Came across this a few days ago, thought I'd post it.
Little Wheel



First thing I noticed was the heavy influence of Michel Gagné. Especially the Insanely Twisted Shadow Puppets. If you have seen this before, I'm sure you'd recognize it right away. They also added a nice 3D feel to it, while keeping in in 2D. My guess is that a few of the elements were created and animated in 3D and brought into flash. It has a very nice narrative, and the musak is fitting too.

Also I was happy to see it was made in Slovakia.


Gagne's Specter's Bride

Well not everyone has an iPhone. Some people might be into using mobile devices based on the Android open platform. The HTC Hero, is the first Android based phone to support Flash.

full story : flash on android



Also, Google's Flash indexing has been updated.Link

most notably
"This means that when a SWF file loads content from some other file—whether it's text, HTML, XML, another SWF, etc.—we can index this external content too, and associate it with the parent SWF file and any documents that embed it."

I can start recommending Flash to people interested in on Gooleable (Google it) websites.
Obfuscation doesn't effect indexing, and since June 19 2009, AS3 content is indexable.

When using FlashDevelop and having multiple embedded swf files, the debugging of the Flash IDE is not enough.

I've tried using ThunderBoltAS3 at first, and found it quite helpful. If you have Firebug installed on Firefox, you can send messages using the Logger interface. You can use sever levels of notifications: Info, Debug, Warn and Error. There is also an AIR app that can be synced up to and gives a nicer interface. What I did not like about it though is having to use the swc. This is not too complicated, but if I'm handing over projects that are made for Flash CS3, the swc procedure is a bit cumbersome and can make it easy to forget about the swc. It's not a problem in cs4, because you can link to swc files, but this causes projects to be just a bit more difficult to switch between CS3 and CS4.

ThunderBolt works essentially like the trace feature, but I've found the FlashTracer on Firefox to slow down wight down the processor sometimes far too much, so Thunderbolt is a bit more helpful, as it allows to display objects and arrays easier.

Then I found out about De MonsterDebugger . This makes debugging what it should be. I always thought that the biggest shortcoming of FlashDevelop was the lack of a debugging tool, but with this debugger this is a issue of the past. De MonsterDebugger only requires one import, rather than the swc.
It supports the trace type of debugging, but more importantly it lets you browse through all the objects.
All you need to do is "debugger = new MonsterDebugger(this);" and the debugger console lets you browse through the available properties and methods.
An other handy feature is the ability to call any exposed method. The is great for doing simple tests where want to call a function without having to build an interface for it.

Check out GotoAndLearn's video about this debugging tool to get a good idea of the capabilities.

Just heard about this on the radio. CBC was interviewing a Calgarian that started a spontaneous dance party.
It's quite phenomenal....



It's really weird to see the event reach critical mass, and everyone racing to join in.

Calgary's 'Dancing Man' an overnight celebrity
Calgary Herald - June 3, 2009

I wanted to pass a parameter or variable directly to a chunk in MODx 0.9.6

Apparently this is only possible in the EVO version of MODx. So Instead I needed to create a snippet to call the chunk and pass the parameter as a placeholder. Rather than doing it for this for a single purpose, I made it so any parameter name can be passed, allowing for a bit more flexibility.

/*
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
 Snippet name: PassParameter
 Short Desc: passes a parameter to a chunk as a placeholder
 Date: May 29, 2009
 Author: Daniel Poda
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Description:
    pass parameter defined by &pName and &pVal to a chunk &tpl
    set &preparse to 1 (TRUE) to parse the chunk before returning the content
    by default this does not pre parse
::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::::
Usage:
    [[PassParameter? &tpl=`myChunk` &pName='param' &pVal='12' &preparse='1']]
*/

   $params[$pName]=$pVal;

   if ($preparse== 1){
      $documentOutput.=$modx->parseDocumentSource($modx->parseChunk($tpl, $params, '[+', '+]'));
   }
   else{
      $documentOutput.=$modx->parseChunk($tpl, $params, '[+', '+]');
   }

   echo($documentOutput);
?>

usage
[[PassParameter? &tpl=`myChunk` &pName='param' &pVal='12' &preparse='1']]

Shane McCartney, the author of http://www.lostinactionscript.com has a presentation here (page 88)
where he states that using
var var_1:String = "str 1", var_2:String = "str 2", var_3:String = "str 3";
is more efficient than
var var_1:String = "str 1";
var var_2:String = "str 2";
var var_3:String = "str 3";

but this source says the exact opposite.
10. One line assignments DO NOT buy any performance (true in other langs)

There were some other things that were contradictory between the two articles, but this is the one I decided to check.
so who's right, well it turns out (according to my test) that the single line is in fact faster, but I'm getting a 10% increase in declaring 4 variables, and not the 30% as expressed in the slides.

more importantly I figured out that the whitespace was making the difference. So once I put the statements in a line
var var_1:String = "str 1";var var_2:String = "str 2";var var_3:String = "str 3";
and put these inline with the for loop braces, the speed increase was over 10 fold. That's right more that 10x faster to have everything in a line (almost 20 depending on how it's formatted)

So I did some investigations, in disbelief of how brutal these numbers were. My first though was that I should change from compiling for flash 9 to compiling for flash 10. Seeing how that didn't fix anything I kept looking. Next I switched from debug mode to release mode. And there it was, once I switched to release that 10+ fold difference was gone. Flash develop (using the flex compiler) gives you the choice of compiling in release or debug mode, but I don't understand why this difference is so big. I remember reading that switching from debug mode to release mode gives you a performance increase, but this makes me ot want to use debug mode EVER.

read the rest

I found these pretty nifty:

replacing TextField and improving performance
http://lab.polygonal.de/2009/04/26/goodbye-textfield/

Round up of ActionScript 3.0 and Flex optimization techniques and practices
http://www.insideria.com/2009/04/51-actionscript-30-and-flex-op.html

Tips on how to write efficient AS3
part 1
part 2

a faster way of tweening (faster than tween max)
Tweensy

I was starting to loose my mind... then I came across this

the interesting part was this ...

if it doesn't works
please set your firefox browser:
1.input "about:config " to your firefox address bar and enter;
2.make sure your "dom.allow_scripts_to_close_windows" is true

Turns out dom.allow_scripts_to_close_windows was set to false.

Playing around with ribbons/particles in Flash. This is a bit more processor intensive than the others.



demo : Ribbons

More inside...

Another flash generative experiment



demo : Splash

on flickr

More inside...

I finally got to doing some more generative stuff with flash. I was playing with the flow fields, inspired by Soulwire.










demo : FLOW FIELD

I disabled the upload, but I'm pretty happy with the menu/layout and it will be the starting point for my future endeavors.

This is clever...

link to veryinteractivepeople.com

Had this idea in my head for a while, so after an hour or so of illustrator and a bit of photoshop, here are the new Madoff Hitler stamps.

My loop class

I have come up against this a few times, where I needed to create a series of numbers, usually integers, that are in loop. The first time I came across
This was for the salted herring portfolio website. I needed to create these fish/cursors that displayed some basic flocking behaviour. Along with the standard boid setup, they had to face either left or right. They would only point up or down when they were moving that direction. The change in direction also needed to be smooth, which leads us to our problem of averaging angles. If you do the average of 0 and 60 degrees, you can do some simple arithmetic and you get the average of 30. However if you average 350 and 10, trigonometry would give us 0 where as basic arithmetic would give us 180. The reason is that our equation doesn’t know how that 10 is closer to 350 if you go the other direction.

This is how I dealt with that…
I converted both the angles to their x and y components, and averaged those. Then I did an aTan on the averaged x and y values, giving me the average of the two angles.

This is the simplified formula in a function that would get the average of angles a and b (in radians).

private function averageNums($a:Number, $b:Number):Number {
    var avg:Number = (Math.atan2( Math.sin($a) + Math.sin($b) , Math.cos($a) + Math.cos($b) ));
    return avg;
}

This worked for the fish, but there is a problem with this equation. If you average 0 and 180 degrees you will not get the right average.

Continued...

Well well, it appears it's not dead yet. Director gets a quiet update according to draw logic. I can think of one person that's probably visibly excited about this.

I've argued before that just about anything director did, flash could do too, but then I haven't taken into account the newest updates like "Advanced physics engine with included NVIDIA® PhysX™ support". Flash however has such a big community behind it allowing for some great libraries and IDEs (like FlashDevelop). Flash also expanded to Flex and AIR, will be supporting C++ soon through Alchemy, and got the actionscript3 update, whereas Director is still sporting the somewhat clumsy (for my taste) lingo.

I wonder what's in store for Director...

This just in
I was used to sending calls to java from within the flash file using the navigateToURL function. If you look around the Google, you will find a lot of people are doing the same still. In AS3, there is a more reliable alternative - ExternalInterfaceCall

I'm saying more reliable, since I found out that IE6 does not necessarily like calling java from an swf using navigateToURL. (I believe sp1 wasn't liking it but sp2 was OK)

Aside from being more reliable, it is also a bit shorter.

var myData:String = "my data string";

// using navigateToURL
var js:URLRequest = new URLRequest();
js.url = "javascript:sendToJavaScript('" + myData + "')";
navigateToURL(js, '_self');

// using External interface call
ExternalInterface.call("sendToJavaScript", myData);

Enjoy

I updated my portfolio and my portfolio link.
My new portfolio is all about simplicity, I figured the old portfolio lacked a bit in usability and required a a bit of time to explore.

I got quite excited about this...

Although I don't use Various CMSes a lot I've spent a LOT of time researching them installing them on my server and trying to figure out why they weren't working. (Turns out I had to get into some php settings and the access files), but aside from that... While I was testing the different CMSes, I got fond of MODxCMS almost instantly. And the more I used it the more I liked it. I remember wandering if MODx could export the data as an XML file. Well I just came across this article that not only shows how to generate an xml file from the content but talks about my intended purpouse (for wanting an xml document) - namely creating a Flash site mirroring the content-mannaged Html site.

Have been playing around with some path finding algorithm, but it may not be for flash. At 5x4 it can find a path under a second, however anything over 5x5 times out.

This algorithm finds all paths and then selects one at random otherwise it wouldn't need to go through over 7000 paths at 4x5 and over 50'000 at 5x5.

So for my purpose this simply will not work and though it was an interesting concept/algorithm to work on I also feel like I lost a bunch of time on this.

Radio Buttons and Un-checking in AS3

Last night I came across this issue where I wanted to uncheck all radio buttons. In short, there is no direct way of doing this. However here’s the work-around I came up with.

Let’s say you have a radio button group (RBGroup) and three radio Buttons (RB1, RB2 and RB3)

First thing you need to do is add the RB’s to the group and add them as chilren

RB1.group = RBGroup ;
RB2.group = RBGroup ;
RB3.group = RBGroup ;

addChild(RB1) ;
addChild(RB2) ;
addChild(RB3) ;

To change the selection…
RBGroup.selection = RB1 ;

To check selection you can do this
trace(RB1.selected);
This is a read-only parameter, so you couldn’t set all to false to un-check them

So here’s my solution
Create another radio button and add it to the group
RB0.group = RBGroup ;

Then you can change the selection to RB0
RBGroup.selection = RB0;
And as long as this radio button is NOT ADDED as child (invisible) it will appear to be unselecting all.

Today didn't go so well so the scanned collection is quite small

I decided I'd put up some of my life drawings form the past year

So it looks like my key got revoked on the two day old app. I added the custom word feature, but reckon this will only work for a while, then I'll need to recompile for a new key.

so instead here's the source, though it is a bit messy.

So I was playing around with a Thesaurus API from Big Huge Labs.





Pretty self-explanatory, if you double click on a word it will search the synonyms.

Trying to see if two lines connect or not?
well here's a little class (just barely) I wrote to aid with a little personal project

Out of nowhere comes sophie3D. It renders up to 50,000 polygons in real time. Also supports rhinoceros.
http://www.sophie3d.com

can't wait to give it a try.

I did this a few weeks back for no particular reason really. I went back into C++ for a bit and got a reminder of how nice it is to have pointers and references. As you know, in Flash there is no such thing.

These pointers are awesome, I think, for many reasons. For example, I can use the same physical memory for one variable that can be used by any object. If I update this one variable, all objects will be effected. and there's more, but this is the feature I thought I would try to emulate in Flash. If your variable is an object, it's no problem, however if you try to do this to an int or Number it's impossible. Basically your number is a value and always a value, whereas your object is a reference.

here's a quick example...

guess who expanded their product lineup?

Concept:

“Natures” is a project that explores the dialogue between the natural
and the artificial, creating a world where these two elements coexist
harmoniously. It consists on a series of audio-visual compositions that
simulates organic behaviors through an atypical use of motion tracking
techniques.
The melodious movement of plants spinning with the wind triggers an
intricate web of computer-generated lines and shapes. Interpreting the
organic structures of the plants, the artificial element becomes part of
the natural and vice versa.





http://www.quayola.com/

O'Neill's collective get an update for the falls season.


Check Me OUT










took a few late nights and early mornings, but its up and running.

After getting the blog up and running again, I though I would re-post some of my past projects


Salted Herring Portfolio



Amph Series




Cannibal




The Collective, 2008 Summer

this link no longer works, because the collective got replaced with a new version for the site

I'm going to bring back my blogski.
(dispite the lack of popular demand)