Sunday, March 25, 2007

My First "Alpha" Release

I have been programming with the Apollo Alpha for about a week now and I have to say that it has been a blast! I've programmed desktop apps in the past using .NET, but I am a web developer at heart. So it always took a mental shift to switch from web app to desktop mode. In desktop development you don't have to worry about sessions, page refreshes, and where to store your data in a stateless environment. That's why I have always enjoyed working in Flash/Flex. Your data is always available with having to jump through hoops. If any of you have tried to build a relatively complex user control in asp.net you will know what I am talking about. That is what I love about Apollo, the ability to move between web application and desktop application development with almost no change in thought process. So anyway, in the past week I have built several Apollo apps. Today I would like to share with you an Apollo Flash video player. This is my "Hello World" so to speak. To make it interesting I created some custom chrome and added a feature that saves the play head location along with the file when you close the app. That way when you open the player again it starts where you left off. This app was inspired by the downloadable videos from video.onflex.org. If you haven't been there yet you owe it to yourself.



Screen Shot


Screen Shot 2 - when you move the app it becomes semi-tranparent


Keep in mind this is an alpha application on an alpha runtime (doesn't get much scarier than that). So if/when you find any bugs let me know and I'll try to fix them in the beta. :)

Also, anyone who tries it on a mac let me know how it goes.

Download Apollo Video Player

Get the Apollo Run Time

2 comments:

Anonymous said...

Good job ! It's amazingly lightweight for a video player... There is a project of a video player by adobe :
http://blogs.zdnet.com/Stewart/?p=248

Just a little bug : when there is no video loaded, playing with the timeslider triggers an error...

{Maz}

Pat Smitherman said...

Thanks for the kind words. I've updated the air file to take care of the slider issue you found. Let me know if you see anything else.