Jul 25
I have recently finished my second Adobe Air application, Media Player. Media Player is a basic video playing application to watch FLV’s, F4V’s, and many other video formats as long as it is an H.264 video with AAC or MP3 audio. I am a huge movie guy and one of my real loves for Flash is its video playback capabilities and being able to create something with it. I hope what Flash can do with video in the future expands even more because right now the options with video that isn’t coming from a Flash Media Server is limited to how it can be manipulated. One thing you will notice is if you try to scrub the video, it may jump once you release the mouse, this is a thing with Flash because it can only scrub or move to the closet keyframe in a video and not individual frames. If the video source is from a Flash Media Server, then frame-by-frame scrubbing would be possible. That is one of the things I am hoping will be updated. Please feel free to request for features or report any bugs that you may find that I never encountered in development.
Also if there are any other Flash/Flex developers that are reading this and know of how to work with DRM videos such as iTunes bought movies, I would love to include that as a video type that Media Player can play. I can’t seem to find a whole lot of info online about it and the Flash Help just provides bullet points on what to do for DRM files but provides no examples.
Jul 05
Well this made my day. I received an email today from Softpedia telling me that my AIR application GetItNow Downloader was added to their Mac OS applications database and they certified(Windows/Mac) it as a virus, adware, spyware free application. This was quite an honor and if you are reading this Softpedia, you made my day, so thank you. Here is the Windows link and the Mac OS link to their listing.
Coming soon as an update to GetItNow Downloader is a scroll bar to the queue list if you have more than 10 items. As it is right now, you can technically have an infinite number of items in the list and therefore have the app grow to a large size in height. If you have any requests for features to the application, please let me know and I will see if it is something I can work into the application. Thanks.
Jul 03
I just released a minor update to my AIR app GetItNow Downloader. There were two bugs in it. The first was the progress bar would go the opposite direction when download really small files, such as text files. The second bug was the “Delete and Redownload” action would delete the file by moving it to the trash, but it wouldn’t initiate the download part if it was a single download, and not from a “Add to Queue” entry. Both bugs have been corrected. If you see anything that glitches or doesn’t work properly, please let me know and I will correct it as soon as I can and you will be notified by the application that an update is available the next time you launch it.
Jun 29
Over the past week I started working on an AIR Application for both Windows and Mac OS to be able to download files from online. The main idea behind the project was to no longer have to use Firefox just to download files. I say that because I use Safari and have a hard time switching to anything else because I am a heavy MobileMe user with having my iPhone and computer completely synced over the air. If you aren’t a Safari user then I shall inform you of what I consider a flaw.
Safari likes to treat certain files in certain ways where other browsers don’t. When it comes to ZIP files, Safari sometimes automatically decompresses the file, creates a folder of the contents of the ZIP, and deletes the ZIP file altogether. Not moves it to the trash, but straight up deletes it. This pisses me off majorly because I don’t want the browser doing things like that automatically and not giving me the option to turn it off as a basic preference. It does have a preference on automatically opening files, but it still treats those certain file types a certain way. Other files like movies and music, it plays within the browser if you have the proper video/audio codecs installed. But I want to download the file, not try to stream a potentially large movie in the browser that isn’t embedded in someones site.
So my solution to this “problem” was to create an AIR app that would let me download the files I want and download them the way I want without having to open a second browser just to download a file and then close the browser. Anyway, the application I created is GetItNow Downloader and you can grab it from my AIR Apps page.
