Abdul Qabiz on Web Technologies, Flash Platform, RIA, India

I am sharing my experience while finding a good media-server (software that can store, transcode and serves various media formats to devices – computers, mobile, apple-tv, etc).

We all (parents, brother, sister-in-law, sister and myself) stay together, which means we have got more than one TV, various devices (mobile, computers, laptops, etc). We realized, it’s useful to host the media at one central computer.

• Storage
• Wiki – to jot down the links and ideas
• Development and Testing – when we work at/from home
• Media Server (software that serves media to various devices in home)

Most of the requirements (above) are sorted out except the last one “Media Server”. I looked at various options, some of these are listed below:

• TVersity
• PS3MediaServer
• XBMC (as UPNP server)
• Darwin Streaming Server
• VideoLan (VLC) as Server

I found myself more comfortable with TVersity, though it’s not opensource and only runs on Windows, for following reasons

• Ease in administration:
  • anyone in my family can add/remove media using it’s easy to use administration interface.
  • admin tool runs using Adobe Flash Player, has been built using OpenLaszlo framework and executable has been created using Zinc like tool.
• Ease while using:
  • Web based interface for administration – runs on Adobe Flash Player
  • Web based interface for media library
    • Simple HTML
    • Flash based (built using OpenLaszlo) – where media is transcoded and played using Flash Player, awesome, isn’t it?
    • iPhone friendly interface
• Support for Open DLNA and UPNP
• Automatically detects (most of) devices, transcodes and serves media, if required
  • That means, ffdshow and other tools can be used to add subtitle and apply various filters before serving the videos.
• XBMC/Boxee that runs on my macbook and apple-tv worked really well with TVersity

You can find the complete list of features on TVersity website.

So now life is simpler and easier, we all store our media at one place and can see it anytime and on most of our devices. Having web-based access to media makes life easier. I also feel, it’s lot easier to extend web-interface, which I plan to do in sometime.

I would love to post about detailed comparison between various options (media-servers and tools) mentioned above, perhaps in another post, sometime in future. Another post would be there to share how our home network looks like. Hope, I can spend sometime drawing diagrams which would be lot easier to understand.

Adobe Buzzword is available, no need for private invite to use it. It took me couple of minutes to register, then I checked out Buzzword; I must say Buzzword rocks!

It has a usable, fast, responsive and sleek user-interface (UI). Buzzword also allows to save documents in different formats (.doc, office-xml etc).

It allows to insert images, tables, comments, notes etc. I loved the ui-interaction for each of these features. I don’t know how to express in words without showing the screen-shots, so why don’t you check it out

Just wondering, who designed the user-interface of Buzzword?

Technorati Tags: adobe, buzzword, editor, wysiwyg

Before I start writing about how useful & helpful Onfolio has been to me, let me put some words(from it’s help) about Onfolio.
Onfolio is a PC application that helps you collect, organize, and share information you find on the Internet, receive in a feed, or capture from your system or network. Web pages, web sites, multipage articles, images, a wide variety of file types, news feeds, search feeds, snippets of files or web pages—you can put any of these into an Onfolio collection. Then you share your research through documents, presentations, emails, websites, and reports.
I have been using Onfolio for over a month or two. I find it really useful because I can keep all my bookmarks, documents, rss feed subscriptions or other web-documents in one place for offline reading and also for archiving purpose. Which really helps me a lot because I don’t have internet connectivity after work.
Onfolio has got a nice User Interface. It works seemlessly with Internet Explorer as well as Mozilla Firefox, which means no matter which browser you are using, all bookmarks, saved webpages etc would go in one place. Which wasn’t same way earlier, because I used to have different bookmark list in each browser & saved documents used to go anywhere on my machine. Yeah! I am a bad manager *lately*.
If you want to give it a try, you can download Onfolio 2.0 Beta. I am sure, you gonna like it!
I just love it and I have been using Beta version of it but I am planning to buy it because its piece of software that’s worth buying.
BTW! Jeremy Alliare also has something to say about Onfolio.
Update: Onfolio guys have a blog also.

Google is the best(IMO) search engine. Now they have released Google Desktop software, which searches local file system and believe me its many times faster than window’s built-in search. Its indexing algorithm is just superb which makes searching very fast. Google Desktop runs as a local server and keep indexing file system in background.
I am finding it cool…get it here.

ASV – Action Script Viewer
A few days, I talked about ASV add-on tools. Lately I also tried ASV and I must say its a ‘must-have’ tool for designers or developers.
Imagine a situation, a client comes back and asks you to make some changes in his site or application you did in past. Now, if you have source files its simple but if you don’t remember where are latest files. Believe me, ASV can help you out here. It can create entire FLA for you through JSFL.
If you have lost some assets or source files from your machine and you only have swf files then ASV can extract following things for you.
- font outlines as TTF
- sound as WAV or MP3
- videos as FLV
- frames/graphics/movieclips/library symbols as SWFs
- bitmaps as JPG/PNG
- ofcourse all ActionScript code (scripts or class scripts)
ASV is very intuitive and user friendly to use, so anyone can easily start using without any problems. I love the timeline thingy and preview feature.
And ofcourse, if you want to study your compiled swf, ASV would help you there also. Peter Hall was able to come up with this idea while he was working in ASV.
Though some guys use ASV for wrong purpose, I would just request, please use the tool for ethically right reason. Its a nice tool made for nice purpose.