Use arrow keys to go to the bar, drink beer and run to the toilet before time is out. How many beers could you stand? This is the first game by the Falanxia team I currently work with.

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As you may know from this blog, I recently wrote a few paragraphs about progress of the project. And there is even MumboJumboT’s Twitter stream with more detailed tweets. But — believe me, it’s hard to tell — now I am not very happy with the results and I have to confess I failed on several places.

First, as usual, I was way too optimistic. I thought I’d be able to code more and harder, but it was not really possible for several reasons. Just a few hours before I started the project I had finished another long term job and hence I was somewhat tired. Our kids were sick two days as well and on the end I was lazy too :) As you may know I planned to create a blabbing machine. And… Failed. Sorry about that, next time I’ll think twice before I start a project like this one.

But! I think even with my failures I’ve got something for you. The MumboJumboT project lite. Very lite. If you’re interested, I’d be glad to show you my humble Adobe AIR application, which you can install by clicking the badge here.

So what is it all about?

This is just an eye candy and mainly a tutorial AIR app. You can click links below to read more on how the project was done and meanwhile you can play with it.

MumboJumboT allows you to:

• Load a sample song (thanks to Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac for The Sphere song from his Organic album, the other song done by me),

• Load your very own Ogg Vorbis file (info on Xiph.org as well),

• Play an Ogg file — actually it was not possible before, because Flash knows just MP3s. If you don’t want to get into dirty details on the Wiki page, you just need to know Ogg provides much higher quality on lower bitrates. The playback is done by Branden Hall‘s Ogg Vorbis Alchemy port, heavily altered by me for purposes of this app,

• Somewhat visualize the playback.

That’s pretty much for now, so let’s continue on the code stuff.

MumboJumboT code

You can read everything about the project’s code on the documentation page of the MumboJumboT project. Please don’t forget to visit its GitHub repository.

What you will learn:

PureMVC and Startup Manager

PureMVC is a cool Model-View-Controller framework aimed to help you to create cleaner code in several languages. And its Startup Manager is a good way how to put initialization of your application in a queue, while following each Proxy requirements.

• Application facade (Documentation and code)
• Application mediator (Documentation and code)
• Loading and queue of proxies (Documentation and code)

Config files

Here you can see my Proxy helping to easily parse config XML settings. The online flavour allows you to merge parsed settings with FlashVars. You can localize the app from the config XML as well, you know, it’s not a good thing to have any static text in the SWF (it obviously doesn’t apply to the logging output).

• Config proxy (Documentation and code)

AIR Updates

Adobe AIR platform allows applications to self-update when there’s a new version available. See the code below to see how to do that:

• Checking for updates (Documentation and code)

Away3D

Away3D is a well known 3D library. And its new Lite flavour finally provides hardware acceleration via Flash 10 postcards in space acceleration features.

• Spinbox (Documentation and code)
• Spinbox Mediator (Documentation and code)

OGG Decoding

As I wrote above, thanks to Branden Hall I was able to use Ogg Vorbis files in the app, even it was not possible before.

• Ogg Vorbis Decoder (code)
• Sample Proxy (Documentation and code)

Advanced mouse controls

You can see there’s a somewhat sick mouse handler allowing you to drag-and-rotate so called Spinbox.

• Mouse Proxy (Documentation and code)

Skinning

Here you can see how to skin the app with my vancura-as3-libs library. Download the skin folder here.

• About Panel (code)
• Load Panel (code)
• Play Panel (coe)

Mocking up

Just to revisit what was written in previous articles, here’s an archive of PSD files you can download. Just in case you’d be interested on how the GUI part was done.

You can watch a screencast of the mocking up on Vimeo.

Legal stuff

Licensed under Attribution-Share Alike (CC) license. OGG Alchemy Decoder by Branden Hall and Xiph.org Foundation. More info RaveIN font by Jakub Steiner aka Jimmac.

The Involver Media Player is coded in pure ActionScript 3 (to save space and hence bandwidth), with a help by PureMVC, BulkLoader, TweenMax libraries and a lot of my own open source classes.

Today you can meet this player on Facebook and other social networks. I worked on this player for several months and I think the request was successfully fulfilled. As you can see below, the feature set is pretty comprehensive.

Features:

• Skinning with custom loaded skins saved as SWFs, easily compiled in Adobe Flash (no Flex and AS3 coding needed, so it’s very easy to prepare new skins),
• Color theming of all skin elements (via config XML),
• Configuration from config XML, overriding any settings via FlashVars and remoting,
• Plugins (external in remote SWFs, internal bundled with player),
• Advanced system and network error recovery,
• Logging locally via LocalConnection, trace() and remotely to logging remoting endpoint,
• JavaScript events to invoke on a certain event (play, pause, stop, checkpoint spotted, plugin widget clicked, etc.),
• Player can be fully controlled from JavaScript,
• Full playback support (play, pause, skip, seek, load progress, playback progress, volume, mute),
• Full playlist support (sequential playback, random playback, intro playback),
• Fullscreen support,
• Titles, logos and other graphics on screen while playing, with animation and precise positioning,
• Mouse wheel support to control volume and/or seeking,
• Set checkpoints in video and playlist to call a function or plugin,
• Plugins can add custom buttons to the toolbar, footer and “More” screen,
• Advanced animation when resizing player window,
• Plugin tickers during video playback,
• Preroll / postroll plugins and actions,
• Popup blocker handler and ticker,
• Galleries of images and videos,
• Carousel to navigate images and videos,
• Facebook application plugin,
• Discussion plugin (with a playback ticker),
• Link plugin (with a list of links and playback ticker),
• Playlist navigator plugin,
• Image viewer plugin,
• Slideshow plugin,
• RSS reader plugin,
• Share this video plugin,
• Signup plugin,
• Stream listing plugin.

Examples:

• Basic player with two plugins
• Larger player with two plugins
• Scaling full window player (opens a new window)
• Player with mouse click handler to show a page
• More plugins
• Notification bar handled by the Link plugin
• Notification bar handled by the Quiz plugin
• Notification bar handled by the RSS plugin
• A lot of plugins, try resizing browser window after clicking “More” button (opens a new window)
• Color theming from configuration XML
• Muppets skin by Alex Schleifer
• Theming Muppets skin by Alex Schleifer
• Sunkist skin by Sunkist Soda

Unfortunately the project is not alive anymore. However all these subprojects were pretty complex and made me much better programmer.

Click the images below to view
full resolution screenshots.

Click the image to see the full resolution.

The visual quality and animation experience scales nicely with hardware being used. So when your computer is not powerful enough, you won’t see so many animations. But well, the site is rather old now, so I suppose you got it with all bells and whistles.

Site is bilingual, so choose your language in the footer.

Click the images below to view
full resolution screenshots.

Initial screen. Click the image to see the full resolution.

Menu overlay. Click the image to see the full resolution.

About Us section. Click the image to see the full resolution.

Video player. Click the image to see the full resolution.

Audio player. Click the image to see the full resolution.

Image viewer. Click the image to see the full resolution.

Click the image to see the YouTube video.

Apropos dnes poprvé sněžilo.

Můj kocour Bruno v novém thrilleru Moucha! Nenechte si ujít následující upoutávku!

Click the image to see the YouTube video.