Mike W’s Blog

The purpose of this post is two-fold.

1. To demo the timeline animation and wikipedia features new to Google Earth (see my earlier post)

Check out the very amateur demo below. My apologies for the hushed tones. You may need to turn up the volume. Everyone in my house was still sleeping . Viewing the video requires at least Flash Player 8. The latest and greatest Flash Player can be found here. I need to explore more elegant ways for detecting the user’s player version, so I’m going to go back to this article soon.

In the meantime a link to the .mov file is included too in case you have trouble with the swf version. Please let me know via comment if you can’t see or hear the embedded video below.

It would be really interesting if you could combine the wikipedia and timeline features of Google Earth. For example, a user could tag a wikipedia article with geographic coordinates and date information, so that a user could get time-specific information while traversing the timeline. Perhaps placemarkers are more appropriate. I need to learn more - just thinking out loud.

The 3D view of Mt. St. Helens is just plain cool!

2. To prompt me to experiment with iShowU for screen recording and conversion of the movie files it creates to swf for a, perhaps, more web-friendly approach

Tim Lauer blogged about using iShowU as a Mac alternative for Snapz, so as a newly converted Mac user, I decided to give it a try. I wanted to see if I could generate an swf from the created movie like Camtasia does automatically (only for the PC - sigh) . After taking care of some minor edits in iMovie, I was ready to experiment.

This article on converting video to swf from Adobe was very helpful. We have Flash in-house, so it made sense to try it with that. I still have some learning to do, but the process wasn’t too bad. I want to get rid of the dead space above and below the capture, and I sound like I’m talking into a tin can after the conversion to an swf.

I learned that the swf autoplays automatically, even if you set params in the html object tag. I had to take care of that setting in the flash file itself, setting the movie component autoplay parameter to false. Hopefully, this saves someone else some time in the future!

You essentially have 3 files you need to move over to the server to include the swf in your webpage.

1. The generated swf file
2. The generated flv file
3. The swf that presents the player controls to the user

Then it’s just a matter of including the appropriate tags in your html to bring it into the page. Dreamweaver makes that pretty easy, and the publish feature mentioned in the Adobe article also creates a sample html file that has what you need.