Deitte.com

Trial accounts: I think that Brightcove has had 30-day trial accounts for awhile, but we've been promoting them a lot more recently. If you want to check out what we've done in Flex and Flash, sign on up.

Brightcove is Hiring: If you're in Boston or Beijing, we have some positions open right now that you may want to look at for QA, system engineering, and project management. I bring this up only to help out Brightcove and my blog readers in the current job market, and of course not at all because your mentioning of my name gives me a referral bonus.

New Brightcove.com: The website was revamped lately, including all the technical sections. There are reorganized docs (a great improvement), training videos, portals, portals, and more portals. It's been redone with Drupal, which will help more of us make changes faster.

Usability studies: There are always usability studies going on at Brightcove, and we're always looking for customers to put under the microscope or send in a suggestion or two.

I just did some stopwatch performance tests of Flash Builder 4 against Flex Builder 3, using the same files that I did for the faster Flex 3 SDK tests. Here are the results:

Build All, in seconds, after changing two UI classes
Flex 3: 42.5
Flex 3 fast: 36
Flex 4: 38
Flex 4 with libraries: 26.5

Build All, in seconds, after changing a ModelLocator
Flex 3: 47
Flex 3 fast: 36.5
Flex 4: 34
Flex 4 with libraries: 26

The projects with libraries were very impressive. For these admittedly simple performance tests, I'm seeing the best Flex 4 project as 70% faster than the regular Flex 3 project.

The "Flex 3 fast" and "Flex 4" results are so similar because some of the improvements are already in Faster Flex 3 SDK. This was unexpected to me, so I ran a few more tests. Sure enough, some more complicated compilations showed more of an improvement for Flex 4.

The "Flex 4 with libraries" test took advantage of the library sharing and other multiple project work that has gone into Flash Builder 4. The project that I was building was divided into three library projects and one main project. The library projects only have acyclical dependencies, which likely made the compilation easier.

More details on the test: the Flex 3 tests were done in Flex Builder 3 using 3.2 or the modified version of 3.2 from the faster Flex 3 SDK page. The Flex 4 tests were done in the beta of Flash Builder 4. The project was simply converted for Flash Builder 4, and only two simple changes to the code were needed to build the project. I only reran two of the three tests from the Faster Flex SDK page for no good reason. I ran each build a few times and averaged out the results.

If you want to know more about manipulating images in Flash, I have an excellent new book to recommend. It's Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Image Effects by Todd Yard, a coworker of mine at Brightcove.

I was the technical editor of the book, and I really enjoyed reading it and learned a lot about a lot of AS3 APIs that I haven't used before. It goes over the basic drawing API, blend modes, many other bitmap manipulations, Pixel Bender, the Flash Player 10 3D APIs, a custom (and newly open sourced) animation and effects library, text effects, video effects, and more that I'm sure I'm leaving out. Outside of the book, there's the new library I just mentioned as well as a huge numbers of samples that can be used in Authoring or Flex/Flash Builder.

This is in the same series (and a great followup) to Keith Peter's ever-popular Making Things Move book.

Dev articles There are new development articles about using ads without an ad server and dynamically loading a player in Javascript. You can find more articles on the developer blog.

New Brightcove blog I just found out about Ashley Streb's blog, and given he's my manager at Brightcove, I will say it's the most fantastic blog of all time. Seriously, though, check it out as as it has a lot of good info on video sitemaps, creating BEML components in Flex, and EC2.

Audio support Now leaving the video-only world, Brightcove 3 has some support for audio players, as shown in a Universal Music player.

On the VUDU And leaving the browser (although not for the first time), Brightcove will start showing up on the VUDU set top box, starting with Sony's music videos.

InSkin ads I found InSkin ads fascinating because the team working on the Brightcove ad API hadn't even heard of it until it was up on a major website. We're seeing more and more partners that can develop ad solutions without any of our internal development, thanks to our fantastic ad APIs. (Did I mention I worked on them?) And the resulting ads look really good.

The state of ads Not directly related to Brightcove, but I'm always reading interesting articles about advertising, and there's been a few more than using lately. It's ranged from the perpetual sizing news to the sky is falling to practical advice

I can't remember the last time I used a Java applet, and so I couldn't help but post about Wordle, a fun (and perhaps useful) way to spend a few minutes.

The site provides a lot of options for creating word clouds from text or links. The image above is from the site and is created from just entering http://deitte.com. The one annoying part of the site is that I had to use a screen capture program, Bug Shooting, in order to get the image to embed. But you can link to word images you create on their site.

Wordle can also be helpful for surveys or other text from customers to visualize the responses. I found the site via Caren Cioffi at Brightcove through Yammer, and she was using it for this purpose.

No matter what I've tried, the demand for iframes in Flex doesn't go away. Recently there's been a number of interesting comments on an old post of mine about Embedding HTML in a Flex application using an IFrame. Dennis wrote new instructions for using the code in Flex Builder 3, ariel linked to an issue with Firefox zooming, and Kedungwuluh linked to an example application.

All of these comments come after I've essentially stopped commenting on the iframe posts that I've written. There's also some great alternatives, as linked in the Embedding HTML post, which have had more active development than my solution. And most importantly, I've written Don't Use IFrames for HTML in Flex which I prominently link to in the Embedding HTML post.

But my passive and active attempts at moving people away from the iframe post hasn't worked at all. The post is consistently the most popular on this blog, getting about 3500 views a month, and the 159 comments keep growing. Of course, writing all this new information isn't going to help, but I don't think it really matters. Obviously the solution is good enough for a lot of people. And there's a lot of people still searching for a really good solution for HTML in Flex.

I was happy to see the announcement of a strategic alliance between Brightcove and Adobe. The alliance will focus on a few areas: long-form HD video, content protection for video, Adobe Creative Suite integration, collaboration on Adobe's new player framework (known as Strobe), and some sales and marketing collaboration.

Since I came from Adobe about two and half years ago and use Flex and Flash every day, it's not too surprising that I'm excited to see Brightcove have an even stronger relationship with Adobe. I'll also be very interested in checking out Strobe more to see the ways that we can work with it.

You can read some more about the alliance in an interview with Jeff Whatcott.

The Flash platform user group at the Brightcove office has been going through a bit of an identity crisis lately. The sessions used to be focused on design patterns, but lately we've been veering off into the general Flash platform territory. This has led to some great talks, but it's a little confusing. It can't be called the Boston Flash Platform Group, as this is an offshoot of the meeting in Brookline. So how about my name in the title of the post? Everyone will remember BFPUDPBBG.

In any case, the group is always looking for good speakers, whether it's talking about design patterns, a new open source project you're working on, or anything else you can dream up about Flash and Flex. Want to talk? Send an email on to boston.flash.platform@gmail.com, and Sam Robbins (or if he's busy, Doug Martilla or me) will get back to you.

Want to learn more about the group? Join the mailing list, which will also tell you about the meetings in Brookline.

We're always happy to welcome new people to the group, whether for one meeting or every month. You'll always learn some new things, have some pizza and beer, and can join us at Characters after the meeting. Check the mailing to make sure, but they almost always occur the first Wednesday of the month at 7pm. They're at the Brightcove office, which is right near the Kendall Square subway at One Cambridge Center. Just go inside the building and tell the security officer why you're there. You can then go up to the 12th floor and someone will let you in.