I love motionbox

I really do love motionbox.com. A little while ago I bought an AVCHD camcorder (a Canon HF10 to be precise). While I’ve been very happy with the camera itself, I unknowingly stepped into brave new world of dealing with AVCHD (mts) files; a world that is definitely in its infancy, to say the least.

I’m a big fan of archiving original video content (and photos, using Flickr) despite what you might edit the video into. You never know when you’re going to want that original source file. However, dealing with the huge mts files, having enough room to store them and back them up, well it’s nothing short of a pain in the arse.

I also need to share them, with limited fuss (if possible), via the web. I have family interstate and like to keep them in the loop.

After much searching (thanks for all your help Gav) and trials of a few different video sharing sites, I’ve finally settled on motionbox.com. I even paid premium memberships with another well-known video sharing site, only to be disappointed (primarily with the video quality).

Motionbox can natively handle AVCHD (mts) files. No transcoding and exporting prior to uploading, just upload your mts files and motionbox takes care of the rest. Perfect for archiving your original camcorder files.

Its easy to manage permissions, share videos and importantly, the quality of the final video that appears on motionbox is awesome. Apparently they use higher bit rates to encode your videos (in H264) than other sites, and I really did notice a massive difference in quality. And their price is unbeatable at $US30 per year for unlimited hosting.

Despite their under-whelming features page, you should really chec out motionbox if you’re looking for a fantastic online video, sharing site.

Filed under: general

Printing via ColdFusion

I’m currently scoping a large ColdFusion, FarCry and Flex application at work. One of the requirements is server-side batch printing from PDFs that are already generated.

I knew about the cfprint tag but wanted to make sure it is up to scratch, so I wrote a quick example of how it works.

It’s a great tag, and a welcome addition to ColdFusion 8. You need to provide a UI / workflow however to reprint (in case the printer fails, etc) as the tag doesn’t really give you any notification of success/failed attempts to send to the printer (I suppose this is outside the scope of the tag, and where the operating system picks up).

Anyway, you can checkout the example. There’s not much to see online, but you can download the example and run it locally – its all server side printing.

Filed under: coldfusion, examples

ColdFusion Sugar for Espresso

Move over TextMate, there’s a new editor for Mac OS X; Espresso by MacRabbit.

I’ve been testing out Espresso for a couple of months now, and I’m very impressed with it so far. In my opinion its targeted directly at TextMate users and brings some much needed functionality such as fantastic project support (built-in, rather than having to rely on Project+ like you currently do with TextMate), code navigator, snippets. It also has most of the functionality that makes TextMate so great such as syntax highlighting, code hinting and code completion.

Of course, TextMate has quite a number of features that Espresso doesn’t. For example, ActionScript/Flex compiler support to date, is far better in TextMate than Espresso.

Like TextMate, Espresso has the ability to be extended via Sugars. Sugars are basically the same as TextMate Bundles, but expressed in XML.

I’ve been dying to use Espresso on a regular basis in my ColdFusion projects, but without a ColdFusion Sugar that’s not been a reality.

A week or so ago, Jonathan Christopher released a basic ColdFusion Sugar for Espresso! It featured syntax highlighting only and as Jonathan didn’t have much time to devote towards feature implementation for the Sugar, so I decided to have ago myself.

I forked the Sugar on GitHub and have been adding features ever since. Feel free to download the ColdFusion Sugar and use it for your development. I’ll be adding features as I continue to learn how to write the Sugar (the documentation isn’t exactly great) and I plan on making Espresso a worthwhile alternative to CFEclipse and TextMate for ColdFusion development.

If you find any bugs, or have any feature requests just email me!

Filed under: coldfusion sugar

Australian Mobile Phone Validator for Flex

Flex comes with a bunch of great validators built-in. You can use them for the majority of your data validation needs. However, for us Australians, the PhoneNumberValidator doesn’t work if you want to ensure users provide valid Australian mobile numbers.

Like the US our mobile numbers need to be 10 digits long, but Australian mobile numbers must start with 04.

I’ve used this in a number of projects and decided to break it out as an example of extending the Validator class to write your own validation routines. You can download the source (including the Unit test) from the example page.

Filed under: flex

Microsoft on my Mac

OK, so most of us want to move away from Microsoft when we move to Mac; but as web developers, that’s not really a reality as Internet Explorer still commands the market share for modern browsers.

We’re currently reviewing a number of our sites for IE8 compatibility and as such, I needed to install it on my MacBook After some quick Googling I found a great post on getting IE8 running on your Mac.

It is an interesting tact for Microsoft to enable testing on multiple versions of Internet Explorer via virtualisation as opposed to running multiple versions on the same OS.

As for the setup, I used Qemu on an XP VMWare instance to convert the VirtualPC Hard Disk to be VMWare compatible. Initially I had some errors in getting Qemu to work, and I had to cd into the qemu/bin directory, rather than the qemu directory itself (as per the instructions). I also had to copy a required .dll into the bin directory and then it all converted smoothly.

I didn’t try it out, but some people had success using Q on the Mac to convert the VirtualPC Hard Disk rather than using Qemu on the PC.

Filed under: technology

Custom Fonts

We’re working on a redesign of a website at work, that needs to follow new branding guidelines. A particular font is used heavily within the brand for most headings and introductory text.

We had to decide between fudging the font into the website design, or not. We try to follow standards at Enpresiv as much as possible, but from time to time that is not always possible.

We turned to the usual font replacement techniques:

• sIFR
• A List Apart’s Dynamic Text Replacement
• a new comer: cufon
• facelift

But I also wanted to dream a little, and take a look at what the future might hold. I made a few examples using the new @font-face css3 capability, and thought they might be useful for others.

The @font-face rule allows you to use TrueType and OpenType fonts directly in your webpages. Browser support is VERY limited at present, but Safari Version 4 beta does a really nice job at rendering the custom fonts.

I can see a whole new ‘licensing’ problem arising out of this new capability. Its going to be so easy to add any font into your website, but whether or not you’re allowed to is something entirely different.

I’m also a little scared of what the web might turn into. Despite the low number of web fonts being very limiting for professional designers, those with little design skills tend to turn to ‘fancy’ fonts and colours to try and spice up their designs. With so many great programs making building webpages within reach of the every day person, I can only imagine what we’re in for.

Filed under: technology, web 2.0