Facebook - Apollo

You must heard about new Facebook platform and API. How about Facebook Apollo client? Social networking on desktop, excited :-)

Technorati tags: facebook, platform, apollo

Bi-Directional text is coming in Flash Player (next release)

I just got the link of Emmy’s post about bi-directional text-support in next major Flash Player release, via Matt Chottin. Thanks Matt for posting, I would have not noticed it otherwise.

It means, more projects would adopt Adobe Flex/Flash in future. I remember, Infosys dropped on of the projects in 2005 because they needed bi-di text support for Arabic and other languages. This news would surely make loads of folks happy, I remember there is entire petition site asking for this feature.

Anyway, you can read the Flexcoders thread, where it was first disclosed.

Update (March 24, 2009): Adobe Flash Player 10 has been released and it has support for Bi-Directional text.
Technorati tags: bi-di text, bi-directional text, flashplayer

Media RSS with different media (video) formats - problem and solution

Most of video sites are providing Media RSS feeds but not all of them provide URL of Flash Videos or Audio. Some (YouTube, Brightcove etc) use element to point to their player (or page) and some provide videos in different formats (mov, wmv etc) and some (Revver etc) have videos encoded in Flash-Video-Format (flv) but their Media RSS contains (different formats mov, wmv etc). Due to various reasons (monetization purpose, traffic-statistics, advertisement, not enough resources to of transcode media etc), these sites are not providing the link to Flash Videos (.flv files) in syndication-feeds. I understand the concern and problems but there is solution that would probably:-

• Increase traffic i.e. monetization
• Solve Usability problem - discussed later
• Allow third-party developers to get a clean way of integrating things instead of hacking f.ex: YouTube FLV URL hacks/workarounds

Let me give an example, look at following YourMinis! widget for Brightcove:-

Problem:

• Context Change: User can’t see the videos within widget, it requires to go to Brightcove’s site.

Solution:

• Provide a shorter duration (10 secs) preview/sample Flash Video file (.flv) in feeds.

Media RSS spec suggests that has an “expression” attribute that determines if video (media) is a sample or full version. Why aren’t publisher using it for sample videos also? Now imagine, if Brightcove had provided a link of preview-flv-url in their RSS feed or API, this YourMinis! widget could have provided a better experience by helping user to see preview before deciding to watch full video. There are various open-source tools to transcode, process, split and merge Flash Video Files. All these sites can automate the process of creating preview-flash-video-files and also provide their users a tool to create previews using online-front-end (made in Flash/Flex). We all know that Adobe Flash Player is not only most-ubiquitous browser-plugin but also most-ubiquitous Video-player on the web ( and hopefully on desktop once Apollo is there), so why not use it? Everyone (Google, Microsoft etc) is talking about widgets that can consume distributed-data. But it seems publishers are little reluctant and doing what their competitors are doing. I believe, this is time to solve the problem of monetization over syndication/distributed-data (APIs etc) irrespective of content-type (text, images, videos, audios etc).

Update (March 24, 2009): Adobe announced support for some more video and audio formats in Flash Player in August 2007. By now, most of us have Flash Player with those new capabilities installed on our machines. So the idea of this post, where Flash applications can consume vidoes in media-rss feeds, seem to have gone easier.

Technorati Tags: rss, media-rss, monetization, flash-video, syndication, widget

Sleepless nights

I have not been able to sleep properly for some months. It’s not because of work pressure, rather my mind is always thinking around related things. I try to think about something else but unable to do that.
All thoughts are around Mixercast (problems, features etc), new ideas, technology and some real problems to be solved. I am feeling a pressure to do more and more even when I know, I can only do limited number of things per day, no matter how hard I try? I also get this feeling of not being able to execute all ideas.
This is causing problem in my social circle, I don’t talk much or I keep thinking while talking to a friend/colleague, I am sure other folks must be feeling ignored by this behaviour of mine. My mind is so much involved in those things that I have been ignoring other things (having food, payment due dates, reading favourite blogs, participating in lists/groups etc) which I never did in past.
How to control this?

Mixercast is Techcrunched

Techcrunch reviewed Mixercast, check it out the post. I don’t prefer Mixercast being projected as Slide-Show player, Mixercast is more than that. I am hopeful, very soon, users would realize the capabilities and use them.

Apart from easy to use Mixercast Wizard, there is powerful designer-tool for more creative users, who prefer more flexible environment. I would list some of those features here:

• Canvas - where user composes Mixercast by dragging and dropping things from Media Library
• Media Library - where all users content (imported, uploaded, linked etc) is shown.
• Media Import tool - imports from Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc.
• Webcam capture tool - records video with audio and saves in media library
• Studio - a place where Mixercast’s partner (MuzeTune, PumpAudio, NatGeo, GettyImages etc) content be select.
• Widget Library
• Property palette
• Widget-specific-property-palette
• Background settings (color, texture-or-tile, image)
• Undo/Redo commands
• Grid, snap-to-grid functionality
• Many more features

Like any alpha quality product, Mixercast has many known (an unknown?) issues, team is working hard to fix/polish existing stuff (widget UI, interaction etc).

It is always helpful to hear feedback from real users (i.e. you), if you have any feedback, please leave a comment here or send an email to [mail at abdulqabiz.com]. I promise, I would try my best to work on feedback and make sure things get better.

If you have not yet checked out Mixercast, please check it out.

Technorati tags: mixercast, techcrunch, designer

Mogulus - Live Broadcast

Do you want to create LIVE TV stations online? Check out Mogulus, it’s your online studio where you can create, program and broadcast your 24/7 television station.

Mogulus is out of stealth-mode but still in closed-beta, you would need to apply for beta-account. But it’s worth watching their introductory video tour, very creative.

• Mogulus Site
• About Mogulus
• Mogulus FAQ
• Mogulus blog

BTW! Mogulus user-interface looks great and entire application (front-end) is made in Adobe Flex 2.0.

This year is going to be interesting, lots of video-content, tools to create content and hardware (Apple TV) to serve it to TV.

Technorati tags: mogulus, live, tv, internet, studio, flex

Mixercast: Mix and Distribute licensed content

Mixercast allows you to use licensed content (audio, video, images etc) in your own content. You can choose audio from MuzeTunes, PumpAudio etc. Video clips from National Geographic etc. And images from GettyImages etc.
Users can not only use these licensed content into their creation (content) but also distribute it (through remixing, embedding over blogs, myspace etc) without bothering about licensing, Mixercast takes care of licensing etc.
Check out the Press Release on Yahoo! Finance
More info on Mixercast blog.
Users can also upload media to Mixercast servers or import/subscribe (via Media RSS) from Flickr, YouTube, MySpace etc. All media items appear in their personal media library which they can use over different sessions for creating different mixercasts. There are some cool widgets, more in future, which can be used to show content in different visual metaphor.
Check out all mixercasts created by me (Abdul)

Memory Object Caching System in Java (J2EE)

I needed a memory-caching system in some of features, I wrote simple-caching system but it was too simple and can’t scale (distributed).

I have heard about memcached and found it’s Java port j-memached which seems to be little complex to setup?

I looked at JCS and EHCache. I chose EHCache because it was already in use somewhere in our application and I could do most of things with it:-

• J2EE servlet caching.
• General stuff (Programmatic APIs to cache things, even if it’s simple HashMap).

It was easy to setup EHCache. In some servlets, I was able to enable caching without touching servlet code:-

• Write filter classes, which extends from EHCache-construct classes
• Add cache entry and configuration in EHCache.xml
• Add entry of filter classes in web.xml

That’s it, caching is in place for simpler things but complex things and more control, I am going to use EHCache API.

Caching is important part of any web-application, one needs to think about it while designing the system. Some people might not agree and think it as premature optimization. I believe, if you know about requirements (scalebility or expected-user-count) then there is nothing wrong to think about optimization.

BTW! Do you think there is better option than EHCache? Please let me know. Thanks.

Mixercast plays Flex/Apollo videos

I just created a Mixercast that takes video.onflex.org’s RSS feed and plays videos in a nice cool widget.

Check it out here

I highly recommend you to watch Mixercast in fullscreen mode by clicking the button that looks like this .

Adobe Media Player Sneak Preview

Mike Chambers has posted Apollo Media Player Sneak Preview video on video.onflex.org. He is talking to Deeje Cooley (Adobe Media Player team member).
AMP looks great. It’s great to see how Media RSS enables us to share rich-media-data, I am in zone that’s why I keep thinking about syndication (RSS/MRSS) :)