hnical functionality that can’t be replicated on the native iOS SDK can work through a third party’s system. So just to share with you some of the results, I was attempting to play four transparent videos, all slightly overlapping with a png image in the background. The playback was unacceptably slow with this many streams. I then tried, two transparent videos with a PNG background and the playback was fine, I didn’t notice any frame grabbing or glitches, and one full screen iPhone video with transparency and a PNG image in the back ground ran fine!

Again, I’d like to express my amazement at being able to play an .flv with transparency on the iPhone. I have no idea how Adobe are able to do it, but I really hope Apple step up their game and include a video codec with alpha channel sometime soon. The only down side to using ARI 2.7 is the lack of support for native UIKit components, meaning you have to build everything in Flash/Flex.

If you want to play around with transparent video on the iPhone with Flash you’ll need to download the trial version of Flash Builder 4.5 from here, and check out this post on setting up your system to export from Flash Builder to your iPhone. You do need to be registered as an Apple dev, as to my knowledge there is no simulator in the Adobe set up, but it was all pretty straight forward (no less painful than having to do it through Apple and XCode).

Here’s the AS3 code, I just created a new Mobile ActionScript Project, as I’ve heard Flex Mobile Projects add unwanted overhead to your app (but don’t quote me on that). You’ll also need to make sure that the info in the project’s XML file (application descriptor file) matches all of your code signing identity info ie com.mycompany.myAppID
One thing to note is that I didn’t use the StageWebView object to place my video. According to Adobe’s docs StageWebView’s shouldn’t overlap with each other, so this wasn’t suitable for this project. The only piece of AIR specific code is the

Monday, June 12, 2006
Installing WordPress Locally Under Windows XP

In the past few weeks, I've tested a few blogging platforms for the upcoming launch of Geeksaresexy.net, and right now, I hesitate between 2 alternatives: WordPress and Textpattern. I'll be fooling around with both in coming weeks to familiarize myself with them. I have now been running Wordpress for a week or so, and I must say that I am quite impressed by its ease of installation. Running a local version of your blog is very useful because it lets you fool around with themes and plugins to your heart's desire without having to risk breaking your live blog.

Here's a little guide that will help you install and run Wordpress locally on your XP box in less then 10 minutes:

1- Get XAMPP lite for Windows. Choose the exe version, and install it at the root of your C drive.

2- Browse to C:\xampplite and double click setup_xampp.bat

3- Once that is done, double click xampp-control.exe and start the Apache and Mysql s