I just got back from Macromedia MAXX and I learned a whole bunch of cool stuff. I fooled around with a bunch of it, and have added a few extra pieces to the website. I hope to drop a more detailed report on the Conference in the next few day, but for now here’s more on the new pieces of my site. I encorporated two relatively new technologies to a set of pages dedicated to It’s a Wonderful Mensch, a short I made for work about a year ago.
The first technology I used was Flash Paper. This has been out for a little while, and basically competes with Adobe Acrobat. The difference is that like all Macromedia products of late, it generates .swf output. This is readable by anyone who has the Flash plugin, which is practically everyone. The whole thing, content and reader, is combined into one file and is less than 64kb.
The second technology I used was Flash Video. This also seems to compete with existing technology, this time specifically in the web video space. This one is different from Flash Paper, in that you compress a file into Flash Video, then bind a player .swf file to it. The video was compressed to about a 12 MB file, that can be progressively downloaded.
The thing I have to commend about both of these technologies is that they build on the Flash Player framework. This makes it have tremendous reach and cross platform compatibility. I don’t even need the Macromedia marketers to tell me that. The compression is good, and it was also extremely easy to create the .swf files and embed them into my webpages. Another thing about them was the ease of creating them. It took me all of about 5 seconds to create the Flash Paper .swf. (In fact I did it on the plane back from New Orleans) The video took me a little longer, but then that’s video. The swf player interface for it took a few seconds.
Check out these features at:
It’s a Wonderful Mensch
tpryan.blog 