jun :: realeyes

Last week David and I gave a presentation on peer-assisted networking in Flash Player 10, 10.1 and AIR 2. This presentation was based on the presentation we gave at 360|Flex earlier this year with some updated slides and some new demos.

So, to start you can check out the resource page for the original presentation we gave.  There you will find the slides and the first round of demos: http://www.iheartair.com/?page_id=609

In addition to that, we now have an updated slide deck: http://www.iheartair.com/samples/conferences/rtmfp_edu/P2P_RTMFP_Welcome_edu.pdf

We also have two new demos:

New Demo 1 – Broadcasting Audio/Video using IP Multicast on a LAN

The first new demo took the existing Multiuser Video demo and enabled it for IP Multicast communication on a LAN without the need for Adobe Stratus: http://www.iheartair.com/samples/conferences/rtmfp_edu/RTMFP_IPMulticastDemo_Flash.fxp

New Demo 2 – eLearning POC

The second demo requires two application and represents some bare-bones concepts to allow one to build eLearning applications with real-time feedback and no need for servers other than Adobe Stratus:

1. The client is a Flash Player based application and uses OSMF to play some media.  It plays a movie for 20 seconds, then swaps it out for a SWF that asks the user what the movie title was.  If they type in ‘elephants dream’ then two things will happen.  First, the OSMF media player will allow the user to continue watching the movie.  Second, the application will use P2P to send real-time student feedback to the manager application. (Peer ID + “Test Passed”)  Here’s the source: http://www.iheartair.com/samples/conferences/rtmfp_edu/RTMFP_InteractiveOSMFDemo.zip
2. The manager application is an AIR 2 application.  It’s very basic and when you run it it will just show a blank screen.  However, if you leave it running and test the client application, you will start receiving feedback in this application whenever someone successfully types in ‘elephants dream’.  You can find the source here: http://www.iheartair.com/samples/conferences/rtmfp_edu/RTMFP_InteractiveOSMFManagerDemo.fxp

As always, these are presentation demos.  They should not be construed as production code…or even super clean code.  For the most part they were done in a hurry around ‘real’ work.  They will however illustrate the core concepts that you will need to build your peer-assisted Flash Player applications.

Feel free to ping me if you have any questions, and enjoy!

The Compilers will be playing a live funk rock show and giving a tech talk to walk through the apps we use on stage at the upcoming RMAUG.  For those that don’t know us, we are a three piece band of musicians that write code for a living and spend much of our time working with the Flash Platform.

The RMAUG meeting will be on the evening of Tuesday 6/8 and if you would like to attend, you can RSVP here: http://rmaug.com/

The beauty of this is that you don’t even need to attend in person since there will not only be a couple ways to watch the show remotely, but also to actually interact with our band and affect our music, that’s right, affect our music remotely no matter where you are in the world.  You just need an Internet-connected device.

So, geeks of the world unite and help us rock the world of Flash Platform goodness and learn something while you’re at it too.

Just as a teaser here’s some of the technology we’ll be using this time around:

• Flash 10.1
• AIR 2
• Adobe Stratus
• Merapi
• Megaphone
• Flash CS5
• Flash Catalyst CS5
• Flash Builder 4
• and much more…

So get your RSVP on…and experience geekRock as you’ve never experienced it before.

The slides and sample code for the Peer-assisted networking talk that I gave at 360 Flex with David Hassoun are now available.  You can find them here: http://www.iheartair.com/?page_id=609

David and I have an article we worked on with Adobe released on Adobe Devnet today. For those of you interested in bringing P2P into your Flash Platform applications this is a good introduction on all the features you’ll have available to you with Flash Player 10.1, RTMFP, and Stratus 2/FMS 4.

There’s good information, a good sample with source code, and good illustrations to help you get going.  The last word document revision I submitted was 28 pages long, just to give you an idea on the wealth of information in this article.

Also, we’d like to thank our Adobe tech reviewers and editors for helping us get through this!

Here’s the direct link: http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/p2p_rtmfp_groups.html

Enjoy!

Here’s two very good reasons to attend 360|Flex in San Jose:

Reason 1:

David Hassoun and I will be co-presenting all that is cool in the world of Flash Player 10.1, Adobe Stratus, and RTMFP.  It’s going to be a great presentation on some of the cutting edge Adobe technology.  So register for 360 and come to our presentation:

Adobe Stratus and Flash Player 10 P2P: Enterprise Multi-user Applications Without the Need for Large Server Infrastructure

Reason 2:

I’m excited to announce that I’m FINALLY going to do my Silverlight for Flex developers talk.  The scope of my original idea has changed and now it’s now evolved into a product compare/contrast, developer workflow, media delivery, and back end system talk.  The cool thing is I’m bundling it up with my friend, and band mate Eric Fickes who will focus on the server side of things.  So register for 360 and come to see the RIATron:

Session 1: Adobe is from Mars, Microsoft is from Uranus: A View from the Client
Session 2: Adobe is from Mars, Microsoft is from Uranus: A View from the Server

I’ve been searching for exact information on the new Flash Player 10.1 classes for a couple hours now.  I’ve tried the new Unified Flash Platform livedocs, the Flash Player 10.1 release notes, and even Devnet.  No love…

Thanks to Shigeru I found the information I need.  He’s got some output from the Library Manager tool he runs that shows exactly what’s new in Flash Player 10.1.

Here’s the link to the API differences: http://shigeru-nakagaki.com/index.cfm/2009/11/17/20091117-API-differences-between-FP-100-and-FP101

By the way, if you don’t read his blog, you should.  He’s always posting really useful information.

Props to Flex developers in Japan!  Thanks Shigeru!

Adobe recently release Flash Player 10.1 on labs.  It has many outstanding new features and I’m excited to start playing around with it.  However, since I’m on Mac OS X, there’s one very big issue.  There’s no debug version of the 10.1 player to download.

The lack of a debug player for Windows users is not too big of a deal since the installer comes in the IE plugin flavor and the Netscape plugin flavor. For us developers this means we can use one browser for 10.1 and the others for debugging our work targeted at older player releases.

For us Mac users we get one plugin installer.  This means to play with 10.1 we have to get by without a debug player.  For those of us that write Flash Player applications as our job, this is simply not an option.

So…rather than living without a debug player or living without playing with Flash Player 10.1 I figured out a way to have my debug and 10.1 too.  Thanks a ton to Sephiroth for building a really useful Firefox plugin, the Flash Switcher!

Using the Flash Switcher, I can install 10.1 globally on my system. Then if I want to debug a pre-10.1 application I’m working on I can use Firefox to switch to the version 10 debug player using Flash Switcher.  The other beneficial side effect is when you switch it in Firefox any browser should also get switched, for instance, Safari.

Here’s the steps I took to make this a reality:

1. First you are going to want to uninstall Flash Player from your system. Once you’ve downloaded the uninstaller make sure to close all your browsers.  Here’s the link to the uninstaller: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

2. Next, you will want to install the Flash Player 10 Debug Player.  Once again, after you download the installer you will need to close all browsers.  Here’s the link to the installer: http://www.adobe.com/support/flashplayer/downloads.html#fp10

3. The next step is to open Firefox and go to Sephiroth’s page to install Flash Switcher.  Here’s the link to that: http://www.sephiroth.it/firefox/flash_switcher/#install

4. Once you’ve installed the Flash Switcher, you will want to save Flash Player 10 Debug Player in the Flash Switcher as a cached version of the Flash Player.  I suggest watching the 45 second tutorial on how to do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iINoAaKB64

5. Next, you are going to want to uninstall the Flash Player 10 Debug Player. Don’t worry, if you cached it in step #4 you’ll still have it. So, uninstall Flash Player from your system. Once you’ve downloaded the uninstaller make sure to close all your browsers.  Here’s the link to the uninstaller: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

6. Now it’s time to install the Flash Player 10.1 Player.  Once again, after you download the installer you will need to close all browsers.  Here’s the link to the installer: http://labs.adobe.com/downloads/flashplayer10.html

7. Now save Flash Player 10.1 as a cached version of Flash Player in Flash Switcher.   If you didn’t in step 4, suggest watching the 45 second tutorial on how to do this: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5iINoAaKB64

8. At this point if you try to use Flash Switcher to switch between the two versions of the Flash Player, Firefox will throw errors such as Access Denied and File Already Exists. (At least I did)  To get around this, you must uninstall Flash Player 10.1 and rely on the cached versions of Flash Player 10.1 and Flash Player 10 Debug in your Flash Switcher.  So, uninstall Flash Player from your system. Once you’ve downloaded the uninstaller make sure to close all your browsers.  Here’s the link to the uninstaller: http://kb2.adobe.com/cps/141/tn_14157.html

You should now be able to switch back and forth between 10.1 and the version 10 debug player.  One thing I noticed, is you’re going to want to close your other browsers such as Safari before switching otherwise the Flash Switcher won’t be able to switch the player version. It may by why I got the issues before step 8, but hey, this was supposed to be a 5 minute blog post, I’m busy with billable work, and too lazy to retest and revise.

Finally, if you want to test the switching with an app in Flash Builder 4, you can run this simple Flex 4 app after each switch.  It spits out the player version and whether it’s a debugger or not.  This download is a zip file containing an FXP export of the Flex 4 Project: http://www.iheartair.com/samples/CodeZips/TestingFP10FlashSwitcher.fxp.zip