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October 25, 2009
Thanks For Voting!
After my lament on Flash/Flex bug voting three weeks ago, I was very happy to see all of the votes on the bugs mentioned:
EventDispatcher should expose list of attached listeners went from 4 votes to 16 votes.
Include FlexPMD went from 3 votes to 9 votes.
Expose more of "additional compiler options" in the UI went from 3 votes to 12 votes.
If you haven't seen them yet, there's plenty more voting suggestions in another post on mine (although two of them have already been fixed in 10.1).
October 18, 2009
Updated IFrame Component
The Flex IFrame component has been updated again to fix issues and improve the code. More information can be found on netthreads. I have a feeling that a lot of the issues I've mentioned in Don't Use IFrames for HTML in Flex are still around, but it's possible that some of them are now being worked around.
Brightcove News: London Meetup, iPhone Encoding, and Developer TV
London Brightcove Developer Group: Head to London for the inaugural meeting of a Brightcove Developer Group. It will include a coding challenge, a first prize of a HD Flip Camera, and judging by CEO Jeremy Allaire.
Encoding for the iPhone: Learn about the settings that we've found work well when targeting your video for the iPhone. You can use this with the existing support that Brightcove has for the iPhone.
Developer TV: You can hear me talk on the new Developer TV about Using Ad XML, Using VAST Ad XML, and Troubleshooting with Player Logging. Next time I'll try to encode things better so that you can actually read the text. And let you see more of Charlie and Callie.
The Future of Online Video: An interesting Q&A about online video with Jeremy Allaire.
October 4, 2009
Brightcove News: Adaptive Streaming, Boxee, and Facebook
Cambridge Developer Meetup: Thanks to everyone who came to the developer meet-up two weeks ago at our office in Cambridge. I wish I had recorded the presentations, as there was a lot of excellent demos on the iPhone, live streaming, Palm Pre, audio support, and more. If you're interested in future meet-ups, no matter where you are, just send me an email (at brian at deitte dot com) or a comment.
Adaptive Streaming: Brightcove now uses adaptive streaming to pick the right video for your current bandwidth. One interesting thing to note about Brightcove's player implementation for this is that we don't require Flash Player 10. Or rather we require FP10 if the user really wants to use adaptive streaming, as that's the only way this feature will work, but the player itself will work fine in FP9. It required an interesting trick to get this to work, and I don't know of any other player that does this.
Boxee Support: Brightcove publishers can now distribute on boxee. This may mean I need to finally stop just using a web browser after hooking my Macbook to the TV.
Brightcove's Facebook Status: New articles have been posted to show how to embed video in a Facebook news feed and add a player to a fan page.
Why Don't You Vote for Flex Bugs?
I posted a month ago on My Requests for the Flash Platform, and I've been surprised at the lack of votes for the items I listed. Let me explain why.
My logs show that the blog post was viewed 840 times. I'll take off more than half of that number to account for crawler visits, people who didn't read the article, etc. So that leaves us with 400 people who could have voted on a bug.
Keeping 400 people in mind, here's what I see for the bugs that I entered in the list:
EventDispatcher should expose list of attached listeners. 4 votes
Include FlexPMD. 3 votes
Expose more of "additional compiler options" in the UI. 3 votes
That's a depressing voting percentage. There are a lot more bugs in the original post, and they don't look to have changed much in numbers either.
So why didn't people vote for these bugs? Here are my guesses:
1. You find it too much effort to vote for bugs
This is probably because you don't want to spend the time to register for an account. To show how easy this is, I just signed up for another account (which I will use to double vote for everything*). It took me less than 3 minutes, and most of that time was waiting for the email registration. The total time in which I was really doing something was less than a minute.
After you have an account, you can vote by clicking on a link in the left-hand column of the bug report.
It does take a bit more effort to create new bugs for things that are bothering you, and I know I haven't been very good at this. But I've been getting better as I've been thinking more about point #2.
2. You don't think voting for bugs matters
You voted for a bug that got deferred without explanation, or an enhancement that feels like it's being ignored. Or you've read stories about this, or you just don't believe anybody pays attention to a few votes on here.
I can understand why a lot of people would think this, but I think they're wrong. Unless things have changed dramatically since I was on the Flex team, opinions like this matter a lot to the team and future planning. The thing that's hard to see from our outside-the-team perspective, however, is all the other inputs going into the decision of what gets done or not. There's corporate goals, other internal team requests, what will make money, what people on the team want to work on, etc. So it isn't the only "vote" on the matter, but I think it's a very important vote.
3. You didn't like the bugs I entered
Now this is a reason that I can completely understand. Maybe you're focused on the Gumbo components, or better data services, or you just want more cowbell. In any case, if you didn't like the bugs I pointed to, I hope you're finding or entering the issues that concern you.
4. You don't have to vote to get something fixed... you have other ways
I think this only works if you're Doug McCune or work at Adobe.
* Of course I'm kidding about double-voting. Unless FP-444 doesn't really get fixed.
No MAX for Me
I won't be at Adobe MAX this year, but I'm excited to see that I can watch the keynotes online. I'll be setting up a room at work to watch this and hopefully hear more about GPU accelerated video, Flash mobile, and whatever else is cooking. Oscar Cortes will be representing Brightcove, and I believe we'll also have a booth there for more information on using Brightcove.
I'm missing MAX to keep my wife company as we expect our first child when it gets a bit more cold out. So if you don't hear me blogging for a few months, this is the reason. :)
