Me and the guys from Bureau BlauwGeel have been working together on their new website: http://www.bureaublauwgeel.nl
The CMS-based website uses video files to create a dynamic, living and breathing background.
Each menu item has a background image that slowly zooms in to keep that dynamic feel.
Although the background and interface always adjust to the size of [...]
I often wonder why the Web 2.0 revolution hardly ever involves Flash. Although more and more data can be called up using RSS feeds, these feeds are still mostly used in HTML pages. Just look at Facebook, Last.fm or even Blogspot.
Strangely, it’s not that hard to implement a blog post, a twitter update or even CMS content in a Flash site. Just call the blog’s RSS feed and parse it. As an example I’m parsing this very blog on my portfolio site: www.eerkmans.nl
When connecting to an external domain, flash needs to find a so-called ‘crossdomain.xml’ file on that domain. If flash can’t find this xml file, it won’t connect to the domain and just hang. But fear not! You can redirect your RSS feed through Feedburner. They have a crossdomain.xml so you can still access any RSS feed that Feedburner can access.
If that doesn’t work either, you’ll have to write your own PHP file that sits next to your SWF, and does the connecting to the external domain. Flash then accesses the PHP file and thinks it’s getting it’s data from it’s own domain…
Since a few months I’ve been working on a flash widget that uses twitter and flickr. This tool has been used at a number of events (concerts, seminars) to create a live report, filled with photos and remarks of the audience.
Accessing Twitter directly from Flash is quite a pain so I was happy to discover the SWX tool by Aral Balkan. SWX allows you to access all kinds of web API’s (like twitter and flickr) by calling just a few lines of code.
When using this tool to report an event I needed a way to filter out specific messages. At first I achieved this by using Twitter’s “@replies” but this needed the Flash application to be logged in to a Twitter account. Right now I’m using the “summize” API to filter Twitter messages.
The tool was used by Nieuwegarde (8 uur overwerken), Lopend Vuur, Lifehacking academy, Noorderslag and a couple more. The original concept came from deondernemers.nl and lopend vuur. PHP scripting was done by Arno Hoogma.
