I threw the doors open on camXip moments ago.

I'm really enjoying working on camXip and since I haven't completed nearly as many features as I've wanted to, I'm going to keep working on it through February and maybe longer. I've contracted a professional designer to do the logo and a couple friends are going to be working on the site as well. I'll probably be splitting the blog off at some point as well.

In the meantime I've been working on some other CakePHP plugins that I'll be releasing. The next one is an automatic RSS feed generator and I may release the user/login system I use for pretty much every project at some point.

I wasted something like 10 hours over three days struggling with Flash. The good news is that I have a decent player.

The Flash development program acts really weird when using the test movie feature and loading images from a web server. Even though the server was localhost I was seeing long delays and blinking when the images loaded. I wrote the viewer three times from scratch using three different methods. It turns out the problem was the way I was testing the movie. It acts strange in the development program, but runs fine when loading from a browser.

I learned a ton of actionscript in the process and V3 ended up being the cleanest code wise, so it wasn't a total loss.

I'll put this warning out there from anyone using Flash's MovieClipLoader class or loading a movie from a website and getting inconsistent test results:
DON'T TEST IN THE DEVELOPMENT PROGRAM. PUBLISH AND TEST IN A BROWSER.

I was able to get the basics of the site up very quickly thanks to CakePHP. I used a design that I'd been kicking around for a couple of months. I'm sure I got the original for OSWD, but I don't remember which one. It's nothing amazing, but it works. I had enlisted a co-worked to do a logo, but he's been pretty swamped lately, so I may have to put something together. It was would have nice to have a true graphics designer's touch for once. Oh well.

A couple of firsts for me with this project. I know I'm a bit late arriving at the party here, but I did my first tag could and used google maps for the first time. I used the CakePHP Bakery article on GeoIP to automatically add each camera to the map and center the map on the users location. Really cool stuff.

Right now I'm working on the Flash player, then I can knock out so more website features. I had planned on doing a premium version where a user could pay like $20 a year and have a faster framerate on their cameras. I hope to still have time for this.

Alright, back to the web apps.

I have a background working with IP Cameras, so I figured it was time to put that knowledge to use. camXip will be a IP camera sharing site. Kind of like YouTube for IP cameras. I'll be using cakephp again, since I have a pretty decent framework that will save me a ton of time. The biggest challenge will be working with Flash, which I plan to use to showing the video. The framerates will be low, something like 1 frame/5 seconds, so I figure I can treat it like a slideshow.

More to come...as I figure it out.