Updated version of Playr

It took a while… A long while… Like… A year.
But I finally updated Playr and made actual plans for V3. Thanks again for all of your great support and feedback during the past year! It really means a lot to me!

It was really great to see how Playr popped up on different blogs; Sometimes mentioned as part of a project/experiment, sometimes mentioned in lists of handy AS3 classes. That really made me happy and it inspired me to add even more features, and make it even more useful. But those are to yet to be built

For now I just fixed a few bugs and I added a pretty important feature which wasn’t there yet: the debug property. Set debug to true and Playr will trace any errors that occur without breaking your app, without you having to listen to these errorEvents.

I also changed the shuffle internals (I still wonder what I was thinking when I wrote a ’setShuffle’ instead of simple getters/setters…) and as far as I know: Nothing seems broken after updating old projects using Playr to the new Playr version (but I’ve been wrong before…).

And the last thing I want to mention: I changed the way Playr handles stream errors. The old version would just skip the track, and try again later. However I think the new implementation is better: The ‘broken’ track just gets removed from the playlist before proceeding to the next track.

So there you go: It’s online, it’s free, it’s open-source, it’s for you to use and save time!
(And it’s created by me, so you’ll probably find bugs sooner or later: Do tell me about them and I’ll look into fixing them )

Happy playing!

Playr Site: Playr.noCreativity.com
Download Playr: Click
Playr Documentation: Playr.noCreativity.com/docs

Come look at our latest creation: The iJoke!

I have been a Mac user for over 2 years and all of my close friends will somehow agree that turning Mac totally changed my computer experience. I haven’t run into that same kind of problems as I was when using Windows. I’m not complaining anymore about a very sluggish system etc (but I am complaining sometimes! We really need to get those SSD drives into those iMacs!). That means I really like what Apple creates, and I like how their products work for me.

The iPad. Doesn't it look like it were a stretched version of the iPhone?(Picture taken from Engadget.com )

So: to the point. If you haven’t heard about Apple’s last new big thing, you probably lived on another planet for the past couple of weeks. Yes, I’m talking about the amazing iPad! I could start by talking about what a great piece of engineering this probably is (that thing is pretty thin, and it has a pretty big display so my guess is that this wasn’t easy) but that just wouldn’t do justice at all. Read the rest of this entry »

Experimenting at new levels

I have been experimenting around a lot in the past year. I have run into all kinds of limits when experimenting and where most of those experiments stopped, this one actually started off… The limit I’m referring to is not the most regular one: The rotation of the earth in space.

I wanted to capture startrails. Startrails are basically the same as trailing lights from a passing car at night. The only difference is that the trailing light is coming from about 7 million lightyears (or any random that makes it sound more dramatic) away and it takes about 15 minutes to actually spot movement.

I went out twice in one night just to shoot some pictures. Once, just to be sure I actually would be able to capture startrails and once for the money-shot. The result?

Read the rest of this entry »

Doodling evolved

The few people that follow me on Twitter have probably seen me tweet about an upcoming site called ‘Draw A Doodle’. I could try to explain everything about what I’m planning to do, but why bother if I could just save you 8 minutes and just show you what I want to really to create?

One of my latest school assignment was to create a site where users can create news-content. (Me being way too excited to have actually paid attention, I read users should be able to create new content… Turns out my lecturers really wanted NEWS content… ) In this assignment, I saw the perfect opportunity to create the basics of the Draw A Doodle project. So I did…

I really put in a lot of effort into detail and animations. Nearing the end of the deadline I had to cut some corners… I had to leave out the layer-rearranging system in the Doodle Creator, I didn’t get to take care of all tab-indices, I had to skip the scrollbar for the users-list and the comments-lists, etc.

Oh god… I was going to cut right through the chase and show you the project! How did I end up telling the story of my life again? Well anyway: Pictures!

Read the rest of this entry »

Why Apple is doing a good job not allowing the Flash Player to be on the iPhone

I’m going to get shot down for this. I can already feel the finger on the trigger of the sniper on the roof across the street, aiming at my head… I love Flash, I have been playing and creating with Flash ever since I was 17 years old. But…

In the past 2 years there have been numerous times when people expected (and were insanely excited about) a full in-browser Flash Player on the iPhone and while I was one of the people hoping it would happen only a few months ago, I’m not so certain anymore.

Everybody is saying that once Flash Player 10.1 will run in the browser on the iPhone, you will be enabled to have a ‘full web browsing’ experience. But how do you expect the ‘full experience’ on a mobile device (in this case the iPhone)? Read the rest of this entry »