4 steps to success for Spotify

- Community

What I Like about Deezer is the community perspective of a gigantic record collection. When I am out of inspiration I want to see/listen what other peeps dig. I want to see that I'm not alone while searching for cool new songs. This is one reason that I often switch to VLC / ShoutCast, that I want new music that other people choose for me. (Shoutcast/Electro/DIGITAL IMPORTED is a fav.)

- DJ / Party functions

Spotify at it's best is at a party. (almost)unlimited number of songs for all tastes. Whats missing in a part is basic DJ functions such as beat-matching, cross fade between songs and maybe visual effects. When we have the unlimited jukebox, please skip the booring gaps and fade-outs that makes the dance floor fade :)

- Mobile version

I want it in my SonyEricsson. I want it in my iPod Touch. Then I will never leech another pirate song again.

- API

As a developer I get all kind of crazy ideas, how to integrate Spotify and music in new web services. Please give me a API to play around with. Please crowdsource the tech developent to us.

OMG - App Store is a hassle.

Well, I know i'm not the bleeding edge, since I upgraded my Nano to iPod Touch the other day. I really like the little thing which made my flight to Portugal a little easier (watching S05 of a popular TV show :)) But i can't help complaining about what Apple could done better with this gadget.

First: Sorting music.

I have alot of mp3 music that are coded in different ways, for example "Acoustic covers vol1" that have it's songs coded for each artist and song name. I want to play this "album" which is a nightmare since all the songs are in defferent artists and albums. Whan I ended up doing is, creating a playlist for each album that I transferred to the iPod. I remember the good ol days when I had a iRiver which could play a "folder" without any problems.

Second: Downloading from App Store.

Cool, I can add apps to my iPod! Let's browse and install a random (free) app just to try it out...Login! Huh? How do I create an account? For App Store? for Itunes? for Apple? where in my iPod can I create an account? No freakin where!

Okay, lets try do open up safari and go to Apple.com and create an account using the iPod. No luck, I get no confirmation e-mail and no success downloading from App Store using that account. So finally, let's open up my computer and go to iTunes, and try to create the account from there. Oh, I need to add additional information to my account. Woot, Credit Card number? Oh well, i trust Apple, so they can have it. But what now?! They think i live in the US?, no I'm from Sweden, currently staying in Portugal. So how do I change country...lets see.... NOWHERE! Aw crap, I give up.. might just be easier to jailbreak it and add apps that way...

Deezer.com - The Spotify killer?

I have been using Deezer for a few weeks now, and I must say that it kicks ass! Although the (Flash) GUI is a a bit buggy, and the workflow is not too intuitive, the service itself rocks, with all that FREE streaming music... just click and play.

Above you ca see my embedable playlist, and if you like electro, there sure are some goodies for you there :)

The media delivery is super fast and i'd say that apx. 60-70% of the songs i play have a great bit rate compression. I used to have Spotify, that was really amazing fast and great quality, but it is still not very accessible to the public, and also it seems that they are removing songs from their database all the time. Allright, just get over to Deezer to find great free music now!

Great delivery Dell!

Yeah, every time DHL comes knocking on the door it feels a little bit like christmas. This time the delivery man had a big nice package from Dell, and it was our new 1U rack server.

I filled her up with 8GB RAM and 2x500Gb SATA HDD, that hopefully will be enough to launch our project for the beta test audience.

The hosting location is also pretty cool, it's a new server hall located in a nuclear proof cave inside a mountain in the central parts of Stockholm (söder). Thanks to my friends at Carismar, i will install the new server in their rack at Pionen which is the name of the server hall from the hosting company called Bahnhof.

Prototype docs sucks!

In our new super cool web 2.0 project I extensively use the JavaScript framework Prototype, because I use a lot of front-end intelligence and DOM manipulation. It is extremely useful and pretty easy to use, but there is only one problem. Some times when I need further explanation how some thing works, I tend to take a peek in the API documentation, and quite frankly it sucks.

First, I’m a long time .NET coder and I’m pretty used to the MSDN style documentation which is great once you get the hang of it. Also the Adobe LiveDocs are pretty OK (especially with the user commends below). But the guys at Prototype should spend a few seconds extra to write a proper description of the objects and functionality, AND some decent examples.
Let me give an example:
Under: http://prototypejs.org/api/element/writeAttribute
They tell you:

writeAttribute(element, attribute[, value = true]) -> HTMLElement
writeAttribute(element, attributes) -> HTMLElement
Adds, specifies or removes attributes passed as either a hash or a name/value pair.

What the hell does “attribute[, value = true])” mean? I could guess that the second argument is some Boolean value but does the *nothing*, mean??
What I was looking for in this method was actually a way to remove element attributes. I had to take a look in the source code for the writeAttribute method to realize that you pass a null or false as a value, in order to remove the element attribute as you can see here:

…
if (value === false || value === null)

        element.removeAttribute(name);
…

…and did I mention that there was no example what so ever of the different ways to create/remove attributes in this method?

Come on team Prototype. Your lib rocks, and so should your docs do!

Leaving Fi to start new company

Yes, it was short but intense. I have left Fi, to start my own company. This is super exciting and i'm currently working on a prototype for this world wide public web site.

Unfortunately I can not reveal the idea, but please stay tuned for information about how to participate in the upcoming beta test.

New job. Exciting project

There has not been much activity here lately, because I have been busy getting into my new job at FI (a.k.a www.fantasy-interactive.com)!

I am currently working on a new exciting project which will create quite a buzz in the industry. Code name ProPod is a new media blogging platform that will rock your socks off.

Presentation of Flash Player 10 aka Astro

This presentation was filmed at the MAX Chicago 2007 by Aral Balkan.
The video shows a sneek preview of some of the new features of Flash Player 10 such as the new text engine, new 3D features and the new bitmap effect scripting language called Hydra. With Hydra people can create their own custom filters in a ActionScript/C
like environment.

Flash Audio/Video updates

Most of you flashers already know about the new Flash player that support
H.264 video and AAC audio.

This is a huge step for all you who are interested in Flash and video, since producing high quality video for Flash has been limited to the ON2 VP7 codec or the older worse VP6.

Now Adobe has implemented a limited sub set of MPEG-4, 3GP and QuickTime movie support whih basically means is that instead of converting your video to VP6/FLV with FFMPEG you can progressive stream .mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.mov and .3gp files using the NetStream API you use to load FLV files now. It only need to have a .FLV file extension.

Another great thing is the support for all audio sampling rates from 8Khz to 96Khz. The old players were limited to 11Khz, 22Khz and 44.1Khz and any other would be played incorrect (slower or faster).


Read more here:
http://www.progettosinergia.com/flashvideo/flashvideoblog.htm#120907

And here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

Resize images 2.0

Everyone who work with publishing images on the web have faced a situation that you need to change the images physical proportions; height and width. I usualy open up the good ol' Photoshop and batch resize the images to the desired height and width. But what if you could resize without make the image smaller or loose information like in cropping? Well smaller ofcourse but I still want to keep that look and feel of the image but it just need to fit in my web design.

There is now a pretty cool technique called Seam Carving to help you with this.

Mario Klingeman at Quasimondo has written a great article how to use Seam Carving in Flash, and yes there is also source code available! :D

Check it out here >>

Papervision3D public Beta

Papervision3D moves from private testing to a full public beta.




Everybody is welcome to download and start playing with it. We believe you will find it very easy to use and to integrate into your Flash 8, Flash CS3 and Flex projects.

Papervision3D Components for Flash CS3

John Grden has released great Papervision component to Flash CS3
Look at the features:

* Design-time render and editing in Flash IDE

* 3 Material types supported - BitmapFileMaterial, BitmaAssetMaterial and MovieAssetMaterial

* Creates MovieScene3D and Free or Target camera

* Manages resizing / centering of Papervision3D scene [optional]

* Dynamic masking to constrain the viewable render area to the bounds of the component [optional]

* Full API and access to Scene, Camera, Collada objects to code around

* Automatically loads materials via Collada file [when materials list is not given]

* New Custom Panel for modifying rotation, camera zoom, camera focus, camera Z at design-time

New remix!

I made a new remix. This time it's P-Diddy and 666 Mafia.

Flashy drum machine

All you who are into electron music know what the Roland 909 is. This drum machine is with the 808 a legendary piece of electronics. Mostly famous for the hard beats of the Detroit house genre and is still the base for lots of techno and house tracks. The flash guru André Michelle has created a realtime 909 drum machine for you all to play around with. This is a must see (hear) for everyone that is the least interested in music and/or Flash. http://live.popforge.de/
Enjoy

Wii + Flash = WiiFlash

WiiFlash allows you to control your Flash games and applications with the revolutionary Wiimote.

It supports multiple Wiimotes, IR bar and Nunchuk and integrates very well with Papervision3D. All you need is a Bluetooth enabled PC and a Wiimote, of course.
If you want to play with it, go and get the code and subscribe to the WiiFlash mailing list.

New Red5 Version Released

There is a new version (0.6rc3) of the Open Source Red5 Flash server. This should be the last revision before the official 0.6 release which is due out in a little over a week.

The final 0.6 will be out just in time for John Grden and I to show off some really cool features of Red5 at FITC next weekend. If you are going to be at the conference please stop in. You won’t be disappointed, as they will be demonstrating some applications using midi, 3D, live multi-track recording and more.
Here are the details about the current 0.6rc3 release:

Major changes since 0.6rc2:
- Bandwidth control code completely refactored.
- Client buffering code completely refactored.
- Keyframe informations are cached so files don’t need to be reparsed
before playback.
- Connections from Flash Media Encoder and On2 Flix Live supported.
- Access to shared objects can be limited.
- Connections can provide a list of remote addresses. This is usefull
for proxied RTMPT connections.

…and of course a lot of bugs have been fixed as well. The complete
changelog can be found in the “doc” directory after the installation.

Installers:

Windows
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/setup-red5-0.6rc3.exe
MD5: 14229425035758379df0fc24f94045

47Debian
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/debian/0.6rc3/red5_0.6rc3-1_i386.deb
MD5: 041c4d388f3346bf435e6989cddecb1fMacOSX
http://red5.nl/installer/setup-red5-0.6rc3.dmg
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/mac/setup-red5-0.6rc3.dmg
MD5: 4b71b3789d5e05e2b2045d14bf770229

WAR (Java 1.5)
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/war/red5-0.6rc3-java5.war
MD5: 4d523f814580ee9fd69adad533e7bba1

WAR (Java 1.6)
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/war/red5-0.6rc3-java6.war
MD5: 4d773cf5dabfe12c915017625c17163c

Instructions on how to install Red5 on Gentoo are available at
http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/bangert/wiki/Red5Gentoo

A tarball for all other systems is available at
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/red5-0.6rc3.tar.gz
MD5: 86cf3778fd4512b2bad62e5de27d6e20

Further informations as well as mirrors for the downloads soon can be
found on the official homepage at http://osflash.org/red5

Please bring any bugs you encounter to our bugtracking system at
http://jira.red5.org

If you have questions about using Red5, please subscribe to the mailing
list at http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/red5_osflash.org

The first Papervision3D Game

John Grden has released the first 3D game ever using flash, papervision3D and Red5.
This excelent game has started a new era in flash and game development. It is also exciting to see the opens-source communication server Red5 in action.

Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us Video

Adobe Flash Media Encoder

Flash Media Encoder (FME) is a free Windows desktop program that enables webcasters to stream high-quality Flash Video content to a live audience using On2's VP6 codec.
Stefan Richter has written an informative article about this program, check it out!

North Face Demo Using Papervision3D

Lee from The Flash Blog has created a supercool demo of Movies and Papervision3D
It is made with AS3, and shows incredible speed!