Author Archives: Geoff

Powered by YouTube event this Thursday, July 10th 2008

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Are you interested in the various API services that YouTube offers? Are you going to be in the bay area this Thursday? Then why not stop by Powered by YouTube?

It’s taking place at the San Bruno YouTube office this Thursday, July 10th from 10:30am to 5:30pm.

Here’s the blurb about it:

Powered By YouTube is a developer gathering focused on bringing together developers to learn more about the YouTube APIs and Tools. Spend the day at YouTube’s headquarters and learn how to bring YouTube to your website, share best practices, and get hands-on with the APIs. Meet fellow YouTube API developers across a wide range of companies, YouTube engineers and product managers, and leave inspired to enhance your user experience with the YouTube APIs.

Also: It’s free, and you get a free lunch.

SWFObject 2.0 Beta

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Today at Adobe MAX I’ll be giving a presentation with Michael Williams on the next version of SWFObject (previously the SWFFix project). As most of you probably know, I’ve been working on a project with Bobby van der Sluis and Michael Williams (From Adobe) that was going to become the de-facto standard for embedding Flash/Flex content. Well we decided that we didn’t like the new name all that much, so we are adopting the SWFObject name for the project.

The new version is a complete rewrite from SWFObject 1.5, so we’ll need lots of testing before we officially launch it and replace the older SWFObject and UFO scripts, and since we have Adobe involved, they will be including this embed system in the Adobe authoring tools in the future.

The SWFObject project is moving to Google Code, where you can download the source from svn, grab the latest build, or file bugs or read documentation.

I’ve also created a new Google Group for SWFObject support questions and discussion.

If you are at MAX today, our presentation is at 2:45pm in room W-196c and it’s called “Flash Detection and Embedding: An open source solution”.

If you can’t make it today, we’ll be doing it again tomorrw (Wednesday) at 11am in room W-185d.

The SWFFix alpha is up

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Bobby put up the SWFFix alpha earlier today – I’ve been at the Ajax experience (with no wireless internet access, wtf?!) so haven’t had time to put together a post about it, but here’s a quick one.

We also announced that we are now working with Micheal Williams from Adobe – the author of the Adobe Flash Detection kit to make sure SWFFix can cover all the bases and be used by anyone. Very cool!

Go check out the dev blog and grab the files, then read the docs and try it out. Feedback is very welcome, so soak it in and let us know what you think.

SWFObject 1.5 released

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I’m pleased to announce the next semi-major release of SWFObject (Direct download link). This version has been in development for quite a while, but only because I haven’t been able to find time to update the documentation.

There’s really only one large change to the code, and a few bug fixes I’ll outline here:

  1. Express Install functionality has changed. You no longer need to add any Actionscript to your fla or otherwise modify your project’s files. The new syntax and functionality is outlined on the SWFObject page in the Using Express Install section.
  2. Fixed a bug that was causing IE6 to crash intermittently if users had a certain version of Flash Player 6 installed and the page was refreshed a few times
  3. Added support for IE Mobile devices that have Flash Player installed (more details here)
  4. Added support for style tags on the object/embed tags outputted from SWFObject. This allows it to be used with swfIR without having to include the SWFObject code multiple times.

This also may be the last major release of SWFObject. If you haven’t already heard, the SWFFix project will be attempting to replace SWFObject as the de-facto Flash embedding standard. The project is still in the alpha stage, but is looking quite promising. So until then, enjoy!

Announcing the SWFFix project

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SWFFix is a new joint project from myself and Bobby van der Sluis. The project’s goal is to replace SWFObject and UFO with a single method that is (hopefully) more standards compliant and doesn’t rely entirely on Javascript.

We’ve put up a dev blog on the site, and will be asking for help and feedback throughout the development cycle, so head over and watch the blog for updates in the coming weeks.

Bobby also has a great A List Apart article out today that talks about the problems with current Flash embed techniques.