Born on the Web

Deep linking and browser history have always been sore spots of Flash sites. There have been workarounds for a while but they were pretty difficult to implement. Being able to link directly to a page, bookmark it and using the browers back and forward buttons are standard functionalities that people are used and expect from a site. When it doesn't work, people get annoyed. Hell do they know or care that the site is made in Flash and using the browsers history is difficult to implement. Anyway, when time is tight on a project, such features are often not impelemented. Enter SWFAddress, an easy to use piece of javascript and actionscript that allows us to deeplink to Flash movies and give people control over their browser history navigation in Flash. It seems easy to implement and once you've done it once, it should be a breeze to set it up for future projects. Furthermore, the wonderfull piece of code is based upon the widely used SWFObject, a popular javascript solution for embedding Flash that solves the recent annoying change in internet explorer that forces you to click on a flash movie to activate the content. I'll try it out soon myself for my next Flash project. Credits for bringing this to my attention go to my colleague Flash cowboy Nico. He threatened to shoot me if I didn't add credits, so here goes :) Hmmm.. so far for the swfAddress. It's been a while since I posted something here. Whenever blog activity is low, you can expect bloggers to be doing other things. Well yeah, it's been pretty busy. I've been on holiday for a while, after that moved to Antwerp (still haven't got internet!) and started working at These Days as a multimedia developer. Things might have been a bit silent, but they are gooood. Cheerio, see you later.

"There's a revolution going on in rec rooms, offices and classrooms around the world. A revolution in which 15 million people are taking part [..] through a computer network called "internet". Hihi. A pretty funny tv report from 1993 on the emergent internet. Who could've guessed back then that it would get this big?

Clo hitted me with a stick. I'm pretty honoured to get hit with a stick by the BBM, which stands for the Belgian Blogging Momma! So momma here you go ... ;) One year ago, 21 years old I was following the module infotainment in my third year C-MD. We had to communicate very difficult information on a simple and entertaining way. We worked in a team of 7 persons (Johan - Hoi Yan - Daniël - Lev and Frits as freelance consultant). Like always we saw us project very ambitious, maybe a bit too ambitious. Me and Lev were the Flash developers in our team. I think I never flashed that much as last year. Well it ended in an online game with a lot of video. When I look back at it a year later, I'm still pleased with the way we integrated the video and how we bring information to the viewer on the other panels. 5 years ago, 17 years old I was already into web developing. When I started flash really was "the shizzle". Long flash intros, the skip intro button. I had to be part of it, I probably had my part. I could make websites in flash, but never heard of html :p . Because I eventually needed to publish the intros I had to learn some HTML. I had my first community named "forumfun" based on a phpBB RC1 forum. We had a sponsored hosting and the board was actually pretty popular, we almost had like 100 members and like 30 really active members. It shut down because our sponsor cancelled our PHP - Mysql hosting. It was hosted by siteraiders who have a site that is soo old and soo flash that its getting cool again. :p 10 years ago In 1996 I was almost 12 years old and ready for the big jump to high school. We shared a dial-up internet connection with a friend. Pretty illegal huh ! The company who provided us the lightning fast 33.6 kbps internet connection called Tornado. Tornado later became Ping, where we got an official login and payed around 12.000 BEF (300 EUR) a year + the always-frightning telephone bill, crazy internet times. Ping became Planet Internet and Planet Internet became Scarlet and we're still customer, we still have the same internet login and password for our internet connection. They should reward faithfull customers. I remember my sister was a IRC fanatic, #belgium on undernet (not sure of the network). So she actually got me hooked to the net. Back then, almost nobody of my friends had the internet. Some didn't even knew what it was, so you see how fast it got adopted. I think I can say that I grew up with the internet, for some reason it was always there. I will pass the stick to my friends and talented collegues Hoi Yan, Lev and Frits. Next year when we're graduated we're not going to see each other that much, so I need to stimulate them to seriously start blogging. I want a decent RSS feed to subscribe to.