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May 25, 2009
Image Effects in AS3
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.
May 18, 2009
Brightcove News: Audio Players, the State of Advertising, and More
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
