I'm an apprentice junior programmer and have been given a project at work, its a simple app in which images are flashed on the screen for a short period of time (starting at 2 seconds) the user has to play for 3 minutes 70% of the images must be clicked / tapped and 30% must be ignored, at the end it displays how many "fails" and how many "halftimes" you got (fails being how many times you clicked an image you WASNT meant to or didnt click an image you WAS meant to and halftimes being how many images you was meant to click that you clicked in half the allotted time i.e at first, if you clicked within 1 second that would count as a halftime click) anyway, all of this works fine, the problem i have is that: i wish to read a value from an XML file (at first the value being 2000 so i can use it as a variable for when i initiate my image timer) which i have achieved, at the END of the game, if the number of fails is 1 or less, i would like to decrease that value by 50 (0.05 seconds) and if the fails is 2 or more i would like to increase the value by 100 (0.1 seconds) and i dont have a clue how i can modify the XML file to change this value, as i said im a junior programmer and dont have much knowledge of AS3 with XML so any help is welcome and appreciated.
Thank you for your time.
I can't explain all the ins and outs but I can give you some direction. If you're publishing a swf for the web, you will need a server-side script (something like PHP or ASP.net) which can write the change to either a database or an xml file.
If you're publishing a swf or projector for desktop playback, you can combine the ByteArray and FileReference classes to save a file, but a "save as.." dialog will open for the user.
If you're publishing as an AIR application, you can use the File class to modify the xml file.
Hope this helps..
Related
I'm optimizing a website using the Lighthouse. I can see that it doesn't really calculate right the results.
Here are some points I think it's wrong in the calculation.
First, although the website time load around 200ms and as you can see the site loaded on first frame but in the lighthouse, all the values of "First Contentful Paint", "Time to Interactive", "Speed Index", and "Largest Contentful Paint
" always are 1.8 seconds for every tests (likes fake number) and it's too high compared with the load time.
The "Avoid long main-thread tasks" show the time so big compared with the load time.
Second, I have kept minimum number of the resources and tried to minimize much as much posible the size of the resources, but the Lighthouse still show the suggestion for this one
How can I pass those things?
After read the comment of Graham, I have some answers already.
However, even I removed all the JS code and all the image, the "First Contentful Paint" reduces 0.1s and the score still is 99. I'm not sure if Google team considers that the website contains only a line text is popular in the morden website. And of course currently, the PWA is not standard yet and even we use the PWA we still should load for "full state" as well.
Video file loaded from server.
Video file has (number of views).
If any application user views that particular video the number of views should be incremented and updated.
If I am viewing that video and another user viewed that particular video, is it possible to automatically update the number of views without any user action.
If there is any possible solution AND is a good practice, what is the best approach to implement this using Objective-C?
I've seen some iOS apps updating the number of views for videos which keeps incrementing every second even if the internet connection is disabled, so I think that is a fake counter.
So I was going through a function call every 5 seconds to check the number of views for each video from the server, but I am not sure if it is a good practice, any suggestions?
Websockets are usually great for keeping things updated without any user interaction.
Take a look at this iOS framework: https://github.com/square/SocketRocket
There are different approaches to update the view-counter, the safest is if you put a REST-server "in front of the video file", which returns the video file and at the same time updates the number of views in your database.
We have a Universal iOS app. We use JSON to download content into the app during the first launch.
The size of content being downloaded on iPad (due to large image sizes) is about 100MB and on iPhone (smaller images) 80MB.
It takes about 4-7 minutes to download all content over WiFi. On 3G it takes 7-10 minutes.
Images are large in size, text content is not so much.
Is there any way we could reduce the download time? I'm aware of JSON compression but not sure if it will help with images?
Any ideas?
Tx
Some of this information has been mentioned in various comments, but it's what I would have suggested anyway and I figured having an answer written up would be more useful, so here goes:
Instead of storing the location of each image in the JSON file and downloading them one at a time, store the images in zip files and download those. Any amount of compression you get from this is an improvement in your download time, and you can simply unzip the images once you've downloaded the zip files.
Store a reasonable amount of the images in the main bundle along with the app. In your case you clearly can't store them all there; you don't want to have a huge app, and since it's a recipe app I presume you'll be adding more recipes as you go along. It makes a lot more sense to be able to update and download recipes via the JSON than to have to push a new version of the app to the app store with each change. But there are some items that can be bundled with the app; ex. large background images, design elements that are constant and unlikely to change. Any image which won't be likely to need updating should be bundled with the main app; any savings on download time is an improvement.
Have some kind of interesting loading screen. This is very important since you're talking about 4-10 minute download times. That is a long time for a user. When engaging with an application, 30 seconds can even seem like a long time. You're going to be hard pressed to make me willing to sit there and wait for 10 minutes for the app to begin if nothing is happening during that time. Have creative vegetable characters move across the screen, include a little interactive puzzle or ingredients on the loading screen, something. Just give the user something to look at (or preferably something interactive to do) while they're waiting. Otherwise you're probably going to lose a lot of users during this download.
If you can make this work, it really is a good idea to only download items when necessary. For example if your recipe app is broken into "Salads", "Fish", "Chicken", "Desserts", etc., you could prompt the user to download the recipe information for each category the first time they click on it. The great thing about this is that it breaks up the time the user has to spend waiting on the download; let's say you have 10 recipe categories, now the time the user has to wait all at once has been decreased from 4-10 minutes to 30 seconds-1 minute. That is a huge difference. I'll wait 1 minute for the Dessert recipes (still give them something to do!) much more readily than I'll wait 10 minutes for the whole app.
4b. You mentioned not being able to access new content while offline, which is a valid concern. To address this you could have a prompt the first time the app loads: This application contains hundreds of exciting recipes and delicious images. It can take several minutes to download all this yummy information. You can download all the content now, or proceed to the app and download recipes by category when you wish to view them. Please note that this will require an internet connection. And the buttons could say something like Download Now and Proceed to App. Obviously you can play with the wording to your heart's content, but the idea is sound. You've informed the user that there might be a significant download time, so at least they're forewarned, and they can make their own decision about how to use your app.
However you decide to proceed, break up the content you download into logical categories for the zip files. For example, "Desserts.zip", "Salads.zip", etc. That way even if you don't decide to let the user download on-demand now, you've set up a structure that is open to change later on.
It is possible to implement a feature that allows users to watch videos as they are uploaded to server by others. Is html 5 suitable for this task? But flash? Are there any read to go solutions, don't want to reinvent the wheel. The application will be hosted on a dedicated server.
Thanks.
Of course it is possible, the data is there isnt it?
However it will be very hard to implement.
Also I am not so into python and I am not aware of a library or service suiting your requirements, but I can cover the basics of video streaming.
I assume you are talking about video files that are uploaded and not streams. Because, for that, there are obviously thousands of solutions out there...
In the most simple case the video being uploaded is already ready to be served to your clients and has a so called "faststart atom". They are container format specific and there are sometimes a bunch of them. The most common is the moov-atom. It contains a lot of data and is very complex, however in our use case, in a nutshell, it holds the data that enables the client to begin playing the video right away using the data available from the beginning.
You need that if you have progressive download videos (youtube...), meaning where a file is served from a Webserver. You obviously have not downloaded the full file and the player already can start playing.
If the fastastart atom was not present, that would not be possible.
Sometimes it is, but the player for example cannot display a progress bar, because it doesnt know how long the file is.
Having that covered the file could be uploaded. You will need an upload solution that writes the data directly to a buffer or a file. (file will be easier...).
This is almost always the case, for example PHP creates a file in the tmp_dir. You can also specify it if you want to find the video while its being uploaded.
Well, now you can start reading that file byte by byte and print that data to a connection to another client. Just be sure not to go ahead of what has already been recieved and written. You would probaby initiate your upload with a metadata set in memory that holds the current recieved byte position and location of the file.
Anyone who requests the file after the uploaded has started can just recieve the entire file, or if the upload is not yet finished, get it from your application.
You will have to throttle the data delivery or pause it when the data becomes short. This will appear to the client almost as a "slow connection". However you will have to echo some data from time to time to prevent the connection from closing. But if your upload doesnt stall, and why shoud it?, that shouldnt be a problem.
Now if you want to have someting like on the fly transcoding of various input formats into your desired output format, things get interesting.
AFAIK ffmpeg has neat apis which lets you directly deal with datasterams.
Also handbrake is a very good tool, however you would need to take the long road using external executeables.
I am not really aware of your requirements, however if your clients are already tuned in, for example on a red 5 streaming server, feeding data into a stream should also work fine.
Yes, take a look at Qik, http://qik.com/
"Instant Video Sharing ... Videos can be viewed live (right as they are being recorded) or anytime later."
Qik provides developer APIs, including ones like these:
qik.stream.subscribe_public_recent -- Subscribe to the videos (live and recorded)
qik.user.following -- Provides the list of people the user is following
qik.stream.public_info -- Get public information for a specific video
It is most certainly to do this, but it won't be trivial. And no, I don't think that you will find an "out of the box" solution that will require little effort on your behalf.
You say you want to let:
users watch videos as they are uploaded to server by others
Well, this could be interpreted two different ways:
Do you mean that you don't want a user to have to refresh the page before seeing new videos that other users have just finished uploading?
Or do you mean that you want one user to be able to watch a partially uploaded video (aka another user is still in the process of uploading it and right now the server only contains a partial upload of the video)?
Implementing #1 wouldn't be hard at all whatsoever. You would just need an AJAX script to check for newly uploaded videos, and those videos could then be served to the user in whatever way you choose. HTML5 vs. Flash isn't really a consideration here.
The second scenario, on the other hand, would require quite a bit of effort. I am guessing that HTML5 might not be mature enough to handle this type of situation. If you are not looking
to reinvent the wheel and don't have a lot of time to dedicate to this feature than I would say that you would be out of luck. You may be able to use ffmpeg to parse partial video files and feed them to a Flash player, but I would think of this as a large task.
I have an issue I'm hoping someone can help with. I have an application that, for all intents and purposes, is working great. It's basically a picture viewer type of application - for something very specific. What it is is about 500 pictures.
I have all pictures set as Content and I load/unload one at a time. For the 500 pictures, I have a class that is used as data about each picture. So things like "place taken" , "index", "short description", etc. I never need to insert or delete from this list, but I may need to make some changes to each individual one, like "user viewed this picture on..." (date) or "favorite = true" (boolean where user marks a picture as a favorite picture).
When I deploy the app, this "picture metadata" is in xml file. It is then deserialized and saved to IsoStorage upon first run. A copy of it is maintained in memory and that is what is used to run my whole app. I have 3 different pages that all use that data, which is set as a static property in app.xaml.cs. Upon Deactivate/Closing the data is serialized back to xml - upon relaunching it is deserialized. Everything works fine and fast - everywhere. Including tombstoning.
The problem is resuming from Deactivation where the app is not tombstoned. It can take up to 10-15 seconds and definitely is returning from e.IsApplicationInstancePreserved in Application_Activated (i.e. it's not tombstoned).
Activating from brand new it takes about 3-4 seconds for the app to start. Returning from tombstoning it also takes about 3 seconds.
What I'm not understanding is why returning from e.IsApplicationInstancePreserved = true; is taking so long (and it won't allow me to pass certification). I've tested and found that if it is about 10 items in the List its incredibly snappy for FAS. If there are about 50 items in the List then it's not immediate. If there are 100 items, it's the first time you can see "Resuming..." (yep, that word coming from FAS, not tombstone). Where I have it, at 500 in the List, it is painfully slow to watch FAS, which is SAS.
It's interesting that in the emulator, FAS works perfectly fine, even with 1000 objects in memory. It's on an actual device where it is incredibly slow (Samsung Focus) in both debug and release mode.
Now I know the easy answer may be something like "why maintain a class with a list of 500 objects all the time?", but my whole architecture and user experience is based on having data about the pictures available on all three pages all the time. Linq is heavily used to report data everywhere.
Any thoughts or guidance on this situation?
Great to hear you found the problem.
"sounds a serialization/deserialization issue to me. Are you storing the list in a State 'variable' ? were the framework will serialize when leaving the app and deserialize it when you return"
Remember, your PC + Emulator is MUCH faster and more powerful than your phone's 1GHz single core ARM processor with 500MB RAM!
When your app is activated with e.IsApplicationInstancePreserved == true, then you shouldn't need to restore any state and you should be able to pick up where the user left off.
If you're saying that when your list catalogs 500 items, the performance is horribly slow when resuming the app, I wonder whether you're also keeping the 500 images in memory and your phone is having to swap all that data into your app's memory space. This will be further compounded if your app has multiple pages each containing copies of your 500 images!
I strongly encourage you to profile your app to measure its memory footprint and to see where the big memory, storage, IO and perf issues are.