What do you think of iTunes now? For the first time in ages I've heard sensible people voicing disappointment with the latest version of Apple's iPod management application.
This version is so tipped towards buying from iTunes Music Store, particularly downloading movies, it's hard to remember this is really about managing your music library. Well, at least that's what I thought. If you think iTunes is fast becoming "bloatware", how about this - Doubletwist.
Not surprisingly you can download it from doubletwist.com.
Visually it's a stripped down version of iTunes. Rather than ITMS this one is oriented to Amazon's music service (MP3 downloads). Interestingly this version of iTunes supports many non-Apple devices including Blackberry and Android phones.
Oh yes, it's also free. Give it a try.
Wednesday, October 07, 2009
Friday, October 02, 2009
Playing Flash with RapidWeaver
My daughter looks after the websites for the organisation she works for. She's off on holiday in Australia. Hold that thought.
Her sites, along with www.podserve.co.uk and www.1scan.co.uk along with our in development service at www.freephotoscanning.com are all developed using the Mac html development platform RapidWeaver. We both love the product and have been impressed with how easy it is to build our sites. A couple of weeks ago, before she went on holiday, she was asked to add a Shockwave Flash movie to one of the sites.
Neither of us had ever done this before. The SWF movie had been made by a professional development house, and very swish it is too. They sent her the movie - an swf movie file - plus four little sub-movies in the form of four .flv files, nicely zipped up into folders along with some HTML code. RapidWeaver has a facility to make an HTML page, which is what was done, and the relevant HTML code was inserted. It didn't work.
So we hunted around and found a suggestion for code which was said to work, along with some suggestions to make it work. This is the code we found and used, with some mods:-
By changing the suggested HTML into the above (changing the url to point to the exact location of the swf file) we got the movie to start to play. But the whole movie simply wouldn't play. That Friday afternoon was a mix of pre-holiday rush plus frustration, we were out of our depth.
"Can you look at it while I'm away? she said. And I said, "OK".
I have spent two weeks, most evenings, getting nowhere. But today I cracked it. here's how it was solved in the hope that our experience will save you time.
First problem, RapidWeaver didn't do a great job locating the files we needed in the right directory on our ISP's servers. To overcome this I used Filezilla to FTP the swf file where it needed to be.
The movie developer had supplied us with a folder containing the flv files. the folder had to be located in the same directory as the main SWF file. Pay attention now, the folder was called movies. Using Filezilla I uploaded that folder to the same folder.
I misread the instructions and changed the value 'mymovie' to the name of our SWF file. Much fiddling later, that's wrong. leave it as 'mymovie'.
Then just ran into a wall, tried everything I could think of, wasted hours, got into a very bad mood. Finally thought to check with tech support at Supanames (they host our sites) just to make sure SWF is supported in our hosting plans. They confirmed that it is supported - and kindly pointed out where I was going wrong. Here it is.
SWF is sensitive to case in folder names. So the folder we were supplied with - remember it was videos - should have been Videos. Yes, that's it, best part of two weeks of frustration because 'v' should have been 'V'.
If you're having trouble getting shockwave flash to play in RapidWeaver, check the case of your Videos folder. Save yourself a lot of bother.
Her sites, along with www.podserve.co.uk and www.1scan.co.uk along with our in development service at www.freephotoscanning.com are all developed using the Mac html development platform RapidWeaver. We both love the product and have been impressed with how easy it is to build our sites. A couple of weeks ago, before she went on holiday, she was asked to add a Shockwave Flash movie to one of the sites.
Neither of us had ever done this before. The SWF movie had been made by a professional development house, and very swish it is too. They sent her the movie - an swf movie file - plus four little sub-movies in the form of four .flv files, nicely zipped up into folders along with some HTML code. RapidWeaver has a facility to make an HTML page, which is what was done, and the relevant HTML code was inserted. It didn't work.
So we hunted around and found a suggestion for code which was said to work, along with some suggestions to make it work. This is the code we found and used, with some mods:-
By changing the suggested HTML into the above (changing the url to point to the exact location of the swf file) we got the movie to start to play. But the whole movie simply wouldn't play. That Friday afternoon was a mix of pre-holiday rush plus frustration, we were out of our depth.
"Can you look at it while I'm away? she said. And I said, "OK".
I have spent two weeks, most evenings, getting nowhere. But today I cracked it. here's how it was solved in the hope that our experience will save you time.
First problem, RapidWeaver didn't do a great job locating the files we needed in the right directory on our ISP's servers. To overcome this I used Filezilla to FTP the swf file where it needed to be.
The movie developer had supplied us with a folder containing the flv files. the folder had to be located in the same directory as the main SWF file. Pay attention now, the folder was called movies. Using Filezilla I uploaded that folder to the same folder.
I misread the instructions and changed the value 'mymovie' to the name of our SWF file. Much fiddling later, that's wrong. leave it as 'mymovie'.
Then just ran into a wall, tried everything I could think of, wasted hours, got into a very bad mood. Finally thought to check with tech support at Supanames (they host our sites) just to make sure SWF is supported in our hosting plans. They confirmed that it is supported - and kindly pointed out where I was going wrong. Here it is.
SWF is sensitive to case in folder names. So the folder we were supplied with - remember it was videos - should have been Videos. Yes, that's it, best part of two weeks of frustration because 'v' should have been 'V'.
If you're having trouble getting shockwave flash to play in RapidWeaver, check the case of your Videos folder. Save yourself a lot of bother.
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