Category ‘Web Development’
HtmlEntities Adobe AIR widget
Do you know the HTML Entity Character Lookup at Left Logic (leftlogic.com)? It comes in pretty handy, when you need special characters and their HTML entites, and it’s much faster than scanning through hundreds of rows of characters. I made an Adobe AIR Flash version.
The HTML Entity Character Lookup was originally developed by Remy Sharp as a HTML + JavaScript (i.e. web app) as well as an OS X dashboard widget. The only possibility for windows users to use that app offline was the HTML Entity Character Lookup Firefox plugin made by Yining. I wanted something different, so here it is: The first release of my Adobe AIR HtmlEntity widget. Now updated for AIR 1.0! In order to run this, you’ll need to install the Adobe AIR runtime available at http://adobe.com/go/getair. Once you got the runtime, you can install HtmlEntities by clicking the button below.
The application is licensed under a Creative Commons ShareAlike 3.0 License. As far as I know the CreativeCommons licenses are not compatible with (or at least not recommended for) software, but since Remy Sharp licensed his app under this ShareAlike license I have to use the same license.
Google announces OpenSocial API
Are you a Facebook member? Did you join MySpace for some of your friends don’t have Facebook accounts? There’s a solution, and it’s called OpenSocial.
OpenSocial is an API for social networks. There’s nothing new about APIs, but the Google is taking a flying leap by standardizing the different APIs of different social networks into one API. You might ask: “Why Google?” Actually Google is just developing the OpenSocial API, but it’s not an idea Google had on their own - they have a couple of influential partners in the social web business: hi5, MySpace, Ning, Facebook and Xing, just to name a few.
I can already hear some people moan about Google doing it - but in this case the fear-mongering that Google will soon know everything about us doesn’t seem quite eligible. To quote one of the social networking companies’ CEOs that was giving a demo of an OpenSocial app at the Google Campfire One: “This is Flixter working directly with MySpace. [...] Google doesn’t control the data in any way” (Joe Greenstein, CEO of Flixter, approx. 55:00 on Campfire One: Introducing OpenSocial on YouTube)
I can’t wait to see what developers are going to do with OpenSocial - would be nice, if Google got everyone together using OpenSocial.
[via Kaffeeringe]
Experiences with ClipShare Pro 2.0
There’s quite a market for YouTube clones, it seems. I’ve been recently working with three of these scripts, namely the commercial ClipShare Pro 2.0, the free PHPmotion and the Real Estate Video Upload Software I wrote a while ago. My experiences with these scripts are quite mixed, though.
Requirements
All of the scripts are based on PHP and MySQL - there might be other solutions out there, but since my clients all had the traditional LAMP setup I didn’t bother searching for alternatives.
For encoding, all of the scripts named use the same combination of MEncoder, ffmpeg to support the Flash video format, the ffmpeg PHP extension and FLVTool2.
Installing these software packages isn’t that hard unless you’re on something different than a .deb-based Linux system: The Debian multimedia repository provided me with the MEncoder and FFmpeg packages, I installed Ruby to run FLVTool2 (which is a Ruby script) and installed ffmpeg-php from Atomo64’s Debian Repository (thanks to Raphaël for this one).
If you’re on another system, you might end up with a lot of compiling, though.
Once you got all these things in place and made sure your php.ini settings allow the exec(), shell_exec() and system() functions you can start doing the real installataion.