Going West

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Three years ago I moved from Tucson, AZ to the big city of New York. And now, in about two weeks I’ll be leaving the east coast for San Francisco.

I’m very happy to announce that I recently accepted a job working at Google (specifically on YouTube). We’re moving out on May 1st, and don’t know too many people out there, so if you’re in the area and want to get some beers, let me know!

New York is a fantastic city, and I’m a a bit sad to leave it (and Schematic), but at the same time am at least equally excited about the new job.

Off to Apollo camp! (UPDATE: not!)

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UPDATE: Well, my flight was canceled this morning due to the weather over here. All other flights out today were booked, so it looks like I’ll be sitting this one out. Poop.

I’m heading out to Apollo camp in the morning. I’ll get into SFO around noon and make my way up to the city to wander around until it starts, then I’ll be spending the weekend in the city visiting some friends and just relaxing a bit.

I’ll be there with a couple other Schematic folks, and we are always looking for hot Flash talentâ„¢, so say hello if you are looking for work, or just want to say hi.

Speaking at Flashbelt

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While I was at Flash on the Beach back in December, I met Dave and didn’t even realize he was the dave from Pilotvibe and the organizer of Flashbelt. Schematic sent a few people up there last year to give presentations, and they all said it was fantastic, so I was very excited when Dave invited me to speak at this year’s conference.

I’ll be giving a talk called Progressive Enhancement with Flash that will cover stuff like:

  • Using SWFObject (maybe SWFFix by then) to embed Flash content
  • Using progressive enhancement to allow search engines to properly index your content and increase SEO for Flash websites
  • Flash content vs. Flash style, and how to treat them differently
  • Deep linking and back button support in Flash

And a few other areas. I should also be able to talk about SWFFix a bit (hopefully it will be fully released by then, but who knows).

Go check out the Flashbelt page for more info. I can’t give you a direct link to my session, but it’s listed there in the session list. Hopefully I’ll see some of you there!

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.