m.BitTube.com

Following the announcement from Adobe of the open screen project, news comes from the Embedded Systems Expo that NEC is showing what sounds like it might be an alternative to Adobe’s Flash Lite Player.

Its a little hard to make complete sense of the post from EETimes.com. But some interesting quotes from the short, slightly cryptic article:

By using our new IP, one can design a portable device capable of processing Adobe Flash Lite several times faster, when compared with using a processor.

Also in the announcement is a hint of better video quality as well.

After reducing the number of gates required for an IC and further tuning the video quality output by Adobe Flash Lite, NEC will start offering its IP in August this year.

One thing that does seem to be missing is an explanation of which Flash Lite version they are supporting, although the mention of video implies this is based around the FlashLite 3 player.

You can read the full (breif) announcement of NEC’s new Flash Lite IP over at EETimes.com.

One further interesting thing is that I could find no mention of NEC being involved with the Open Screen Project from its press release.

Credit where its due: EETimes.com

I have just popped onto the Adobe Labs website and noticed that Adobe have made version 10 of the Flash Player available for download. The player has the code name “Astro” and looks like it was posted yesterday 15.05.2008.

Key New Features

3D Effects - Easily transform and animate any display object through 3D space while retaining full interactivity. Fast, lightweight, and native 3D effects make motion that was previously reserved for expert users available to everyone. Complex effects are simple with APIs that extend what you already know.

Custom Filters and Effects - Create your own portable filters, blend modes, and fills using Adobe® Pixel Bender™, the same technology used for many After Effects CS3 filters. Shaders in Flash Player are about 1KB and can be scripted and animated at runtime.

Advanced Text Layout - A new, highly flexible text layout engine, co-existing with TextField, enables innovation in creating new text controls by providing low-level access to text offering right-to-left and vertical text layout, plus support for typographic elements like ligatures.

Enhanced Drawing API - Runtime drawing is easier and more powerful with re-styleable properties, 3D APIs, and a new way of drawing sophisticated shapes without having to code them line by line.

Visual Performance Improvements – Applications and videos will run smoother and faster with expanded use of hardware acceleration. By moving several visual processing tasks to the video card, the CPU is free to do more.

An further note of interest is that the player is released on multiple platforms straight off the bat. Over on the Flash Player 10 Download Page you will find Mac, Windows and Linux verions of the flash player 10.

Full information is available from the Flash Player 10 Labs Page

Those of you lucky enough to have multiple monitors hooked up to you MacBook or MacBook Pro when you work may have come across this issue. When you remove that extra monitor some applications don’t get re-positioned back on to your laptop display. I had this with one particular application that I use frequently, KeePassX. Well somewhere along the way I dug up this use full terminal/apple script that solves the issue.

property processesToIgnore : {}
tell application "Finder"
	set _b to bounds of window of desktop
	set screen_width to item 3 of _b
	set screen_height to item 4 of _b
end tell
tell application "System Events"
	set allProcesses to application processes
	set _results to ""
	repeat with i from 1 to count allProcesses
		set doIt to 1
		repeat with z from 1 to count processesToIgnore
			if process i = process (item z of processesToIgnore) then
				set doIt to 0
			end if
		end repeat
		if doIt = 1 then
			tell process i
				repeat with x from 1 to (count windows)
					set winPos to position of window x
					set _x to item 1 of winPos
					set _y to item 2 of winPos
					if (_x < 0 or _y < 0 or _x > screen_width or _y > screen_height) then
						set position of window x to {0, 22}
					end if
				end repeat
			end tell
		end if
	end repeat
end tell

I don’t recall where I may have dug this up, but if you think you know, please let me know in the comments so I can give credit.

Keeping with the algebraic/code functions as titles from my Last post I thought I would put some thoughts down regarding the news from Adobe earlier this week of their Open Screen Project (OSP). Anyone working in the Web/Internet industry at the moment will be well aware of the Rich Internet/Interactive Application (RIA) moniker. What Adobe is committing to is much larger though this is about true cross platform convergence. Its about Rich Anywhere Applications (RAA) or Rich Everywhere Applications (REA) if you will. You see what I did there .

Interestingly this is a concept I began to scratched the surface of with my presentation at Flash On the Beach Last Year, and over the last few months has been a subject I have continued to keep close to hand both in my day job and my personal development projects. At the moment the Flash Player Fragmentation offers a considerable challenge to any developer wanting to design and or develop for multiple devices and multiple screens.

Articles like the one posted over at ADC on adaptive screen layouts offer a great foot up. But before we get to visual display we need to know what player version we are targeting. And to do that, we have to hit the time machine button and roll back all the way to Flash 4…..

(more…)

A few weeks ago as I was preparing to present at the OnAir event I had a rather untimely hardware failure on my Apple MacBook Pro. As a result I had to rather hastily prep my wife’s MacBook Black to present from. One of the preparations was to make sure I would be able to connect the machine to a projector, as any apple laptop owner will know its important to carry a DVI to VGA connector at all times.

However the MackBook black uses the mini DVI connector, as a result I thought it would be a snap to just pick up a Mini DVI to CVI connector, and then from there I could use the DVI to VGA connector I already own. Not so. Despite the packaging suggesting otherwise, the DVI result from the apple mini DVI connector is not a standard DVI out. There are 4 pins “missing”. The pictures Below explain better.

[gallery]

Over at Ian Talks Tech my friend Macca recently posted a fix for the “Error 51 : Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem” error from a cisco vpn client. I had also encountered the same problem some time ago and it brought my own memories rushing back. I had initially discovered a fix for the error 51 problem over at a different site, Anders.com . Since finding the one line terminal command answer to the issue that my cisco 3000 client had thrown up I thought no more of it. Ian’s post jogged my memory about my own search and I immediately put my copy and paste skills to good use to come up with an apple script that you can run to fix this cisco vpn client error.

All you need to do is open the apple script editor.

“/Applications/AppleScript/Script Editor.app”

Then paste a similar line of code to the commands that Macca and Anders mentioned:

do shell script "ifconfig fw0 down" with administrator privileges
do shell script "ifconfig fw0 up" with administrator privileges and password
do shell script "/System/Library/StartupItems/CiscoVPN/CiscoVPN  restart" with administrator privileges and password

Feel free to run the apple script to test it, just note you will be asked for an administrator password for the script to run.

Once you are happy you should compile and save the script to keep it safe, or “save as” and choose application. Alternatively, you could just download the AppleScript Fix for the “Error 51: Unable to communicate with the VPN subsystem” problem, that I have pre compiled as an application.

Credit where its due.
Ian Talks Tech for jogging the grey matter.
Anders.com for solving my problems when I had them.
Apple for showing me how to do shell scripts in Apple Script.

Thats right, its all very last minute but I will be presenting a session at the upcoming Over the Air event in London this week.

My session is scheduled for Friday afternoon.

Flash Video Nokia Masterclass - Dave Williamson (Adobe)Learn how to create live video applications with the most popular online video format on Nokia devices.

Over the Air is all sold out now, but you can find all the information about the event over at the Over the Air Blog

I look forward to catching up with you if you are there.

As many people will have seen yesterday Nokia release a fairly major update to the N95 firmware. One of the major bonuses for flash developers is the inclusion of FlashLite 3 as standard onto the device, both as a standalone player and within the browser. For those using detection scripts the player version reported in the browser is:

PlayerVersion: FL 8,1,55,0

You can see a FlashLite version test movie here..

Related to this I found myself in the situation where the Nokia Software Updater would not allow me to install the new firm ware, my t-mobile branded phone was just such a device. A quick search and it seems that devices on certain service providers are locked from the update. However there are always round such restrictions. Below is how to modify your Nokia N95 product code so that it is unlocked for applying new firmware updates.

WARNING THIS PROCESS MAY BRICK YOUR PHONE, VOID YOUR WARRANTY AND ANY NUMBER OF OTHER TERRIBLE THINGS. DO NOT DO THIS IF YOU ARE IN ANYWAY UNSURE OF THE CONSEQUENCES. I ACCEPT NO RESPONSIBILITY FOR ANY NASTY THINGS THAT HAPPEN TO YOU, YOUR DEVICE OR ANY ACTION YOUR SERVICE PROVIDER TAKES AFTER FOLLOWING THESE LINKS AND INSTRUCTIONS

That said, I only had one minor hiccup in the whole process, and it seems I am not the only one to have experienced it. I for got to mention that to Mike on MSN

Right with that out the way, on to the fun.

1. First off BACK UP YOUR DEVICE! make sure you have a back up of the memory card and also the device memory.
2. In order to install the new 21.0.016 firmware you will also want to make sure you have the following software.

* Download the latest version of Nokia PC Suite.
* Download the Nemesis Service Suite.

3. Next read this post, it provides a list of the available product codes for the N95.
4. Finally you should make sure you read this post, it covers how to update the product code on the N95.

As I began to progress through the steps outlined on changing the product code of my Nokia N95 mobile phone there were a couple of items where I was left to ‘take a leap of faith’.

1. When installing Nemesis Service Suite I left the device connection as the default virtual USB device. And that seemed to be the right thing to do.
2. When deciding on a new product code for the device I chose the one for EURO1 Plum, this appears to have worked fine for my location and device. I have a silver/grey Nokia N95 and am based in the UK.

Once the product code was updated on the mobile phone the Nokia Software Updater worked fine to allow me to upgrade to the latest 21.0.016 firmware.

Curse my slow blogging skills, beat to the post.

This just popped into my news reader from ZDNet.

Well, you really believe that Flash is synonymous with the internet and frankly, anybody who wants to browse the web and experience the web’s glory really needs Flash support. We were very excited about the announcement from Windows Mobile, adoption of Flash on their devices and the fact that we’ve shipped 0.5 billion devices now, non-PC devices. So we are also committed to bringing the Flash experience to the iPhone and we will work with Apple. We’ve evaluated the SDK, we can now start to develop the Flash player ourselves and we think it benefits our joint customers. So we want to work with Apple to bring that capability to the device.

If the mountain wont move to you..

Go Adobe!

Read the full ZDnet article here
Read the SeekingAlpha transcript here

Anyone looking in the WordPress dashboard today will see the news that there is a sneak peak of the WordPress 2.5 Release Candidate 1 availible. From the dashboard comments this new version of WordPress will feature.

A customizable dashboard, multi-file upload, built-in galleries, one-click plugin upgrades, tag management, built-in Gravatars, full text feeds, and faster load times

If you are interested in giving the release candidate a test run, probably in a test environment I would think at this stage, You can download WordPress 2.5 here.