In the past week, I’ve been pretty busy adding the finishing  touches to the features and fixing the last few bugs that popped up. Most of the last-minute changes are a result of using the class in one of my own projects.

It’s then when I realized I’m missing some key features like adding the music directory, and some properties of the PlayrEvents. I also added some ear candy like fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods.

On a more functional note: I’ve abstracted the playlist to an independent class. So now you’re provided with lots and lots of ways to customize and manage your playlists.

The shuffle mode is now smart. In English that means the playlist remembers what songs have played and which ones haven’t.

Finally I’m happy to tell you guys won’t ever have to write an XML playlist file yourself. I’ve got a PHP4 and PHP5 version of PlayrDiscovr which reads a directory and returns the corresponding XML listing the tracks and their properties.
On top of that, I’ve got some help from other people (I still need to contact you guys) who are willing to help me out with building PlayrDiscover in ASP, Ruby and Python.

Even though I’m listing all of the new features, the Playr class is still the easiest way of implementing any kind of sound-feature in any Flash/Flex/AIR application. But the simplicity shouldn’t be a limitation, which it isn’t: you’re still able to build full-feature media-playing applications.

One of the little challenges I still have to tackle is the Tween problem. I’ve implemented fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods. Those methods actually tween the volume property of the Playr instance. The problem with that is when using the Playr class in a Flex project, you get a cool error message telling you it can’t import fl.transitions (which is the class package for the Tween class and the easing package).
I still haven’t figured out how to work around this problem. If any of you have any suggestion on this problem, feel free to tell me about it.

I plan on releasing Playr 2.0 in the coming week (or 2) depending on PlayrDiscovr impementations, final changes, demo’s and site development (yes, I’m building a dedicated site for Playr ) Feel free to suggest other implementations you’d like

Some of you guys already knew, but only 2 weeks ago I finished my latest project: WALTER EGO.
Walter Ego is a Dutch rapper who happens to live in Nieuwpoort.

A few months back, Walter contacted me, and we started brainstorming about the new website. At some point he told me that I should make this website my masterpiece…

If you’d die now, this is what people should remember you for...

Well… At least expectations weren’t high, right?

A year ago I built the first edition of this website, which was pretty basic. Back then I used ColdFusion to build the administration panel. This time I built it using PHP.
I have to say that this project clearly improved my PHP skills. While I was building the backend, I was focusing on modular development, so I could reuse a lot of the written code. A lot of people suggested using the ZendFramework but since I’ve been looking into this a few times without making any progress, I just skipped that chapter (after all: we’re all bound by deadlines ) and went on developing my own framework (‘framework’ might be slightly exaggerating though).

I am pretty proud of the result, since everything I wanted to do, actually came through, and made it to the final result. While building this site, I really enjoyed seeing progress, and experimenting with the visual effects. I learned quite a lot during this project, which is really really cool! I even got to work with the Playr 2.0a class, only to realize it still needs a lot of work.

I even got to hack my way through the Youtube API and the Youtube AS2 SWF, to get a clean FLV file, which I then could easily stream to the video section of the site. That was pretty uncool. I never expected Youtube to return an AS2 SWF file. I expected an FLV file. Man, have I been wrong!
The main reason for Youtube to return a SWF is to embed all kind of extra features (such as captioning for example). And finally, Youtube not having an AS3 version of this made me want to start screaming.

All in all, this project was a fun project: I had many challenges to tackle, and in the end I delivered a quite unique product (at least, that’s what I like to think :p ).
Just 2 days ago, at midnight, Walter Ego released his first CD, which you can download freely from the site. If you understand Dutch, you might be interested in what this talented rapper has to say.
Download the CD here.

Some screenshots:

The video page streaming from Youtube

Administration Panel :: Guestbook section

Administration Panel :: Home section

Alternate HTML content for Google

Administration panel :: Pictures section

About page

URL: WalterEgo.be