Aral Balkan

The Flash movie in this post is Twitter Stream -- a stream of the latest updates from the public timeline. Read the rest of the post to see it and learn more.

Click the full-screen button on the top-right-hand-corner (courtesy of the Papervision demos) to see it in all it's glory. The original resolution for it is 1080p (1920x1080). I initially started building it for the PS3 but then decided that it ran better with my Mac connected to my HDTV through HDMI. It's meant to run as an installation on a large screen. In fact, I've got it running in the corner of my living room right now :)

Ah, and by the way, since I mentioned it: The PS3 is a lovely machine. I never thought I'd say those words. In fact, until I found out that it had the Flash Player on it, I had no desire to buy one. How Sony could do such a horrible PR job on such a wonderful console is beyond me. Of course, when I did find out that it had Flash on it, I just had to have one (Flash, full-screen on 1080p, anyone?) :)

Unfortunately, it only has the Flash 7.0.25 player. I don't understand what Adobe is playing at with this. They should be falling over themselves to get the Flash 9 player onto the Wii, XBox 360 and PS3... Anyway, since we have Flash 7, we'll make do with Flash 7 for now.

So the first thing I started doing is (of course) adapting my SWX Twitter badge for the PS3. As I did so, it evolved to become Twitter Stream. I wanted particle effects to create the stream so I dug up Jared Tarbell's particle component from the Flash MX: Most Wanted Components book that we co-authored many moons ago. Unfortunately, it didn't compile for me as-is, so I ported it to ActionScript 2 (and will release this shortly, after some minor clean-up). Now I have lovely particles (thanks, Jared!). Yay!

You can download Twitter Stream 1080p as an OS X projector (3.6MB) and as a Windows projector (1.3MB).

Update: I updated the Mac version of the projector. It no longer has the embedded font which means that all sorts of foreign characters (or native ones, depending where you're from) will work. The font, to my knowledge, is not available on all Windows machines so I left that one as-is. As a side-note, Chinese, Japanese and Arabic look pretty cool on this.

Comments

• nice one Aral -- with the Flash player running on PS3 I might just have myself an excuse to get it, though its a pretty damn expensive toy ;) For the PS3 noobs among us, how do you serve up that SWF content -- just in a browser I suppose? Good to see the old book still comes in handy ;)

  by Peter on 2007-04-07 21:52:07

• Hey Peter, Yep -- it's the browser that has the plugin :)

  by aral on 2007-04-07 22:11:58

• Dizzying. My only suggestion for improvement is to make the text selectable (I know that doesn't do you any good on your 42" plasma screen), but if someone has a URL I want to follow, I'd rather select/copy it than try to write it down before it's gone!

  by Kevo on 2007-04-08 08:21:35

• The whole Sony/Flash Player things is a messed up affair. AFAIK - It's not actually an Adobe/Macromedia build. Sony have a weird company policy with being reliant on third party software, so instead of just paying for a version from Adobe/Macromedia they paid for a licensed of the Player spec and wrote their own. Go figure. That's why it's Player 7. As for the PS3, when I first set mine up I noticed there's a "Install additional OS" option somewhere on the menu, have you looked into this yet? I imagine it's going to have to be Windoze but more likely Linux and definately not OSX, unless you do some serious hacking, AppleTV style. Hmm, I wonder how well Flash would run on an Apple TV? In fact, I can see that size, spec and cost of box working quite nicely as an installation machine, hooked up to a touch screen/projector.

  by Jolyon on 2007-04-08 09:59:41

• Hi Aral..Nice app.. I think it would be great to port it to a screensaver..

  by Savvas Malamas on 2007-04-08 11:57:57

• Hey Savvas, Yeah, was thinking of that! :)

  by aral on 2007-04-08 13:44:10

• Jolyon: Thanks for the background on the PS3/Flash -- interesting. I still think that Adobe should be going above and beyond to get the latest Flash player on these devices without looking for financial compensation. It's the foot through the door, so to speak. Re: The Apple TV. Not too impressed with mine at all. Don't see what it's about at all. Converting a video for it using Quicktime Pro took hours. I can do far more for far less with an HDMI-DVI cable and my Mac.

  by aral on 2007-04-08 13:46:16

• @Kevo: The text was originally selectable -- I turned it off while troubleshooting loss of fonts on the PS3. I'll either set that back on or make the whole thing a link to the user's profile (probably a better idea).

  by aral on 2007-04-08 13:48:11

• cool :)) is there a way of using this on a pc instead of a ps3?

  by aylin on 2007-04-08 17:49:22

• @Aylin: Yep, just download the windows version :)

  by aral on 2007-04-08 17:53:12

• "I still think that Adobe should be going above and beyond to get the latest Flash player on these devices without looking for financial compensation." I'm not sure they'd see it as compensation, its them letting other parties license and distribute their product. Isn't this how they plan for them to make money out of Flash?

  by Tink on 2007-04-08 23:11:38

• The key thing here is that the Flash Player is the core that the whole platform revolves around -- without the core, there is no platform. The stronger the core, the stronger the platform. It is in Adobe's interests to get the latest player on to these popular platform and get people developing for it.

  by aral on 2007-04-09 05:26:05

• This is really nice, I love it ;-) Does it support unicode characters (chinese, japanese ...) ? Is there any source code available ? (The idea is to display this as a screensaver with xscreensaver)

  by stombi on 2007-04-09 16:25:59

• Hi Stombi, A screensaver would be very cool. You can find the source in the SWX SVN repository: http://svn1.cvsdude.com/osflash/swx/trunk/flash/examples/ No guarantees that it will work for you without tweaking (you may have to change the URL in the FLA to point to the one here http://aralbalkan.com/swx/swx.php if it isn't already). It will also be in tomorrow's release. The examples will be easier to use in 0.2 once I've implemented cross-domain permissions.

  by aral on 2007-04-09 22:29:16

• Too bad this Twitter banner reintroduces us to Comic Sans. In Blue!!! With drop shadow!!! Aaargh! :) http://bancomicsans.com/

  by Michiel van der Ros on 2007-04-10 07:55:39

• Comic sans? The typeface is Brush MT.

  by aral on 2007-04-10 18:13:02

• Oh, you mean the banner. That's Chalkboard not Comic Sans.

  by aral on 2007-04-10 18:13:31

• Just a minor bug spot - the word is spelt UPDATING not UPDATEING - this is displayed in the centre in the blue text when connecting in full screen mode

  by Jane on 2007-04-11 08:28:57

• Hey Jane, That sounds like someone twittered "UPDATEING" at just the right time! (The app doesn't display an update message in the message area.) :)

  by aral on 2007-04-11 08:47:12

• well it's nice to know i've wasted all my time trying to get flash player 9 to work on the linux 5.0(ps3 version). all that for nothin.

  by mark on 2007-04-12 00:00:08

• Hi Mark, What exactly wasn't working? If you publish the FLA for Flash 7, it should work on the PS3. Not entirely sure I understand your comment, though.

  by aral on 2007-04-12 08:21:12

• So if PS3 only runs Flash 7 and a website is running Flash 8 or 9 there is no way to watch the content? If you add another OS such as Linux will it be able to run Flash 9.0.28?

  by Bean on 2007-09-14 19:21:13

• Honestly, I never got this Witter Stream to work. Not on a Mac and not on Windows. Not even the online version you got running at the beginning of this article. I always get 'SWX Call Times Out!' Love the app. But would like to see it functioning. Thx. Koen.

  by Koen on 2012-05-19 15:47:27