Almer/Blank Labs

For the past few months, we've been running a contest to encourage suggestions around potential uses for Synthia, which you can hear at SynthiaHearsPictures.com.

The contest ended yesterday, and we picked a winner. Congratulations are in order to Kenny D. from Los Angeles, who provided the winning entry — and who will shortly receive a brand new iPad. …read more…

The OSMF team sent this to me to help get the word out, and I wanted to pass it along to you all.

On Wednesday, June 9th, Adobe will be hosting a FREE 90-minute session, run by Lisa Larson-Kelley, on the formal launch of the 1.0 version of the Adobe Open Source Media Framework (OSMF). Lisa will also cover the beta release of "Strobe Media Playback," a pre-compiled SWF media player (including source code) based on OSMF.

The invitation is here and you may register here.

…read more…

I tried to record my 'Standardize Your Flash with Adobe OSMF' talk from FITC Toronto — and, lo and behold, it actually seems to have worked.

So I edited it down a bit (cutting out the Q&A, which unfortunately was not audible on my microphone), chopped the sections down into individual videos, and posted them to YouTube. I thought it might be a good reference if I embedded all of them in a single post, along with the source code you'll want for each lesson if you wish to follow along in Flash CS4 or CS5.

In this talk, I cover:
- what is OSMF
- OSMF capabilities
- The basic structure of an OSMF player, including the MediaElement, MediaPlayer and MediaComposition
- Dynamic Streaming (the files for that video also include HTTP Streaming)
- Subclipping
- The key MediaPlayer properties and events required to build a media player

…read more…

Do you see the world in more than 3 dimensions?

Are you constantly examining people, places and things as they relate to the big picture?

If so, come and join one of the world's premier Rich Media agencies, Almer/Blank, where you'll become a member of a diverse team of architectural experts.

Work on innovative projects that will challenge your technical and business acumen while rewarding you with timeless knowledge and industry recognition. You'll be involved in technology solution design and implementation, as well as mentoring team members.

What you need for this position:
- 5+ years of engineering experience (OOP, MVC and TDD are huge pluses)
- 5+ years of Flash/Flex/ActionScript experience
- 3+ years of LAMP stack experience
- 1+ years of PureMVC experience
- Commercial product development experience
- Strong solution design and implementation skills
- Ability to mentor team members
- Ability to understand business requirements and solve problems
- Openness to feedback and knowledge of when to and when not to defend design choices
- Desire to produce the best experiences in the industry, hands-down

Additional experience with any of the following will be considered a plus:
- Flash Gaming
- Animation
- 3D
- Java
- UX/ID

What you'll be doing:
- Designing medium to large scale software/hardware systems and leading other team members in the development of those systems.
- Interacting with users to define system requirements and/or necessary modifications and assisting with systems integration
- Participating in all stages of software development including analyzing, designing, programming, debugging, and modifying software enhancements and/or new products for internal or customer applications.
- Acting as the SME
- Work closely with engineering and creative teams
- Create and implement future solution direction plans

What is in it for you?
- Fun, Casual, Creative Environment (15 min walk to the beach)
- Work with a brilliant team of engineers
- Health Care (for full-time employees)
and more…

Please apply here.

Thank you.

I'm continuing work on my FITC Toronto talk, 'Standardize Your Flash with Adobe OSMF', and the files to accompany it.

OSMF certainly has features and functionality for hard-core developers to build powerful media-rich experiences. But OSMF also makes basic media player code really easy for those users of Flash who might not consider themselves developers, but who still are comfortable coding on the timeline.

One of the issues with the still nascent, but growing at an impressive rate OSMF documentation, is that almost all the sample code is for users of Flex Builder / Flash Builder — and all of the sample code for Flash assumes use of external class files.

But using OSMF does not require coding in external class files. So, to illustrate that point, I've gone ahead and modified the simplest possible OSMF video player from Adobe's documentation to code that works on the timeline. Which I'm posting here. …read more…