Flash

Yesterday Steve and I pushed through some updates to our SWFAddress module to support the new version 2.1 of the SWFAddress library and also changed it to use the new SWFObject 2.0 library. SWFAddress 2.1 brings a new and improved SEO script which works very well with Drupal. We've also fulfilled our one feature request and added support for percentage height and width for the Flash embed instead of just pixel dimensions.

With these updates we have green-lighted a stable release of our module, calling it version 1.1. We are currently working on an awesome new project in stealth mode that will be using what we're going to call version 2.x of the SWFAddress module which will support not only search engine optimized full Flash site support but also full AJAX site support too! We are super excited about this and can't wait to tell you all about it!

So if you're looking for a way to do super powerful content managed Flash, Flex, or AJAX sites, watch this space for some exciting news to come and start checking out the SWFAddress module for Drupal!

One of my favorite quotes from DrupalCon Boston '08 was Leslie Hawthorne's, "Drupal makes sandwiches happen." The quote I think describes just how amazing the Drupal community really is -- people going out of their way to help other people. The past few weeks have been big weeks for me in large part due to my involvement in the Drupal community. Ever since Steve and I first spoke about Druplash at DrupalCampWI in January we have been trying our best to give back to the community by organizing and speaking at more events. This led to speaking at DrupalCon '08 about our research in Drupal-powered Flash and Flex applications. While we were in Boston, I met Claudio Luis Vera, a partner at Studio:Module, a firm working with the MIT Media Lab on a new Drupal-powered website. Claudio invited Steve and I to come with him to MIT to present some of our research, which we happily agreed to do -- because it got us a quick tour of the Media Lab which we've both dreamed about seeing.

Who would have guessed that this chance meeting at DrupalCon would start the ball rolling on some major life changes for me.

This is the fourth in a series of posts chronicling the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance kickoff gala, a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories and run a quiz show via SMS and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

As you'll recall from the last post, the idea of providing refurbished Nokia phones for all 120 of our tables just wasn’t going to work out. Flash Lite was too limited, Java was locked down, and the annoying modal popups triggered after using SMS or a data connection would destroy the experience, and so we turned our search to an SMS or MMS gateway.

There are several options out there for receiving text messages. You can get a GSM modem, put a SIM card in it and pull down all SMS messages sent to a certain number. This is certainly a cost-effective way to go about things, and it means that you can easily get a SIM set up for service on a local number. On the negative side, transmission speeds are pretty slow, taking several seconds per message, and the donors would have to type in a ten-digit number each time they wanted to interact with the system.

This is the third in a series of posts chronicling the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance kickoff gala, a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories, run a quiz show, and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

As you'll recall from the last post, my students and I were tasked with building an interactive quiz and a method to collect memories from alumni and donors. We planned to buy a large quantity of AT&T Nokia 6085 GoPhones that we could preload with Flash Lite or J2ME apps.

My first practical step was to check reception in the space. Armed with my refurbished Nokia and my trusty T-Mobile Dash, I visited the giant ballroom in which this event would be held. Both my Dash and the Nokia got at least 3 of 4 bars throughout the entire room with connectivity to the EDGE network. (Verizon is the only 3G carrier in Peoria at the moment, sadly.)

This is the second in a series of posts chronicling the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance kickoff gala, a mediated event in which I used Drupal to gather alumni memories, run a quiz show, and display photography both on the small iPhone screen and on some giant screens via Flash.

One of the killer theatrical moments of the night - the presentation of Caterpillar's gift worth between $30 and $48 million dollars!

Almost three months ago, Jim Ferolo dropped the bomb on Matt Forcum, Harry Williams, Brett Noe and myself that we would be using our respective areas of expertise to produce the gala kickoff for the Campaign for a Bradley Renaissance. Since I am teaching a section of MM 491 on Multimedia for Mobile Devices, my students and I were tasked with building interactive portions so that our donors could interact by sending in memories, voting in a quiz show and sending in their photos. (We would later nix the photo / MMS capability.)

We expected up to 1200 guests at this event, distributed around up to 120 tables. Our first idea was to give each table a BU-branded phone, with which we could do all sorts of neat things. First, imagine the cacophony of 120 phones ringing at the same time (especially since we had planned to hide them from the guests up until that point.)

Today was Steve's and my presentation on how to build content-managed Flash sites using Drupal. I'd just like to say thanks to everyone who came out and for the great questions. We've posted our slides as a PDF up on the session page at the DrupalCon Boston site and you can download them here as well.

Both Brian and I are at DrupalCon 2008 in Boston this week. We will be giving our presentation about content-managed Flash and Flex sites with Drupal tomorrow night at 4:45 PM, but we’re both going to focus far more on the Drupal side of things and touch briefly on the ActionScript and Flash, so that even Flash and Flex neophytes will understand the entire backend, setup, and use cases.

If you would like to learn more about how to use the Flash / Flex stack, however, you have two options to get training from Developer Community Champions that we should mention.

It's official, Steve's and my presentation titled "Druplash and Druplex: Content-Managed Flash and Flex sites powered by Drupal" has been accepted at DrupalCon Boston 2008. We'll be presenting on strategies to create easy-to-maintain Flash and Flex sites which degrade nicely for iPhone and mobile users and maximum search engine friendliness using the Drupal content management framework.

The presentation will contain an overview of historical problems with 100% Flash websites, how with a variety of popular free toolsets most of these problems can now be overcome, different ways to get dynamic data into Flash and Flex, how the Web Services layer of Drupal makes it really easy to get data into Flash and Flex, and show some demo sites we've been producing.

Steve and I are both really excited to be heading off to our first DrupalCon and to even be presenting there!

Now that I'm on the lookout for ways to contribute back beyond writing documentation and use cases for SWFAddress (which we're working on in hopes that we'll get to give our Boston DrupalCon talk,) I took a look through the DROP queue yesterday, and saw one relating to creating a credits video for the Drupal Dojo sessions.

I thought this would be a great way to combine a little After Effects skill-building with a contribution back to Drupal. I ended up not using any After Effects, but instead GarageBand, Soundbooth, and Flash for the animation. I also took advantage of a fantastic new CS3 feature - Export to Video. Hit the Read more link to get a look at my first draft for the Dojo outro.

Tonight, Steven Merrill and I committed and released our first beta version of SWFAddress.module for Drupal 5.x. We demo'd an early alpha version at DrupalCampWI a few weeks ago and Steve has been hard at work shoring it up for release.

Steve and I came up with the concept for Druplash and Druplex (what we call Drupal powered Flash and Flex sites) about a year ago and have just been toying with them ever since. We recently got ourselves in gear when Steve needed to build a new portfolio (link coming soon) for his future career as an opera singer.

Using the great SWFObject and SWFAddress javascript libraries and the Services and AMFPHP Modules for Drupal, we figured out how to build full Flash and Flex experience sites which degrade nicely to full HTML underneath for SEO.