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March 12, 2007

Loading 3D Model Data In Flash At Runtime

I was working on a small 3D flash program today and wanted it to read in it's model data from a file that I created with another program, such as Blender. I'm not sure if it's the best way to do things, but it was fairly painless to export the model data to a plaintext VRML file and then convert the mesh data to a simple XML format. It's trivial to read in XML data in Flash, so this saves having to parse a more feature-rich 3D file format.

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February 13, 2007

Play Flash Lite 2.1 Content On Your Device

If you have an older Symbian or Windows Mobile device, it probably either came with support for Flash Lite 1, or no Flash support at all, whereas the newer devices are starting to be available with support for Flash Lite 2 content, which will allow developers to make use of more advanced programming features, not the least of which are functions. I suspect that this is going to motivate a lot more cross-platform application development for mobile devices, especially in the hobby and open source world where code signing costs and fragmented SDKs are a pretty significant barrier to entry.

Thankfully, last December Adobe released free end-user Flash Lite 2.1 installers for both Symbian series 60 and Windows Mobile platforms. So if you don't have the most recent hardware, you can perform a quick upgrade and extend the usable life of your device. For thos of you who are interested in developing Flash apps for devices, Adobe's dev center also has some decent starter howtos on the subject.

I'd love to get your opinions on mobile development. So if you have any thoughts on the subject or know of any good open source tools, guides or resources, please share them in the comments!

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February 7, 2007

Howto: Download Youtube and Google Videos

Sometimes you want to save the videos that you watch on Youtube or Google Video. Perhaps you want to watch them later. Maybe you are hoping to transcode a video for playback on a mobile device. Or maybe you want to edit a clip into a podcast you are making. Problem is, you can only download a subset of the videos from Google and Youtube doesn't even have a download feature.

There are a few different ways to get at the FLV file that the video player application is downloading. Safari users can use the Window->Activities feature to locate and download flv files as they are playing, and Joshua Kinberg put together a couple nice Greasemonkey scripts for Firefox that make downloading pretty simple.

I was looking for an easy solution that works cross-browser, and this is what's working for me: 2 javascript URLs, based on the original code from Joshua's Greasemonkey scripts, that you can add to your bookmarks list.

Google Video Download Bookmark (right-click, copy address and save to bookmarks)
Download Google Video

Youtube Download Bookmark (right-click, copy address and save to bookmarks)
Download Youtube Video

Don't click on those URLs here. Just get them into your browser's bookmarks. The next time you are watching a video on Google Video or Youtube, you can click the appropriate bookmark and a window will pop up that will begin downloading the FLV! The Youtube file will be named "get_video" after it is downloaded. Just rename it and add a ".flv" extension and you should be in good shape.

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