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The download to my Flash XML image slideshow has been posted. Gallery is open-source, and is one of the most advanced image slideshows on the web. Make use of titles, captions, audio, watermarks, alpha channels, and most of all, transitions. There are 13 current transitions, with more on the way, as well as subsets of some transitions, to make over 43 possible effects. Get it here.
As you can see, the layout has changed quite a bit and is slowly becoming cleaner and more accessible. I am using a new theme for wordpress, Vistered Little by Nik, and have begun moving my projects to be part of my blog rather than part of the main site. Now is a good time to replace any links you have bookmarked, as everything will be moving. As soon as the changes to the blog and projects has been completed, I will recreate my Flash homepage to reflect the same.
Thats right, the ‘XSPF Web Music Player’ is no more, my jukebox has been completely rewritten, losing the last snippits of code from Fabricio Zuardi’s original. The Jukebox is fully skinnable, every function previously available has been recoded to support skinning and resizing. The first skin, iPod Black, is a partial demo of what is possible. It supports both audio and video, and works the same way as the normal player. There are 3 files associated with the player, the actual swf file, which while having around 400 extra lines of code, has been cleaned up so that it is the same size as the Xspf, a measly 16kb. Next is the skin.xml file, which contains the instructions for creating the player look, and lastly is the background image. There are two versions, a Flash 7 version for higher browser support, or a Flash 8 version for PNG and alpha channel support. As of now there is no download, but in the next few days I will be remaking my website to support the posting, previewing, and downloading of skins, as well as releasing a few more of my own skins. As for player updates, I will be adding an image loader for greater image options (resize, rotate, color change). The one drawback I can find is in the font display, the user must have your specified font on their computer to view the player correctly, otherwise they will see the default system font (usually Times New Roman). There has only been one function addition, and that is the ability for the alphabetize function to disregard a ‘The’ at the beggining of an artist title, the same way iTunes does. For example, ‘The Beatles’ would come alphabetically before ‘Cake’. To turn this off, and alphabetize normally, pass the variable ‘forceAlphabetize=1′.
View it Here.
This is the last update of a skin that doesn’t play music or have all of the functions of the current player. By next week there should be a the XSPF 5.0 player will be available that anyone with a little bit of time can customize to their liking. This also calls for a web update, the current jukebox page will be updated to support the posting, displaying, and downloading of personal skins. Lastly, there will be instructions and documentation on using my “skinXML”. Download and start creating now, if you think you can do it without instructions. Here.
I haven’t really had a lot of time on my hands to post, but i’ve been working on both Gallery and the XSPF Skinner. I’ve uploaded a sample of the xml, and an example of how it is used. It is far from done, however, and many things are subject to change. This does not actually play music, just displays a skin. But for those looking to create skins, here is where you can start making ideas. Download the demo.
This is the first showing of my XML slideshow. Created for, already in use at IACMusic.com, and gratefully allowed to become open-source, Gallery is an advanced image viewer with support for many customizable items, through an XML playlist. Options are title, random transition, shuffle, startimage, duration, captions, links, watermark, resizing, list, controls, looping, and autoplay. Right now it contains 11 transitions; “fade”, “bars”, “blinds”, “blocks”, “checker”, “circles”, “dissolve”, “fadewhite”, “fluids”, “move”, “moveout”, “wipe”. Many include extra random changes to a singular transition to get a total of 43 transitions. This is not yet available for download yet, but a demonstration has been placed at http://blog.lacymorrow.com/projects/gallery/.
I’ve updated the playlist on my site with roughly 95 new songs. Enjoy! http://blog.lacymorrow.com/projects/xspf-wmp/
…And this time, no bugs! You are now able to use external variables in a text file with your players, to replace the long strings of variables in you html. One file can be used with however many players you need. Just replace the paragraph or two of ‘www.mydomain.com/xspf_player.swf?playlist_url=playlist.xml&alphabetiz e=true&autoplay=1′ etc. with ‘www.mydomain.com/xspf_player.swf?loadurl=variables.txt’, Using ‘loadurl’ as your sole variable. This finishes my planned work for the XSPF, but I still have a lot to do. I’m deciding on whether to build a skin formatter, for users to create their own layouts, or new downloadable versions with different looks, or both. See it here.
The playlist creator is now open-source and up for download. For those looking into the scripting side of flash, this is a good example of flash forms and text manipulation.
Updates everywhere. I’ve been doing some server cleaning. First off is that the documentation for the XSPF player has been updated for the first time in months. Next comes the player creator. It has been updated a few times in a few days, but I believe it will stay this way for a while. Lastly is player updates; The request for a start_track with shuffle has been filled, and works perfectly. Also, for the more technical of us, I have included a way to collect stats about your player usage through an external php file (or any language that can read POST variables). This is a dumbed down version of the player I created for IACMusic.com. It can collect the label (title and artist) for each track, as well as the annotation. The script can be customized to include such things as a date, referrer, and ip address. I’ve included some of these options in an included script. This data can be used however one wishes (for IAC, it was written to a text file, and processed into a database later on). The final player updates were pointed out to me by the ever-watchful eye of Lucas Gonze. These are XSPF validation errors. The trackList node needs a capitol ‘L’, the playlist should be in ‘.xspf’ format, and there is no such thing as a ‘type’ node in XSPF. This has been changed to meta rel=”http://lacymorrow.com/type/” to follow validation. Finally, ‘music’ is does not follow XSPF format. This has been changed to ‘audio’ (under the meta node). See it here.