Yesterday I had a presentation at the SFUG meeting covering some bits of my rewritten BBML framework (originated from the project laax.com). I’ve tried to share some insights into the technical concept and strategies for CSS parsing, CSS selectors and layout validation.

Picture by Marc Liyanage

It’s been surprisingly fun (I give credits to the beer sponsored by Nemos). People even managed to pretend they’d be interested in what I was prosing, so credit to them too!

I’d also like to mention that there’ll be the swiss flash event soon: Flash at the Lake will not only pamper you with appearances of great national and international Flash enthustiacs, it will also give anybody attending the pleasure to enjoy one of Zurich’s greatest locations with people who don’t think of you as a storm lightning adorer when you sit in the sun twittering Flash into the clear lake. And all that to a fantastic price. Check it out at fatl.ch

So here we go with the presentation (Quicktime so you can enjoy the marvelous effects):

I’m close to finishing a new project. Well, it’s actually not that new of a project, but it hasn’t gone online so far, and when I did the first version back in March I’ve used Papervision to achieve the goals. It’s basically a simple CoverFlow effect to scroll through Logos.

The thing with the old Papervision version was.. it got pretty slow when loading many pictures (resulting in many 3d objects). I got briefed with a screen design more or less and expected much less elements to be loaded. Now they got back to me saying they had some problems. Oh yes, they had. Boy was it slow!!

So I did a new version, skipping Papervision for the new Flash Player 10 capabilities. Wow! What an improvement not only in speed, but also in quality (because I wouldn’t have to switch to crispy bitmap handling for acceptable speed – and Flash doesn’t provide that feature anyway) and file size (less than 25%!). Now I just hope that the end client will have the nuts to go with Flash Player 10 :-) (Adobe still doesn’t provide any statistics, but it’s not that wide spread yet as for now).

See here the result (still in development – click the picture). You’ll need Flash Player 10 (I don’t check for the version in this example):

I made use of SimpleZSorter

Update: Well, the client wouldn’t go with 10. So I had to recode the Papervision version to speed it up as much as possible, and I think it got pretty speedy after all. See here for comparison.