Our work | MadeByPi® Blog

Jan 13, 2011

The year that’s been in the digital world…

Posted by admin | Filed under Cool stuff, Our work

By Karen Lewis: Client Services Director

So, as the year comes to a close, I’ve been asked to reflect upon the year that’s been and where it leads to in the digital arena. Interesting task - and one that I relish! Looking back, predictions for 2010 were dominated by adapting for and surviving the poor economic climate in addition to enthusing about this being the year of the mobile (finally!), given the phenomenal market adoption of smartphone technology.

And indeed, digital profited from the UK’s economic climate with price comparison, auction and cashback sites demonstrating the fastest growth rates in the industry as value for money dominated and influenced consumer purchase behaviour.

What has also happened is that shopping has become increasingly ‘social’ (e.g. Amazons user feedback and Groupon); ‘in-the-know’ consumers are more likely to seek lower prices online (via eBay’s Fashion Outlet and ASOS Marketplace) and, more importantly, influence shifted to peers with consumers reporting that they are now more influenced by user generated reviews than brand advertising.

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Dec 22, 2010

Strobe Media Playback: Wrapped

Posted by Mikea | Filed under Development, Our work

Strobe Media Playback (SMP) has quickly become my Flash media player of choice.

Built by Adobe - using the Open Source Media Framework (OSMF) - it's simple to use, yet powerful; and thanks to being open source, the project is available for all to download, modify, and re-build at will. Which, as it turns out, is rather handy.

For a recent project I needed to -quickly- implement a Flash video player that supported various streaming protocols, and would play nicely when loaded/controlled by some other Flash content. For me, SMP was the obvious choice.

The standard player supports being loaded by another SWF - passing any flashvars from the loading SWF on to the player - but for this project I needed more control over the configuration, positioning, size, and full-screen behaviour. With a few small changes to StrobeMediaPlayback.as, and a new wrapper class to make loading and configuring the player from Flash nice and simple, I had what I needed.

When modifying the player, my aim was to retain all the original functionality and behaviour when embedded into HTML - so the same player can be used everywhere, as you should see at above... However, *caveat alert* I can't guarantee that, so if you end up deploying this somewhere important be sure to test it works as expected beforehand.

Changes to the player were made in the StrobeMediaPlayback document class:

Added an option to stop the automatic initialize() call when the player is added to the stage - to allow initialising the player with custom sets of parameters, not necessarily from the loaderInfo parameters.
Added optional width/height parameters to the initialize function, where passing 0,0 causes the player to fit the full size of the stage.
Added a resize function that can be called any time after initialisation.

Get the wrapper code and tweaked StrobeMediaPlayback here. There's a little read-me in there to help you get started working with the wrapper and/or rebuilding the player, and the changes are documented in comments at the top of the StrobeMediaPlayback class.

The wrapper and player modifications are built on version 1.5 of StrobeMediaPlayback - you can view/download the various SMP distributions on sourceforge.

Nov 29, 2010

ChildLine Charity Auction

Posted by ColinG | Filed under Cool stuff, Development, Our work

The team here at MadeByPi^® were recently tasked with creating an auction site for our client first direct, the website would be used to auction off some really rather cool items to raise money for childrens charity ChildLine.

ChildLine

The auction this week came to a close and we are pleased to announce that the website has raised a huge £14,114.10 in the aid of charity!

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May 12, 2009

MadeByPi the Movie

Posted by admin | Filed under Our work

It was lights, camera, action earlier today as we put together some video elements for a forthcoming Flash app. After a special "Hand Idol" competition throughout the office, Shona and Tom were chosen as our models and both thoroughly enjoyed their preshoot manicure.

Check out some pictures here

Nov 12, 2008