February, 2009

Owning and running a business, the most important elements to your company are your image and the people working with you. This is even more important when you are a smaller business. If you are surrounding by the best of the best, that becomes the perception of what your company is. A small agile company composed of experts is a lot different than a large company with a few experts and a lot of worker bees. Both are valid models and neither is right or wrong. I opt for the quality over quantity approach, regardless of the income difference.

I will presenting our media framework tomorrow night at the Flash Platform meeting.

The general outline of the presentation is to talk about our client work history, run through the framework, talk about what we are working on, and basically field questions and get input from folks.

Anyone that is interested please come out. The presentation will hopefully give you insight on what we have done and the field in general.

We released a minor update to the Dreamsocket Media Framework that addresses issues with streaming video and mp3s. The release is an update to all 3 versions (Flash AS2, Flash AS3, and Flex AS3) and is available for download in customer accounts.

Here is a brief outline of the changes:
[FIX] ondemand streaming not being canceled out
[FIX] duration not being reset on close for StreamingNS
[FIX] corrected streaming mp3 initialization
[CHG] added autoloading of content if closed and setting a url back to the same one

To begin with, we used Drupal to build Dreamsocket.com. We chose it for many reasons but perhaps the best thing about it is the community surrounding it. Drupal is open source and there are literally hundreds of open-source add-ons for it which are under active development. I would recommend anyone looking to build a website to put aside their preconceptions and check it out.

With this project, we set out to build a website that would establish a presence for Dreamsocket on the web, provide a place to sell our products, provide support for those products, and enable us to interact with our customers. I will cover a couple custom modules and techniques we used to reach these goals.

Based on the feedback that everyone has sent in and the analytics we have gathered so far on our site, we've made the first round improvements to Dreamsocket.com. In short, we have added media framework demos, live support chat, code highlighting, and extra company info.

We have been getting inquiries on whether will we allow upgrading of products. Simple answer yes! We will allow upgrading of the Dreamsocket Media Framework from compiled seat to source seat, source seat to source site, or compiled seat to source site. The cost to upgrade will be the difference in price along with a small amount to cover our costs for the additional transaction. Currently the site does not allow upgrading, but we are working to add support for this into our store front.