Archive for September, 2008

  posted by Steven

Just about 2 weeks into the beta and we’re getting great uptake and comments from all of you.  Today I wanted to take a few moments and talk in more detail about a fun feature that we’ve added to Windows Live Messenger and how it came about.

When we were sitting around brainstorming ideas for new features in Messenger, some of the team was saying we have to do webcam display pictures. Everyone will want to use their webcam to make expressive video tiles. Makes sense. I need a picture of myself to put up in Messenger and there’s a camera plugged in facing me – seems like a no-brainer. Well this was just the beginning. The team started developing this idea that was based on dynamic display pictures which allow you to set a mood for an avatar.

Why do you need a mood tile? Lets say you are in a conversation with your best friend and they say: “Hey guess who is coming to my birthday party? and you say “Who?”, and he says: “Your ex-girlfriend” This would be a great time to have a mood tile. With mood tiles you can change your appearance of your display picture to react dynamically to the conversation.

Open the display pictures dialog by clicking on your display picture from the main window Click on the button that says “Tile with Moods” – you need to have a Webcam installed. Here is the one I use.

Here you are presented with a dialog that allows you to take five still frames or five, 4-second video clips that you can make into a dynamic Mood tile. Clicking on the camera or webcam button records the frame or clip. When you are satisfied with what you recorded, click on the next empty box and record/capture the next mood. Each mood has a corresponding emoticon. You can modify which emoticon is used for each mood. The default capture is what your display picture will look like most of the time.

When you are in a IM conversation with someone you can show your mood tile off by pressing the keystrokes for the emoticons.

Here is a quick video which shows off how this might play out for you.

 

If you want to create a video display picture without the mood options you can do that too. Open up the display picture dialog, click Webcam Snapshot and either capture a still frame or 4-second video to set as your display picture. Put on your funniest expression and have some fun.

- Steven

This is the second in a series of articles reporting on Flash on the Beach, one of Europe's premier Flash conferences held in Brighton, UK. Since there are tonnes of sessions I'm going to pick out my personal highlights, but you can always check the official Flash on the Beach site for more information.

The second day at Flash on the Beach started at a much more civilised hour for me. Since I'd already registered, I could afford to spend a whole extra hour in bed before jumping on the train to Brighton. I even managed to grab some breakfast on the way, and the extra brain food that brought was going to be essential in making it through probably the most technical of the three days.

Aral Balkan: Grab the Low-Hanging Fruit
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The day started with an inspirational talk from Aral Balkan on, essentially, learning to play. The main thrust of his presentation was that we spend way too much time getting hung up on patterns, frameworks, and the best way to approach a particular problem. This leads to procrastination, which means that the cool ideas in our heads are trapped there forever. If we can stop getting hung up on how best to implement something, we can all have more fun (and who doesn't need more fun in their lives, right?).

The one thing he showed that really stuck in my mind was Scratch. Scratch is an MIT-developed tool that makes it ridiculously easy to create simple interactive Java applets graphically, without having to write a single line of code. Aral's point in showing this was that we shouldn't feel limited or intimidated by the tools we are given. Like Java, ActionScript 3.0 is a powerful language, but that added power has made it more difficult for people who have never written a line of code in any language to start learning. The Scratch developers have built a graphical programming environment where you don't need to know a complex language like Java to create simple or even moderately complicated interactive projects.

I think Aral is planning on running the same talk at a number of conferences this winter. If you get a chance, I highly recommend this session to get your creative juices flowing. It's inspiring stuff.

Niqui Merret: Accessibility - Beyond the Basics
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After a quick slurp of tea (mmmm... caffeine) I dashed into the Corn Exchange for Niqui Merret's session on accessibility. I've seen Niqui talk maybe half a dozen times on Flash and accessibility, and I always come away from those sessions having learnt a lot about what it means to develop for people with disabilities. This session was no exception. Rather than spend a long time on the basics of accessibility, after a quick introduction Niqui dived into some of the more advanced areas of creating accessible Flash sites.

There was some really great advice here on how to implement accessibility as painlessly as possible. After talking briefly about what you get for free in terms of accessibility from Flash's default behaviour, Niqui moved on to show off some of the base ActionScript classes she has created to make her life a little easier. One class makes decorating a UI element with accessibility attributes as easy as a single function call, and then a set of base UI classes for various different types of control makes use of that class. Creating accessible controls is then a simple matter of extending those classes and overriding the appropriate methods.

The talk itself was intentionally kept short. After her presentation, Niqui opened the floor and spent the rest of the session engaging the audience and answering questions on accessibility. It always gives me a buzz to see how many people in the room actually care. Niqui's passion for accessibility is infectious. As I left the room, I caught snippets of conversations from other attendees about putting their new-found knowledge to use in their own projects.

Joa Ebert: Audiotool's Private Parts
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Just before lunch, with my stomach already rumbling with hunger, I took my seat back in the Corn Exchange for Joa Ebert's session on all the behind-the-scenes stuff that makes AudioTool tick. The actual process of programatically generating audio will be covered by André Michelle's session tomorrow, but Joa promised to cover as much of the other stuff as he could in the allotted time. That turned out to be just enough to make my brain explode.

If you've not played with AudioTool, I highly recommend you check out the AudioTool video tutorial. The user interface is stunningly gorgeous, essentially replicating real-world pieces of audio equipment all wired up with cables to produce, modify and output all those screeches, pops, and whizzes that dance music producers love so much. If you've ever played with Propellerhead Software's Rebirth, you'll have an idea of what I'm talking about.

Joa spent a while talking about the impossibly complex problem of routing and drawing the connecting cables so they don't overlap any of the pieces of audio equipment you have on the stage. It turned out that routing wasn't the problem - it was doing so in a way that didn't adversely affect the performance of the application or (most importantly) the audio playback. The answer Joa arrived at was to use a quadtree to divide the stage and limit the amount of elements to be tested. This is a technique commonly used in gaming (3D games use octrees) to improve collision detection performance.

Once we were done with quadtrees, Joa showed off something he'd worked on that simply blew my mind. Graphically, Flash has always had an issue with having lots of elements on the stage at once. Although the performance is getting better with every version of the Flash Player, it still lags behind the performance of hardware-accelerated solutions like OpenGL. Joa rebuilt the entire Flash display stack in Java using OpenGL, and then ported parts of AudioTool to run on that system, just to test the relative performance gains. He also built an entire interactive shell in AudioTool so that he can debug the application while it is running.

Needless to say, I came out of this session with the sad realisation that I am an average coder at best. I guess if all else fails I can always limp my way into management, where you're not really expected to know what you're talking about, and you just need to make sure that the people you're hiring are smarter than you.

Jam Session
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The only really notable session that I attended after lunch was the jam session, which was a last-minute replacement for Nando Costa's "Motion Graphics, One Step At a Time". Apparently poor Nando is stuck in the US until FedEx finally get around to delivering his green card, so John Davey convinced a bunch of the speakers to get together for a code jam session. The result was possibly one of the best sessions so far, with really smart developers like Keith Peters, Joa Ebert and Ralph Hauwert showing off some of the cool experiments they just happened to have lying around on their MacBook Pros.

I really dig this kind of stuff, and it reminded me of all the awe-inspiring experiments from people like Joshua Davis, Jared Tarbell, and Manny Tan that got me interested in Flash 11 years ago.

End of Day Two
--------------

Once again, my train ride back to London and my duty to you, loyal YDN blog reader, meant that I had to skip the inspired session and the after party. Tomorrow is the last day of Flash on the Beach, and if it's even half as good as today I'm in for a treat.

Steve Webster
Front-End Engineer
Yahoo! Europe

This week, we're excited to release the Slideshow for Facebook gadget.

Designed for Facebook users, this gadget connects to your Facebook account and finds a wide variety of photos from your friends' collections. These photos then appear, one-at-a-time, in the gadget's frame. It's an automated slideshow — an easy, great way to stay in touch with old friends!

Posted by Larry Gadea, Software Engineer

  posted by Steven

Just about 2 weeks into the beta and we’re getting great uptake and comments from all of you.  Today I wanted to take a few moments and talk in more detail about a fun feature that we’ve added to Windows Live Messenger and how it came about.

When we were sitting around brainstorming ideas for new features in Messenger, some of the team was saying we have to do webcam display pictures. Everyone will want to use their webcam to make expressive video tiles. Makes sense. I need a picture of myself to put up in Messenger and there’s a camera plugged in facing me – seems like a no-brainer. Well this was just the beginning. The team started developing this idea that was based on dynamic display pictures which allow you to set a mood for an avatar.

Why do you need a mood tile? Lets say you are in a conversation with your best friend and they say: “Hey guess who is coming to my birthday party? and you say “Who?”, and he says: “Your ex-girlfriend” This would be a great time to have a mood tile. With mood tiles you can change your appearance of your display picture to react dynamically to the conversation.

Open the display pictures dialog by clicking on your display picture from the main window Click on the button that says “Tile with Moods” – you need to have a Webcam installed. Here is the one I use.

Here you are presented with a dialog that allows you to take five still frames or five, 4-second video clips that you can make into a dynamic Mood tile. Clicking on the camera or webcam button records the frame or clip. When you are satisfied with what you recorded, click on the next empty box and record/capture the next mood. Each mood has a corresponding emoticon. You can modify which emoticon is used for each mood. The default capture is what your display picture will look like most of the time.

When you are in a IM conversation with someone you can show your mood tile off by pressing the keystrokes for the emoticons.

Here is a quick video which shows off how this might play out for you.

 

If you want to create a video display picture without the mood options you can do that too. Open up the display picture dialog, click Webcam Snapshot and either capture a still frame or 4-second video to set as your display picture. Put on your funniest expression and have some fun.

- Steven

Nicole Sullivan and Stoyan Stefanov are dedicated to making the web a faster place. As integral parts of the Exceptional Performance Team they already shared a lot of crucial information of how to make your web sites faster.

One thing they've been pondering a lot about lately is image optimization for file size. Image editing tools come with all kind of great ways to optimize images for visual quality and file size, but when you look at the image in a text or hex editor you'll find that there is a lot of extra information in the file, for example the name of the editing suite, dates when the picture was created and lots more.

There are a lot of tools that remove this information safely and get the most out of the images without having an effect on their visual quality. The catch is that there are a lot of tools for a lot of image formats, all of them on the command line.

So Nicole and Stefan took their research findings, fired up their code editors and built a web app that does all the optimization for you:

Smushit.com allows you to upload some files or give it a URL. The tool then takes the images, optimizes them and tells you how many bytes you can save. You then get a zip of all the images for download and can replace them on your site.

Here's a video of Stoyan and Nicole presenting Smushit.com at The Ajax Experience in Boston (sorry about the audio):

Chris Heilmann
Yahoo Developer Network

This is the first in a series of articles reporting on Flash on the Beach, one of Europe's premier Flash conferences. I'm going to pick out my personal highlights.

This morning, having arrived bright and early in a cold but sunny Brighton, I eagerly made my way to the Brighton Dome to register for this year's Flash on the Beach conference. This is the third year in a row that I have made the journey down to the South Coast for the conference, and once again the line-up of speakers over the three days is stellar. After grabbing a cup of YDN-sponsored tea (yes, we're doing our bit for all the caffeine-addicted Flash developers out there) I headed into the main auditorium for the start of the day.

Adobe Keynote

John Davey, conference organiser supremo, dropped a bombshell in his introduction to the keynote session: Flash on the Beach will be coming to Miami in April '09. If you've always wanted to get to Flash on the Beach but didn't want to brave the chill of the UK in October, then maybe Miami is more your style. I am assured that tanned, toned bodies and manicured poodles are welcome but strictly optional.

The keynote, delivered by Richard Galvan and a few other Adobe folks, showed off some of the features that are shipping with the Flash CS4 release. It's been a while since I've played around in the Flash authoring tool, but judging by the spontaneous applause from the audience it sounds like the new animation system is going to please the designers amongst you. We also got a tantalising glimpse of the new features in the Drawing API, including what looked like live video being projected onto an animated distortion mesh. I don't know what practical applications that might have, but it sure looked pretty. Richard promised that there'll be more information on this and other new features in some of the other Adobe sessions at FotB, so I'll keep you updated.

Mark Anders: Flex 4 and Thermo

After some more tea (or should that be moar tea) I switched venues to see Mark Anders talk about the new designer/developer workflow in Flex 4 and a tool known only by its codename: "Thermo". Having been on the wrong end of a few "misinterpreted" designs (and on both sides of the designer/developer fence) I was interested in seeing how Adobe plan on tackling this thorny issue.

The upcoming Flex 4 has a radically refactored component architecture and a handful of new MXML elements to represent vector graphics, the latter of which exist as a subset of MXML knows as FXG. If you've had any experience with the excellent degrafa library, you'll feel right at home with FXG.

With these two additions, and the introduction of Thermo (think Flex Builder but with the scary ActionScript stuff being replaced with new designer tools), Adobe seems to have completely separated the look and feel of a Flex application from its underlying logic. Developers can round-trip their designs using the new FXG format, and then integrate into their code either at compile time or runtime.

To demonstrate this improved workflow, Mark showed off a weather application that consumed Yahoo's Weather API. The application had several, radically different skins that changed not only how the application looked but also how the user interacted with it. He went from a debug view where all the information was visible, to an accordion-style view with animated open/close states, and finally to a mobile view which looked very much like iPhone's Weather application, complete with flick scrolling. The skins were all created with Thermo without a single line of ActionScipt code in sight. Impressive stuff indeed.

However, as excited as I am by all this, I can't help but wonder why Adobe created FXG and retrofitted all their creative tools to read and write the new format, when SVG is already here and supported by all those tools and more. If I bump into Mark or any of the Adobe people over the next few days, I'll be sure to ask.

Eric Natzke: The Art of Play

The last session of the day was back in the main auditorium, which was just as well as it was absolutely packed. Graphic Designer come Flash hero Eric Natzke showed off some of his latest artwork, and talked about the process of generating that artwork with Flash.

I think I can safely say that everyone in the room was inspired by Eric and his amazing graphical style, not least because there was a mad scramble at the end of his sessions to get one of the free postcards he was giving away. I didn't get a postcard, but I'm seriously tempted to order a few of his canvases for my living room.

End of Day One

Sadly I can't attend James Paterson's "inspired session" or the party this evening as I'm currently on the train back to London, but rest assured I'll be back again tomorrow for more Flash-related fun.

Steve Webster
Front-End Engineer, Yahoo! Europe

We had a busy and successful week exhibiting Trexy and Turbo10 at Ad:Tech 2008.

We launched Ad Trails, our new advertising product at the two day exhibition in London. Nige also gave a presentation titled: Ad Trails - Matching Ads to Search Desires.

Nigel and Marty also managed to squeeze in a bit of not-so-hard rock guitar at the show too.

 

  posted by Steven

We know people like to personalize Messenger. Colorization, display picture, friendly name and personal status message have been the main surfaces for self-expression in Messenger for a while. In this next version of Messenger we wanted to give users a new surface that allowed them to both theme their main window with pictures and images that were meaningful to them but also make them social by applying them to the conversation windows of your network. Scenes is one of those features that when people see it for the first time they get it right away. Think of it as the wallpaper in your IM salon. When you change your scene your network gets to keep up with you and your mood.

So you might be asking yourself why would I want a Scene? Well here is an example of how I used scenes in Messenger. When I returned from family summer vacation in Southern California I wanted to stay in a “beach” mood. Messenger and Windows Live made that easy. This is what I did.

There were three photos my wife took that really summed up the great time we had in California.

 

The weather was beautiful and the waves were awesome. (That isn’t me). The third photo was a picture of my daughter on the carousel in Long Beach.

When I launched Messenger I clicked on the curl in the upper right corner of the main window of Messenger:

This opens up the Select a Scene dialog. From here I could browse to the picture I wanted to theme my main window and the conversation windows of the people I IM with. Messenger comes with a few scenes which you can use or you can pick your own by clicking the Browse button from this dialog. You can pick any PNG or JPEG photo to paint your main window. Be sure to pick one that can scale larger for the conversation window of your contacts. They’ll get to see what you picked!

From this dialog I can also let Messenger auto-select a complimentary matching color for the rest of the Messenger main window, or I can further customize it by selecting my own favorite color.

You can preview the changes by clicking the Apply button.

You can also just drag and drop photos directly on to the top of the main window from Photo Gallery or from your pictures folders. When you do this Messenger auto-selects a matching color as well.

Here’s the video we posted the other day on updating your scene just in case you didn’t see it.

On Monday I set my scene to the picture of the surfer. When my friends IM’d me the conversation window  had the picture of the surfer. Lots of people asked me about my vacation and I shared other photo albums with them on Windows Live.

On Tuesday I set my scene to the picture of the sunset and Wednesday the picture of the carousel.

The nice part about setting the pictures every day was that every time I launched Messenger I was reminded of all of the good times we had and in every conversation window there was something my friends and I could talk about.

It’s also important to note that others (currently only others that are using the Beta version) will see your scene when you IM with them.  This is by design.  One of the product managers referred to scenes as analogous to the clothes you wear.  Many people use fashion as a way to express themselves and scenes give you an opportunity to do that digitally, through Windows Live Messenger.

This is V1 of scenes and I am really interested to get people’s feedback on the feature so that can take it to the next level in the next version of Messenger.

-Steven

 

 

 posted by Lonn

 

Hi everyone, it's been a week since we've launched the beta and we're really pleased by the overall positive comments we've heard, both on this blog and throughout the media.

 

As with any beta, things might not always be perfect and we appreciate you trying it out and letting us know what you think.  I've been reading through the comments and forwarding all the bugs and feedback on to the Messenger team.  Because of the amount of feedback we get it's impossible to personally respond to all of you, but just wanted to say thanks again.  It's particularly helpful when you provide steps to reproduce your problem.

 

All major issues have been logged and are being addressed.  Here are a few that I wanted to quickly comment on, that were brought up by some of you.

- Custom emoticons don't display properly to the user. (We're working on fixing this... Fyi, they do show up to the person you are sending them to).

- Changing your status using the drop down menu can cause errors with the layout.  This is a known issue around High Dpi.  The work around (for now) is to your the File menu to change status.

- Ad content.  I've brought up some of the concerns raised about the contents of a few ads with the advertising team and they are looking into this further.

 

Regarding feature requests/changes.  We will continue to work towards the final release and feedback like yours is taken into account along with input from many other sources.  In the end, we're confident that we will have an extremely solid product that we're all proud of and that you will love to use.

 

Btw, in the next few days, if you are still using a previous beta build of Windows Live Messenger that came out earlier this year, you will receive a prompt/message to upgrade to the latest beta version. We strongly encourage you to accept the upgrade and give us any feedback on the upgrade experience. Yes, we care and just thought we’d give you a heads up!  All of you that have downloaded the latest beta version over the past week, won't see the prompt and can ignore this friendly notice. :)

 

Lastly, I've had the pleasure of using the new version of Windows Live Hotmail over the past little while as an internal tester and highly encourage all of you to check it out when the upgrades begin to go public very soon.  It's cool and it's super fast!

 

Thanks and talk to you more soon.

Lonn