As per every post, these are just brain farts that emit from my minds orifaces so if Im way off base feel free to let me know.

Ok so to set the scene I will outline what I have been noticing.

1. People have been downloading Torrent video quite happily for a long time now.  Take for example the series of Hero's. Its actually available for free from the network website (streamed). But seeing all you US folk have the latest releases I have noticed all my mates have downloaded the torrents to view them before they arrive in New Zealand.
2. The common video format for these torrents is AVI in either xvid or div (more and more so the previous).
3. HDTV is popping up on all the torrents, not because everyone has hdtv Tv sets but the quality of the final converted video is alot better with less artifacts.
4. More and more media centers are popping up and people are transfering media files to a central storage, ignoring DRM people seem to be hoping to watch these again, and keep them for later.
5. Apple now P0wns the music scene because of the hardware; Lessons to be learnt?

Right onto the points of interest. 

Torrents work! I dont mind leaving something running overnight or over a couple of days if the quality is going to be good. I cant myself see in the near future  wanting to watch streamed media of anything over a few mins long. I prefer to wait for quality, and other people seem to be the same. Why is FMS pressing with streaming technologies when it has it covered well enough for now. I noticed that some time ago the Adobe teamed up with Verisign but this is only a step in the right direction. I am hoping Adobe is going to start stepping towards peer to peer video transfer to speed things up and do file transfer as oposed to streaming. Im sure they are watching Joost with interest, I know I am.

Thats not to much of a step away from what I have at the moment. I turn on the TV and check out what time I can watch a show….I turn on a media center and see when my file transfer will be finished and I can watch my show. FMS seems to have been missing the mark. Its only Java, which although is not a bad thing, it is a limitation to intergrate with some things *awaits Java fanboy rants in cooments* , and I havent seen much more than chat apps done with it (again I would love some more examples).

The flash player really really needs to take advantage of hardware accelleration to get a great codec for HDTV. Like I stated previously div-x and x-vid are leading codecs for torrents. But I can see why. Imagine having to convert to a format that can only be viewed in web players and a few desktop apps that not to many people have. Adobe seem to be working on a flv converter on the labs but they really need to do some work to play catch up if they want to OWN.

Lastly hardware support. Apple demonstraighted how a piece of hardware can lead to software and create sales channels. Adobe has such a tight grip on who uses its SDK's and how much they cost that I cant see how FLV could ever make it into the home entertainment area. The Wii is great with its Flash player 7, but imagine it with Flash player 9!

Lastly what I would love to see happen: FLV encoders free! FMS devlier some amazing developments in the network delivery and enable distribution of feature length video. HDTV FLV codec (with hardware accelleration)

Bring it on Adobe … let's see some advances in Flash Media server.

</BrainFart>  

Wow the past few weeks have seen all sorts of component releases and cool demos. I guess everyone had a chance to play over the holiday period. What is really encouraging is that most are releasing the source on something that they arent ever going to release and support. 

One Set of really ecouraging components that is going to go comercial and be supported is Michael Schmalles set. He hasnt released all of the components yet as he is working hard on getting everything up to scratch in terms of support and documentation. I have been keeping an eye on FlexComponets list and I see that he is putting alot of work into intergrating them into the flex core. He even has a desktopesk group of components that I love the look of, but go check out his blog to see some of the cool things going on

James Ward and a couple of mates have shown how to use a framework called Turbo Gears. Its very Ruby on rails like but in Python. Was an interesting watch. They created a Conponent using Ely's DisplayShelf comonent. How cool would it be to see that as  iChat using streamed  video!!
Check out his blog post for more details on how he went about building it with a crowd of spectators watching thier every keystroke lol.

Code Zen posted an article that got me interested with using a nicely rendered TileList. He also have a few other good posts there one of which showing how they completely covered someones office in TinFoil (thats Kiwi for Aluminium Foil). 

Then Tom Lee broke out a pearla of a post in textHighlighting. I love this one as I use this all the time in FireFox. Nice work Tom!

And they kept coming with a post from ScaleNine showing a vista theme for Flex. Uber sexc!

Finally the flex team release a new component….or rather a set of components for having dockable control panels. There is also a nice flow Container in the source aswell. The dockable control panel can be moved around in a toolbar or dragged out to be its own panel.

So I thought I would just highlight these few things and show some pretty pictures. Im really excitied about what I think will be a great year for the Flex framework. If you have seen any other cool things in your travels please leave a comment and point me to it.

Last night I got side tracked and figured out how to call methods and recieve results on a .NET dll from inside my Ruby on Rails website.

What the F*$k you say. .NET and ROR, what an unlikely couple. Well yeah. ROR rocks at making sites quick and clean. .NET is the most rocking serverside lanuage with system intergration. It should be its writen by the same company that makes the OS. So I was after a way to get the best of both worlds.

I really wont bore you with the details here, but if you want any info just leave a comment with your email and I will explain it to you. I would like to write a generic wrapper/plugin for ROR to make this really easy but I have to sort out translation of dataTypes so complex Objects can be passed between the two.

I wrote a little site that called a .NET dll to get system information like CPU % etc to display on a page. To basically show load on the server. 

Ultra g33k stuff I know but still a very cool little tid bit to know can be done. 

I wish there was a native 3d API in the flash player…. but the first step for the Adobe boys and girls will be hardware acceleration (which they are reportedly working on). So for now we will have to make do with libraries like Sandy3D and now Janus if its a desktop application. 

The next release of Janus which includes this functionality is scheduled for Monday the 15th of Janurary. 

Thats right Janus now supports 3d. And being an ex RightHemisphere employee Im happy to announce its virtually the same 3d viewer that you will find in Adobe Acrobat 3D. So what have they done? Well basically they have wrapped the 3D viewer ActiveX and given direct access to the viewers API from within flash. The viewer can load roughly about 89% of the 3d formats out there so its useable in alot of situations. So if your looking down the barrel of a flex project that has to load and view 3d models and interact with the models Janus has the answer.

The boys at Janus have posted a few quick examples for now but I understand they will be posting somemore soon. And with over 1200 commands available there must be alot of examples. 

I also understand there might be some USB interfaces in the works. This will basically allow hardware to be interfaced directly with the flash player, detecting digial and analog signals from a USB device. So if your a hardware g33k like me you can start to write libraries to control or read from some of the cool USB devices out there.

I have always followed the web based desktop space with interest and was surprised today when I saw one that looked nice like Vista (well kinda)!

http://www.craythur.com/

Its very cool looking but like most doesnt really serve any purpose other than the generic calandar and contacts deal. Surely something like this could offer more. At least open a framework which allows others to develope applications within it?

None the less another step in the evolution.

And on another note have you seem the WPF version of the Vista Yahoo messenger client. Man it looks sweet!

http://theflashblog.com/?p=241

Well done to the peeps at frog design and Yahoo!