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Flash-controlled webcam
Saturday, March 23 2002
I've only really been immersed in Flash for about a month, but I've already run up against some of its limitations. One of the more surprising of these is its inability to dynamically load images, the sort of thing you'd want to do in an intelligent Flash-controlled webcam viewer, one which only refreshes the webcam image when it changes. Yesterday evening I was trying to incorporate just such a viewer into the new Bathtubgirl Flash chat (reachable now via the Webcast page) and realized that the only way I could do it was by having Flash control the refreshes of images on an HTML page outside the Flash itself, using Javascript as an intermediary. To give you an idea of how difficult this was, I had to make code that handled the refreshes using two different techniques, one for the Mac and one for the PC. Since I don't have a Mac for debugging, I had to rely on screen shots and comments mailed to me from California. The chat itself is a useful QA tool, allowing people to report bugs in real time (as long as they can get it to work at all).
By the way, I'm pleased to see that new Flash MX that Macromedia is releasing allows dynamic loading of images. I can hardly wait to start laying down trippy visuals and calling up MP3 fragments remotely while changing webcam images fly in and spiral out. There will be nothing like it on the web.
Sally with her favorite toy - a padded leopard-print
glove designed for rough play with cats.
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