BRUSCA

Hints and tips on Designing for Web 2.0 Websites

Posted by Brusca under Adobe, Design, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash

A Web 2.0 site is supposed to charm its visitors with its simplicity and ease of use. So, if you’re designing a Web 2.0 site, remember it has to be very interactive and user friendly.

Read on at HubPages

HTML5 Video Playback…

Posted by Brusca under Adobe, Apple, Design, Dreamweaver, Flash, Video, iPhone

I just finished up watching the latest Diggnation and was quite surprised to hear Alex Albrecht and Kevin Rose claim there was no reason to use the flash video playback anymore. As you can imagine I was astounded at this notion. Video playback through the Flash player on the web has been a major part of my focus for more than 5 years now and the next best options are not even close.

I for one have not yet delved into building HTML5 pages yet, so I thought I would do a quick test. As a quick test I spent 5 minutes adding a video tag to an HTML page and linked a video to it, excellent! Fast and easy, what everybody likes. So I tested this on Safari first, knowing this browser seems to support HTML5 the best, and no worries there. Next Firefox 3.6, see the resulting screen shot below. Turns out FF supports the video tag but not the H.264 codec. So because of this you cannot use alternative content, like say the flash plugin just in case your browser does not support that specific tag. You just get a big grey box. Check out how the video presents in your browser http://www.brucelevick.com/html5.html.

So without even getting to the most commonly used browser on the market there is already a big issue of the different codecs supported in different browsers (Flash plays the same codecs no matter what the  browser), with no control that I can see if one of these codecs is not supported. As for IE, the most commonly used browser, no support whatsoever for the video tag. Yes I certainly should ditch my Flash video playback (sarcasm if you didn’t pick up on it.) . I will say one thing that at least with browsers that have no support you can implement alternative content. Until IE supports some other codec the others don’t, then HTML5 video playback is going to be a nightmare to manage.

Check out how your browser measures up. http://html5test.com/

Also check out the “limited” attributes the HTML5 video tag has. http://www.w3schools.com/html5/tag_video.asp. Don’t even get me started on the comparisons to the Flash video functions.

Sorry for the rant, I just find this very frustrating to hear industry geeks make ridiculously uninformed statements, and that the (video playback) wheel is being reinvented so to speak. Lets not go back 10 years and go through that same teeth pulling revolution we went through 10 years ago. I can’t go through that client heartache implementing elements working on one browser and not the other, not again. HTML5 video playback… not for a while.

Recent Projects

Posted by Brusca under Design, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Photography, Tanzania, Video

Currently I am continuing to develop the Australia Zoo TV project. This is a very exciting project and has a lot of potential to do well and delivers some great video content, spreading the message of Conservation. www.australiazoo.tv. Developing the website, filming the Rescue Unit, editing and producing the episodes has been a huge challenge, but one I have fully enjoyed.

Carpet Python

Another recent project is for a very good cause. Humanidee (www.humanidee.org). I met Dee through the fodder of Twitter after my trip to Tanzania. Dee has set up Humanidee to help people in need all over the world. Currently Dee is in Tanzania volunteering and helping out The Tanzania Albino Centre in Arusha.

Humanidee.org

webdu 2008

Posted by Brusca under Adobe, Dreamweaver, Fireworks, Flash, Google

It’s been another whirlwind webdu. As per usual webdu gives anyone with a passion for this kind of work the added motivation to continue to grow and explore new realms as they arise with technology growth within the web world. Sometimes aspects of your work can be demotivating, thankfully there are exciting times ahead.

Flash CS4 has some very nice features. One of them being the use of inverse kinematics. You can now create bone structures to help animate characters from within flash and the bones can be accessed using actionscript.

An example can be seen here at The Flash Blog

New Dreamweaver and Fireworks CS4 beta versions are now available and we got a sneak peek of those at webdu 2008. Some very nice feature like webkit built directly into Dreamweaver.

Google Maps API for Flash. Google have finally released an API for Flash. Meaning we can stop using the Yahoo maps application on the Steve Irwin Day events page and use the much better mapping system from Google, that’s right Yahoo, there is a world outside of the United States.

All in all a good conference, and some very nice new features and toolsets to help us at Australia Zoo deliver RIA’s through the browser and on the desktop.

Now time to sleep!