Some more bitmapdata and soundSpectrum progress

Today I found some time to mess around with bitmapdata and computeSpectrum again. I’ve been playing with this earlier, but didn’t quite get where I wanted to be. A few weeks ago I came up with a better way of rendering the soundTunnel. That resulted in some crazy cool shit, which I finished off today.

I won’t go into technical details here (yet). I just wanted you guys to see the result.

Demo

Click here
And just to make sure it is actually reacting to the sound, try the following links too

• Song 1: Click
• Song 2: Click
• Song 3: Click (default)
  
• Song 4: Click
• Song 5: Click

Controls

• F: Go full screen
• S: Freeze visualization
• Click: Change color (happens automatically too)

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Shootout at MAX Milan!

Kind of an intriguing title, isn’t it?
But you should take a look at this: the guys at Boulevart created a great Flash Lite shooter for MAX Milan. Make sure to check it out and give it a shot! The winners will be announced at Adobe MAX in Milan. Prizes seem to be quite interesting: There’s a ticket for FITC Toronto waiting for a new owner

More information here: http://labs.boulevart.be/index.php/max-milan-shooter/

Mobistar does it: The iPhone 3G available at 99€

When Mobistar first announced the iPhone in Belgium, it was to be sold at the full price as selling the iPhone with a Mobistar plan is illegal. A lot of people were very disappointed as we all anticipated the iPhone for a very long time. When Steve Jobs announced the iPhone in Belgium, and the price drop, we all had high expectations.

However Mobistar somehow knew to screw up the deal due to legal issues. The iPhone 3G 8G was to be sold at 525€, and the 16GB version at 615€.

But now they make it happen:

Buy the iPhone 3G 8GB at 99€, and then pay 25€ every month during 18 months. After all you still pay 549€ but in a very comfortable way. The 16GB version is yours for 189€ and the 18 monthly payments. That results in a final amount of 549€/639€. That is not much more than you’ld originally pay.

I think this is a very intresting deal for people not willing to pay 525€/615€ at once. However you do have to pay 25€ every month during a year and a half. That’s long! And you still haven’t got a phone number/data plan then. So it’s a bit of a double deal. I still believe this might be very intresting for some people.

More info: here

Flash CS4 doesn’t like your FLA files!

I’ve been an early adopter of Adobe’s new Creative Suite which has been announced in October. At first glance everything seemed okay, and I really really REALLY enjoyed working with the new Flash IDE. The thing I liked the most were the panels which aren’t animated anymore. The panels still disappear when you click outside the IDE, but they disappear instantly. No laggy fading away.

Another cool thing is the workspace switcher. I never switched workspaces before CS4 because of the overhead: You had to go to ‘Window’ then go back down to ‘Workspaces’, and then you got to choose you workspace… If you already specified any…
Flash CS4 comes with a few standard workspaces and a very handy button, located in the main screen of Flash. Changing workspaces is really only one click away!

Next thing that drew my attention was the 3D capabilities which are now built-in. I have always been intrested in 3D, but I never really got to play with it. So I hoped Flash would allow me some playing around with it.
I must say: The built-in feature is pretty cool. You can actually draw 2D objects and then move them around in a 3D space. The bad thing? The 2D object will stay a 2D object. You can’t change the ‘depth’ of an object. You can only alter the width and the height of the object. That’s a turndown for me. Nonetheless: it’s cool!

But… Read the rest of this entry »

Playr 2.0 is coming!

I just wanted to update you guys on how the update for the next version of Playr is progressing.

In the past week, I’ve been pretty busy adding the finishing  touches to the features and fixing the last few bugs that popped up. Most of the last-minute changes are a result of using the class in one of my own projects.

It’s then when I realized I’m missing some key features like adding the music directory, and some properties of the PlayrEvents. I also added some ear candy like fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods.

On a more functional note: I’ve abstracted the playlist to an independent class. So now you’re provided with lots and lots of ways to customize and manage your playlists.

The shuffle mode is now smart. In English that means the playlist remembers what songs have played and which ones haven’t.

Finally I’m happy to tell you guys won’t ever have to write an XML playlist file yourself. I’ve got a PHP4 and PHP5 version of PlayrDiscovr which reads a directory and returns the corresponding XML listing the tracks and their properties.
On top of that, I’ve got some help from other people (I still need to contact you guys) who are willing to help me out with building PlayrDiscover in ASP, Ruby and Python.

Even though I’m listing all of the new features, the Playr class is still the easiest way of implementing any kind of sound-feature in any Flash/Flex/AIR application. But the simplicity shouldn’t be a limitation, which it isn’t: you’re still able to build full-feature media-playing applications.

One of the little challenges I still have to tackle is the Tween problem. I’ve implemented fadeIn() and fadeOut() methods. Those methods actually tween the volume property of the Playr instance. The problem with that is when using the Playr class in a Flex project, you get a cool error message telling you it can’t import fl.transitions (which is the class package for the Tween class and the easing package).
I still haven’t figured out how to work around this problem. If any of you have any suggestion on this problem, feel free to tell me about it.

I plan on releasing Playr 2.0 in the coming week (or 2) depending on PlayrDiscovr impementations, final changes, demo’s and site development (yes, I’m building a dedicated site for Playr ) Feel free to suggest other implementations you’d like