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.

Teknision is a branded application company, they are the creators of the site I linked yesterday: "Update Hollywood". Paolo hinted me to the presentation of his company in a comment: How marketers can use rich internet applications to build their brands? (video + powerpoint) Interesting talk...

Hey, had a client send me a link to your blog, we actually are the company that developed the front end of Update Hollywood, here is a link to a presentation that we did on user experience and our spin on it. Gabor Vida, our President did the presentation to local businesses in our area. http://www.teknision.com/zone5ive/ check it out.

Thanks for the feedback Paolo.

Ok, we made flapi viewer on the flickr api. But how these guys made this ?! It stays a mistery to me ... COOL ! Retrievr

There are some good resources out there... :

Fabchannel: They stream really cool concerts... bloc party, arcade fire, roisin murphy, ... They even broadcast concerts live ! Tuesday 22.00 the Stereophonics in Amsterdam.

Google video has some nice videos, you just need to find them.Try typing in the name of a band or song. You'll be amazed by the results. Example: the cool clip by soulwax - e-talking, or a fragment of top gear update You can even embed google videos everywhere you want. Check out paul stamatiou his tutorial.

Shoutcast TV is streaming video for winamp. There is a lot of absolute crap in the list, but if you look closer, you'll find something to look at.

You know more ? comment away ...

Yesterday Microsoft's variant on google maps relaunched, it looks impressing, especially the bird eye function is really cool. It's scary how much you can see on the images. I think it's definatelly as good as google maps, maybe even better. Some examples (double click to zoom deeper):
- Las Vegas
- New York
- Washington DC Amazing isn't it ? Play around...

It's cool to see how an online shop can differentiate itself just by its look'n feel. Just like his offline variant the mark and spencer online store stands for style and carefully selected products. If you only compare m&s design grid to that of amazon, you'll notice the difference. While shopping the site succeeds in giving you the same feeling like a luxureous offline shop. It's great that e-commerce sites are putting the focus more on the shopping experience of the users then on the actual selling of products trough a site. I think that's the reason transactions on the internet increase. If you make the experience of the online shopping better you'll satisfy your customers. Shopping not only exists because of the need for products but also because people like to shop. Future shops with a good shopping experience will get more customers. Every new technology that can make the shopping more usable and fun, can be very important for an e-commerce site. With the adaptation of AJAX, flash, ... the possibilities are wide open. But I never saw an online shop that extensively made use of those technologies (except this limited example of macromedia ). To give you a simple example, a google suggest like search on the amazon homepage would be a great feature. I'm looking forward to see some rich features in online shops, according to me, it will be a win-win. Message to my mom: While browsing I found myself something to put on my christmas wishlist, forget the socks and shorts I want a sumo suit :p !

Why would you spend money on expensive photo hosting if you can have a Flickr account? But still want to integrate your photos into your own site? Well we had the same problem. So we started developing this viewer...read on As said in this forum before, we've finally come to launching a beta. The current beta is live this means that the .fla source is not available yet, but within a week we will release it. For now it's important to get some good feedback from you guys, flickr users. So comment here or on the "read on" blog. Read on...(features,todo, bugs, beta,...) FLAPI viewer public beta Thanks, Lev, Fritz & Jesse

I simply love my music, and always on the look for new bands. Being a member of last.fm for a while, I discovered a lot of unknown, great bands such as M83. And today I found out that pandora.com (thanks to techcrunch,an interactive internet radio, switched from being a paid service to a free service. You just give in one band you like, he starts playing songs in the same genre you decide if you like the song or not. Great for discovering new bands. It would be great if they had a supporting community like last.fm. I love their flash application.