT is a good thing for both parties, because I love travelling, meeting Adobe infected people and Powerflasher has an experienced (that’s what they’re saying ;)) representative of their awesome technology. But besides that, it makes me really proud. And, if I’m doing a good job, the next event will be the Flash Forward in San Francisco in August. Sweeeet!

Anyway, luckily I was able to arrange some business meetings in my all-time favourite city, New York, after the FITC. So, if anybody who is reading this, is in the area from 26th to 28th (and likes drinking beer), drop me a line.

If I find the time to do some sightseeing besides all the flash and business stuff, I’ll try to put my adventures and pictures on travelbert.com, as usual.

Today Powerflasher released a new version of their highly respected and addictive FDT Plugin for Eclipse. What is so special for me on the Update is the fact, that there is huge movement in the developer scene going on - towards Mac. More and more developers are switching these days. If you have visited a developers conference in the last months or so, you’ll now what I mean. It’s already getting kinda hard finding any PC Notebooks on those conferences.

Anyway, the Powerflasher team still not “converted” (Carlo is one of the few with a MacBook pro, but running a wrong OS - but that’s another story), but fully aware of this trend, finally made some workflow improvements for Mac users.
Best part of that update for me that they finally made the External SWF Viewer working on Macs. That’s absolutely great news. I’ve checked it out immediately, and here it is, amazingly fast as always:

(when using it, remember to use the same runtime JRE as the workspace does under Run -> External Tools -> External Tools -> JRE Tab. I’m always running into the same issue ;))

Besides that, Powerflasher improved and fixed a lot of other stuff as well and posted a good overview in the FDT Forum.

By the way, their Logging tool SOS is soon getting an update, too. But you don’t have that information from me

I’ve uploaded a simple flash live streaming demo, in h.264, over HTTP. The camera is located here in my office in Bochum and I try to keep it up as long as possible.

Some technical keywords:
Slot3 Streaming server / HTTP Protocol / Flash Media Encoder / h.264 / 500 KBit/s video / 128 KBit/s audio / minimum Flash Player 9.0.115.0

The most important fact on that demo, besides that it is h.264, is, that it is streaming over HTTP (in h.264 ;)). So you won’t run into any firewall problems or so. 100% reach in Flash Player 9.0.115.0 and up.

I you want me to go crazy in front of the camera or want something special on my office TV, Skype or Twitter me. It *might* be possible, that I actually do something like that Have fun!

By the way, did I mention that we’re selling / renting that stuff?

Two more events are around the corner. Together with my buddy Bartek Drozdz I’m going to visit the Multi-Mania in Kortrijk, Belgium on Friday and the Web Flash Festival 2008 in Paris on Saturday and Sunday. It’s my first time on both events, but I think both will be real fun and, of course geeky. Especially the Multi-Mania looks really promising due to the awesome line-up and the stories I’ve heard from last year. By the way, both events are free!
So, hope to see you there!

After we’ve won a Annual Multimedia Award 2008, you and me.Net, the startpage to the intranet of Deutsche Telekom, which is a close collaboration between Gedankenwerk, Powerflasher, V2A and myself, is nominated for the Deutsche Multimedia Award 2008 (DMMA). Thanks for that!

Wow, the guys from the Alternativa Platform 3D-engine have rewritten their incredible demos and made some optimizations for Flash Player 10 Beta. Especially the texture quality looks really amazing. You won’t gonna miss that:

Alternativa Platform Flash Player 10 Beta Demos

Personal note: I think, this is the point where flash games are getting more serious and that Flash isn’t a platform for minigames anymore. I mean that stuff already looks like the freakin PS2. Sure, no opponents, AI, etc. But still really cool! I definitely look forward into what the gaming industry is gonna make out of that.

Last week, we from slot3.com have been in Stuttgart at fmx/flashconference 08, where I was invited to talk a bit on flash video streaming and encoding. For us, it was a great day, we had a lot of fun and met old and new friends (thanks again to Wolfgang for awesome organization).

One, if not the highlight of this event was definitely the presentation of Balázs Serényi, from beautiful Budapest on Source Binder, a node-based visual framework for developing flash applications.

SourceBinder (Binder) is a node-based visual framework for easy prototyping and real-time tuning of Flash based visual applications.

Binder is the missing link between visual and code-based programing environments. From a distant perspective you can edit and view your project as a self-explaining node-based flow diagram. Getting a little closer it lets you fine tune every attribute of your building blocks and observe the results in realtime. Taking an even closer look you will be able to edit the ActionScript code itself. And switching between these views is as easy as zooming in and out.

You can read more on source binder at Mario’s Blog.

However, I’ve recorded the full presentation on video and wanna share that with you as an 800KBit/s f4v stream. Just click the image below:

(stream could be down for 30 minutes or so later this day, because we’re switching to another streaming server today)

I finally found a very detailed Tutorial on how to setup your programming environment to work with FDT. Highly recommended!

found at FDT 3.0 Blog

The fmx / flashconference is around the corner and my first real presentation on a flash conference gets closer and closer. The fmx takes place between the 5th and 8th of May 08, in “Haus der Wirtschaft” in Stuttgart. The huge conference on digital media is kind of a framework for the flashconference, the oldest flash-related conference in germany. Since 10 years now, my buddy Wolfgang is doing a pretty good job in organizing the event.
As you might imagine, I’m already pretty nervous. Talking 60 minutes to a crowd of flash-maniacs on video is one thing. To do it in english another
But anyway, we’re working hard to get all the stuff we wanna show up and running until thursday. Here’s a brief overview of what I’ll talk about:

• - Video on Demand, using HTTP and why we think it’s better. I’ll show some cool h.264 demos as well.
• - Live broadcasting for both VP6 and h.264. (Maybe with a few special features ;))
• - The video encoding engine we use for as well our clients and our daily work, + a little sneek preview of our upcoming flex interface for controlling it.
• - (Flash) video on several other devices
• - Copy protection, of what we think is the only way to do it properly

So, a lot of stuff to talk about. Hopefully I can put all of that into 45 minutes, plus a little Q&A session..
Be sure to check the schedule on flashconference.de for all the other interesting sessions.. Personally I really look forward to Mario Klingemann’s and Serge Jespers’ sessions.

So, see you there..

On May 1st, the new website of Fi, formerly known as Fantasy Interactive has finally launched after a delay of one week. First I have to say, I like it a lot! Seriously. But as soon as I saw the site for the first time I was expecting some people to freak out, because of their expectations they had into a website of a company who pushed the boundaries of flash all the time.
And that’s exactly what I saw when browsing a bit through the comments on the Fi Blog, thinkswedish.com. Most of the people there are disappointed about the new site. But for me, I think it was the right step. I totally agree whith what David Martin said:

Fi was notorious for developing everything and anything in Flash, Today in Fi, you will only find Flash in places it needs to be and fits.

That fits especially into things like URL Rewriting or search engine optimization. Sure, you can do all that stuff with flash, but it’s not.. well, native.. All kinda fake enforced or so.

For me the new site was a real relief, because all the time when I had to choose, which technology to use and already was thinking of choosing some kind of HTML/AJAX solution, I was always like: “Well, Fi would make that in Flash. And they know what’s right”. Even if my stomach was telling me, that it’s not a playground for flash, I was thinking about using it anyway.. because Fi would do it like this. And they’re frickin’ heroes for me!
So, as said, great relief for me that they’re not developing everything and anything in flash anymore. So my stomach was right!

By the way, great work guys. Keep it up!

The coolest Flash Game Ever. Let’s rock!

Today Adobe announced the Open Screen Project, a combination of different moves towards open standards. They teamed up with a group of industry leaders and announced the following steps today:

• - Removing restrictions on use of the SWF and FLV/F4V specifications
• - Publishing the device porting layer APIs for Adobe Flash Player
• - Publishing the Adobe Flash® Cast™ protocol and the AMF protocol for robust data services
• - Removing licensing fees - making next major releases of Adobe Flash Player and Adobe AIR for devices free

All starting immediately.

Especially opening the doors to the video standards is pretty interesting for us video developers and reading the file specs revealed a lot of interesting information, because especially the h.264 codec is very complex stuff.
But also giving insight into the SWF format should bring some really interesting developments and applications in the future. We can build our own SWFs at runtime now, Great news!

But besides all of that, the most interesting part for me is, that Adobe has removed the licensing fees for the devices player. I think that’s a pretty smart move to (hopefully) boost the kinda sleepy flash market on devices a bit. And maybe it’s a reaction on what’s going on between Nokia and Microsoft’s Silverlight, a competitor I wouldn’t underestimate.

Found at Serge Jespers Blog. Go there for further information on Adobe’s Open Screen Project.