flash disign Sarasota, Bradenton flash disign web disign -- mmk4mkt

Brad Neuberg's awesome work on DojoExternalInterface gave us a major boost. It emulates the most recent javascript to flash communication API (ExternalInterface, in Flash 8) accross platforms including Flash 7. The library hides differences with browsers and flash versions as much as possible, and works around various performance limitations.

Thanks again to Jason for his interest, feedback and support. I'm pretty excited to see what cool stuff he'll cook using this and the new web APIs from Yahoo.

If you only want to deploy this component, you can download the 'binary' package.
To modify the flash source files and re-build them, get the 'source' package.

As you can see in the demo/index.html file, after including dojo.js and FlashXMLHttpRequest.js, you'll need to initialize dojo and the flash object by calling InitFlash with the name of a function. That function will be invoked once the flash object is loaded and ready to make requests.
From there on, you can create FlashXMLHttpRequest instances and use the 'open', 'onload' and 'send' methods almost as you would with a regular XMLHttpRequest object. You can also call 'setRequestHeader', but only to set the content type request header.

More generally, FlashXMLHttpRequest still has some limitations, due to the native Flash capabilities.
First, access to other domains is restricted by use of a crossdomain.xml file.
Second, you can only make GET and POST requests. It will become possible to support other verbs, such as PUT, DELETE or HEAD, with the new APIs provided by Flash 8.5.

Let me know if FlashXMLHttpRequest is useful to you and if you encounter any bugs. Here's a more convenient permalink to this post: http://blog.monstuff.com/FlashXMLHttpRequest.

Advertiser Sneaks Malware into Flash Ad
An underhanded advertiser trick that hit LiveJournal demonstrates a risk of accepting Flash ads -- they can pop up windows:

... the Flash ad contains code to open a popup that leads to a very different destination -- it's what I assume is an affiliate link that attempts to download and install ErrorSafe on your computer (link is to Symantec's description of it).
This, of course, would be totally against any ad company's guidelines. Masquerading as a banner ad, but discreetly opening a popup -- and not only that, but to what people consider malware -- is totally against any ad company's guidelines. So how did it get through?
Simple -- the ad actually contacts its website in the background, and the site returns a response code that tells it whether to display the popup or not - 'popup=1'. My guess is that kpremium.com returned 'popup=0' while the ad company were testing the ad for conformance to guidelines, and then they turned it back on once it was out in the wild.

Questions answered

I've had a couple of questions by email that I should answer (note I've paraphrased some of these):

What fonts should I use for my HTML Media Center application and can I use Flash? The SDK is where to go for design guidelines for HTML applications (the short answer is to use a sans serif font). Yes, Flash can be used in HTML Media Center applications - Napster and MSN Music both use Flash.

How can I add an application to the Start Menu? You can't. Well OK, you can, but we recommend that only OEMs use this functionality as there is a limit to how many applications can appear on the start menu and adding a new app will stomp on existing applications. If you intend to distribute your application you shouldn't do this, but if you really want to know, the details are in the SDK here.

I've seen the Media Center software for sale online is it OK to buy it? I'm no lawyer so I'm not going to comment on this. Media Center is an OEM product and only available with new PCs is the official answer though.

What is the object element for? And what's it got to do with accessibility?
Currently we add images to our pages using the img element, we tend to add fancy bits of video or wizzy and exciting flash using the applet element. So why do we need the object element? The object element introduced as part of HTML 4, and is designed to be used for all instances when we want to embed a generic object - such as a flash movie, or a video or an image - into a web page.That's all very well but what's it got to do with accessibility? Well the fantastic thing about the Object elements is that you can use it to provide lots of alternative presentations of your content - you are not confined to providing a simple text equivalent - as you are for when using the img tag.For example, you want to provide a Quicktime video on a web page - but it turns out that some browsers don't have the support for Quicktime - so you can specify that a mpeg movie be played instead, or some other alternative format. If the mpeg movie isn't supported you can specify that a text transcription should be used - and so on.To add the fun - for browsers that don't support the object element you can provide the embed element within the object element as yet another alternative method of delivering your multi-media.So there you go; the object element is a kind of Swiss army knife (so to speak) you can add to your web accessibility tool box.LinksW3 Schools Juicy Studio
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Site Launch > ChristMemorial.org
Just in time for the Holidays!I'm pleased to announce that Christ Memorial Church here in Holland, MI has launched their new website. The site was designed by a CMC staff member, and Boyink Interactive implemented it on ExpressionEngine, which allows the church to distribute responsibility for content maintenance to multiple church volunteers and staff members.Some of the content is forthcoming, but it often happens the new site reached the 'better than the previous site' tipping point. Going live with the new site often seems to be the best way to 'inspire' those responsible for outstanding content to 'get 'er done' as well...;) From an EE implementation perspective the highlights of the site are:

Use of EE segments and conditionals to reduce the number of templates required. The bulk of the site content runs through 3 templates.
EE integration with the Monoslideshow tool for the Flash animation on the home page. This integration allows the church to update that Flash piece by simply posting a new EE entry consisting of a new image and the descriptive text. Christ Memorial can use the EE publish and expire dates to ensure that event-related promotions appear and disappear from the site at the right time.
Rotating header images are implemented using another EE weblog, each image being one entry and the presentation set to random.

Congratulations to Christ Memorial!
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Why Flash memory is good for your computer

Simply put, flash memory will enable a revolution in improving computer performance in daily utilization scenarios. Your computer will boot up faster. It will launch applications significantly faster. (Hey, it will shutdown faster as well.)

The problem

To see why we will have this dramatic performance improvement, let's remember how harddisks work: whenever you have a mixture of random I/O requests, the actuator moves across different tracks to read/write the corresponding data. Switching tracks is a slow operation. For an average SATA drive, this is around 9 milliseconds. This might not seem much, but a few milliseconds per seek means that you can have at most a few hundred random I/Os per second. And this feels like light-years compared with the performance of other components in the system like RAM access speeds or even CPU frequency. So, just to give you an example, a random I/O with 4 KB requests and average of 4 ms seek time per request would mean around 1000/4 * 4 KB = 1 MB per second disk transfer rate. Pretty small, don't you think? Especially when you compare it with sequential I/O, where you can get a much faster transfer rate (say, 60-70 MB/s on a regular harddisk, depending the rotational speed, data density, etc).

One trick to alleviate this performance issue is to minimize seek time by reordering writes and/or serving reads from cached memory. Memory caches can greatly help in this regard, but here is a little problem: applications, the OS, and other components do not expect writes to be reordered. When you a write reordering is detected at the application level, then a data corruption can appear, especially when you reboot the machine in the middle of performingg a set of reordered writes.

For example the applicaiton is performing Write(block1) followed by Write(block2) in one thread, and Read(block1) followed by Read(block2) on a different thread. In the sequence above, the application expects block1 to be written always before writing block2. Having this guarantee simplifies for example applicaiton recovery semantics, assuming that the computer can crash between writing block1 and block2. But if we perform write reordering, and only write to the disk block2, then our application recovery logic cannot be done in any way. And so we get to corruption.

Still, storage controllers perform today all sorts of tricks like maintaining a write-through cache in volatile RAM, coupled with limited reordering. More advanced controllers, or SAN equipment use persistent caches (battery-backed volatile RAM) to perform write reordering, complementing advanced storage features like RAID configurations, etc.

The solution - why flash is good

By now it should be clear how flash can be used in this picture: you can use inexpensive flash as a persistent write-through cache for reads/writes. Also, the fact that this flash is persistent enables reordering I/O requests at an unprecedented level, therefore greatly reducing our nasty seek time bottleneck:

The new 2Gb OneNAND chip doubles the capacity of a OneNAND memory device (from 1Gb) and increases the chip's ‘write' speed from 9.3MByte to 17MByte per second.

”We're seeing a rapidly widening market for our OneNAND memory because of its outstanding performance and capacity that has become even more noteworthy with the application of 60 nm technology,” said Don Barnetson, Director, Flash Marketing, Samsung Semiconductor. [...]
Because of its exceptionally high performance, OneNAND can serve as a catalyst in the development of new product markets. A much-discussed example of this application-creating role is in how OneNAND memory is now being specified as the buffer memory inside a hybrid hard disk.

Samsung successfully demonstrated a commercial Hybrid-HDD prototype for the first time at the MS Developer Conference (WinHEC: Windows Hardware Engineering conference) in Seattle last month.
[source: http://www.physorg.com/news70899414.html]

Flash-based I/O optimizations - already present in Vista

One more thing worth mentioning: Vista already benefits from Flash-based optimization. The feature is called EMD (External Memory Device), and can boost the performance of your computer by simply adding a USB thumbdrive and designate it as an EMD device. Under the cover, it works in a similar way with the technique described above.

d.Construct schedule and podcast

As you’ve probably heard by now, Clearleft is organising another d.Construct conference this year, set for Friday 8th September. Like last year we’re keeping it nice and cheap – the idea is that even freelancers can afford the £75 entrance fee. But because it’s cheap, you’ll need to be quick – last year sold out in half an hour!. Tickets go on sale on Tuesday 18th at 10am (British Summer Time) and to help you get in quick, we’ve put together a funky little countdown on the registration page. We’re hoping plenty of folk can stay the weekend in Brighton (which is why we put the conference on a Friday) but if you do, beware that another conference is on shortly afterwards, so hotel rooms may get booked up pretty quickly.

d.Construct is essentially about building the new wave of web applications – Web 2.0, Ajax, tagging, user-generated content (authentic media) and all that. You can now see a run-down of the schedule, and on it you may spot the main focus for this year is APIs. For me this is the biggest thing about Web 2.0: websites sharing information and content by design. We have Jeff Barr from Amazon; Simon Willison and Paul Hammond from Yahoo!; and our own Jeremy Keith talking about different aspects of APIs – innovation, business implications, inspiration, technical challenges and group mashups are all covered.

Also on stage, and back by popular demand, we have Aral Balkan who will once again be opening our eyes to the – frankly astonishing – world of Open Source Flash, Flash Platform and Flex 2. We can’t talk about Flash without mentioning accessibility, and that’s exactly what Derek Featherstone will be doing, by way of giving us strategies for making Web 2.0 design patterns more accessible. And we can’t talk about Web 2.0 with mentioning tags. Thomas Vander Wal will be explaining how we can make tagging systems live up to the hype (incidentally, if you’re blogging about d.Construct 2006 please you tag your blog posts with dconstruct06 for easy Technorati collation). Last but not least, we’re dead chuffed to have Google’s Jeff Veen wrap up the conference with thoughts and solutions on designing the complete user experience – anyone who saw his talk at @media will understand our excitement about having Jeff with us in Brighton.

As with last year, we’ll be podcasting d.Construct. But for this year we’ve started podcasting early. Jeremy has done a fanastic job of splicing together a review of last year’s conference. He’s also been chatting to attendees and speakers for this year’s conference, something which Garageband makes fantastically easy to podcast as it automatically detects an iChat and puts each particant on an individual channel so that filters and levels and be applied to each. Pretty cool stuff, I thought. Anyhow, you can subscribe to the feed directly or go the podcast page for more info, iTunes and Odeo links etc.

Update. Feel free to advertise your presence at d.Construct on Upcoming.

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