For the second year running, Wowza Media Server Pro has won the Reader’s Choice awards for Best Server Hardware/Software (with 43% of total votes versus Adobe’s 22% and Microsoft’s 12%) and Wowza Media Server 2 Advanced was the top choice for Best Streaming Innovation of 2009, above Adobe’s and Microsoft’s entries.
YAY!MEDIA provides a range of Wowza application development services and we’re pleased that Wowza remains a popular and powerful platform for streaming and collaborative application development.
For Wowza streaming services, we recommend streamingwizard.com.
Congratulations to the Wowza team!
The Wowza IDE is a great way to start coding Wowza projects. It’s based on Eclipse 3.3 but unfortunately it’s also missing a few core components that most people would be used to or require, an important one being the CVS Repository Exploring perspective that allows you to connect and synchronise projects with a CVS repository. However it’s fairly simple to get it back (once you know how). Here’s a quick guide to getting the CVS Explorer back into your Wowza IDE. These instructions are for OSX but it’s pretty much the same process on Windows:
- Download the CVS client package from the eclipse.org site and unzip it somewhere
- Start the Wowza IDE and select Help > Software updates > Find and install
- Select the option that says ‘Search for new features to install’ and click ‘Next’
- On the next screen select ‘New local site’ from the right hand side
- Navigate to the folder you just unzipped above and select it
Eclipse will then proceed to install the CVS Repository client. Restart Eclipse after the installation and once restarted, go to the Add Perspective button and the CVS option should be there in the list. And that’s it!
The next Midlands Flash Platform User Group meeting is tomorrow, at Warwick University, Ramphal Building room R.0.21. Hopefully it’ll be a good one as I’m helping organise it and we intend to run more over this end of the Midlands in future, possibly in September and November. I’m going to demo some of the apps we’ve built with the marvellous people in the web-dev team at Warwick University during my secondment there, including our AIR Media Converter Client, the Files.Warwick Desktop Client, a nice combination of MySQL, BlazeDS, Lucene, Spring, Flex 3.0 and Cairngorm by Rob O’Toole and maybe if I get time, our media recording applications in Sitebuilder, the University’s CMS.
Our MOO cards arrived today and very swish they are too. This means I can now go to all the cool places and not be the only one without a business card to put in the prize draw bucket.
MOO is a great service as well – the easy upload and design process is one thing I think is well-executed, but most of all I just like the language used on the site and in all its communications, warm and friendly without being patronising. Take ‘Little MOO’ for instance, the bot that confirms your order that freely admits it’s a piece of software, but says it will look after your order while it’s processing:
Hello, I’m Little MOO – the bit of software that will be managing your order
with us. It will shortly be sent to Big MOO, our print machine who will
print it for you in the next few days. I’ll let you know when it’s done
and on its way to you.
and when the order was done:
Hello, it’s Little MOO again. I thought you’d like to know, the following items
from your order are now in the mail…
I don’t know why, I just like that. Maybe that approach is dependent on your company persona to some extent but for me it felt more fuzzy and friendly to get an email like that from what is in fact just an automated system. Positive vibes, positive experience.
Whenever I use Flex Builder I don’t like the standard Courier or monospace font used in Windows or OSX. Instead I prefer to use the excellent Proggy Programming Fonts – they are excellent, concise fonts designed to be readable while remaining compact enough to allow me to see more code at the same time. Up until now though I’d only installed the fonts on my PC development setup, so today I thought I’d do the same on my iMac Flex Builder setup. For OSX, installing the font is as easy as downloading the font(s) you want, and dragging it to /Library/Fonts. To get it working in Flex Builder, go to Preferences > Appearance > Colors and Fonts > Text Font, and change the default font there to the one you want.
However on OSX I did this and hit a snag – the Proggy fonts are designed as pixel-fonts, that is they don’t look very nice when anti-aliased, so on OSX Flex Builder they look a bit rubbish at any size, even the 16pt they were designed for. One option is to turn off the global font-smoothing for 16pt and below in OSX’s System Preferences, but because that’s a global option it will affect the appearance of all fonts, and I didn’t want that. Fortunately I’m not the only one to have hit this problem, and I’m grateful to dispatchEvent() guys for their ingenious solution, involving resizing a whole set of Proggy font glyphs to something massive (you can download the fixed Proggy font from the post), which then allows you to set the actual size to 4pt in Flex Builder, thus bringing it under the default font-smoothing threshold in OSX. Works a treat! In their post on the subject some people also contribute some other solutions, including a command-line fix.
So now I have my favourite font working in OSX Flex Builder, I can get back to work…
YAY! is now offering the following on-site courses for Flash CS4 Professional and Actionscript 3 development for Flash CS4 Professional and Flex/AIR.
- Flash CS4 Professional for Beginners
- Flash CS4 Professional Application Development
- Introducing Adobe Flexbuilder for Flex and AIR
For more details, email us at enquiries@yaymedia.net.
Flash Camp Birmingham yesterday was a great success. From my point of view, every session was interesting and informative, and I learnt a great deal more about Flex 4, PureMVC, Degrafa, the Spark component architecture, FXG, Flash Catalyst, Away3D, mobile UI design and much more. Now all I have to do is go away and try some of this exciting new stuff out. It was also good to meet up with people in the community and talk about the latest developments and the Flash Platform generally.
Thanks to Jodie, all the speakers and everyone at Midlands Flash Platform User Group for a great day. Hopefully they’ll run more of these events in future.
Quick reminder that tomorrow Tuesday 16th June is FlashCamp Birmingham. If you’re interested in the Flash Platform in any way at all, try and grab one of the last few remaining places. The presentations and list of speakers is really great and should make it a fantastic day for beginners and experts alike. See you there!
This is our new, shiny blog for everything related to Flash Platform development, news and updates on the things we’re up to. Stay tuned for entries about AS3 development, MXML, and anything else we think you might find interesting along the way. Welcome to YAY! 
Here’s some news of what promises to be a great (and completely free) conference coming up in June for Flash Platform developers. FlashCamp Birmingham is being held on June 16, arranged by the Midlands Flash Platform User Group, and will consist of a range of presentations and talks for novices and experts alike. Events like this are a great opportunity to network with other novices, experts and developers and will also be an opportunity to see the new Flash Builder 4 in action. Some of the most knowledgable people in the Flash/Flex/AIR community will be there speaking, including Stefan Richter and Simon Bailey, while Adobe will be providing the keynote.
Whether you’re a novice or a seasoned pro, everyone will learn something at Flash Camp in Birmingham. We’ll explore existing Flash Platform technologies like Flash, Flex and AIR , before looking ahead at Flash Catalyst and beyond. Our keynote will be from Adobe Systems, who will also be running an hour-long session later in the day. We have a group of sessions dedicated to the creation and customisation of Flex components, and to add some creative inspiration, there will be presentations on real-time 3D in Flash, and how to take your Flash application architecture to a new level.
More information at http://www.flashcamp.co.uk/ and hopefully see you there!
