Sunday, March 8, 2009

I Need Beta Testers

So, yesterday it just...suddenly popped in there...an epiphany of sorts. Usually when I go to bed I start thinking about different ideas and such and yesterday as I was going to bed I figured I should think of some web applications I could make with Flash...and then...

*POW!*

GIFS!

Animated GIFS!

...only, why should we be limited to the GIF format when there are others that are ~so~ much better...like PNG (with alpha transparencies)...and JPG, with its uber compression...hell since it's in Flash we can eve do JPGs with alpha transparencies!

But the problem of course is that not everyone can code in Flash and a lot of people wouldn't even know where to begin to try and setup such a beast...sooooo...I made a cookie cutter!

Right nyah:
animation_player.swf?v_spd=20&v_nbr=106

Now, this thing is simple, uber simple, STUPID simple, MAC LUSER simple. *nods*

All ya gotta do is plug in two values into the URL, the speed at which you want your animation to run...and the number of images you have in your animation, using nyah:
v_spd=20 - speed
v_nbr=106 - number of images

And then you just name all your images:
"image_1.png", "image_2.png", "image_3.png", etc in sequential order.

And that's it! Plug that into an embed tag on your site and viola! You can have animated JPGs and PNGs!

Of course, this is just a quick prototype I threw together so it has some quirks and kinks that need worked out. For example I've noticed if you use it on a browser that stalls out for one reason or another then it tends to fuck it all up and it won't reload itself properly. It also only supports JPGs right at the moment and it desperately needs a preloader for the images, otherwise it sorta re-cycles over itself until the images are all cached, which actually makes the initially loading a *LOT* slower than it'd be if I actually properly preloaded the images before throwing them into the setInterval function.

So anywho, I need people to test the little bugger out and tell me how it works, or how it doesn't work, or whatever other ideas or suggestions you have for the thing.

2 comments:

Kirk Is said...

Clever-ish!

Do you need a copy of the player in the same directory as the image sequence, or is the directory/URL somehow passed in?

Also, does the sequence start with 0 or 1? And what's the unit for the speed?

Onideus said...

See the most recent post.