Particle power!

Ever since Ralph Hauwert first announced his part of the LetItBloom site, I kinda wondered how he did it.

V1

A few weeks ago, in Amsterdam, Ralph explained a bit about it during his session. And then finally yesterday (actually the day before…), I bit the bullet and spent the evening making it happen. Only 4 hours later I had a first version that got pretty close to it.

Check this very first edition on the following URLs. The text is generated using AS3, so you can just make it show any text you want. Just change the URL params

• Particle fun V1 (with blur)
• Particle fun V1 (without blur)

The particles move to a perlin-map (red & green) with text in front of it. The color of each pixel is used to determine whether the particles has to move up,down,left or right and how far. Not how fast… That left all particles moving almost equally fast… Which is kind of a minor downside to me… Seeing how it almost was 6AM, I felt it were a good idea to catch some sleep… Read the rest of this entry »

Updated version of Playr

It took a while… A long while… Like… A year.
But I finally updated Playr and made actual plans for V3. Thanks again for all of your great support and feedback during the past year! It really means a lot to me!

It was really great to see how Playr popped up on different blogs; Sometimes mentioned as part of a project/experiment, sometimes mentioned in lists of handy AS3 classes. That really made me happy and it inspired me to add even more features, and make it even more useful. But those are to yet to be built

For now I just fixed a few bugs and I added a pretty important feature which wasn’t there yet: the debug property. Set debug to true and Playr will trace any errors that occur without breaking your app, without you having to listen to these errorEvents.

I also changed the shuffle internals (I still wonder what I was thinking when I wrote a ’setShuffle’ instead of simple getters/setters…) and as far as I know: Nothing seems broken after updating old projects using Playr to the new Playr version (but I’ve been wrong before…).

And the last thing I want to mention: I changed the way Playr handles stream errors. The old version would just skip the track, and try again later. However I think the new implementation is better: The ‘broken’ track just gets removed from the playlist before proceeding to the next track.

So there you go: It’s online, it’s free, it’s open-source, it’s for you to use and save time!
(And it’s created by me, so you’ll probably find bugs sooner or later: Do tell me about them and I’ll look into fixing them )

Happy playing!

Playr Site: Playr.noCreativity.com
Download Playr: Click
Playr Documentation: Playr.noCreativity.com/docs

Dooodls for everyone!

A few days ago I presented the Dooodle application I built. You guys created some cool doodles and I totally love it!

But it’s still an independent application hacked into Wordpress using basic widget.  That means I can’t just share the code so you can use it too on your website (since you’ll have to set up a database, fill in config files, etc… Boring stuff). So yesterday I decided to compact this into a handy Wordpress plugin.
And this is what I did: I give you Dooodl!

[UPDATE] Mark asked me to share the source of the Dooodl Creator App, so I did Feel free to send me links to your own creator. I might add different creators to the plugin, and let you choose in the WP-admin which one you’d like your visitors to use

Read the rest of this entry »

Bezier animation fun revisited

A few months ago I experimented with Bezier Animation and allthough I uploaded my SWF files and shared them, I never really shared the source. This is what I wanted to do a few days ago when I thought “Oh, what the hell… Let’s clean that code up before uploading it…”.

So I started moving some code around and after a few minutes, I found myself rewriting the whole thing… That’s not a bad thing since now we’ve got one handy class that can do about just everything a Bezier Animator should be able to do.
Demo time!

There’s still a little bug somewhere which allows the target to ‘run away’ from the bezier, and I haven’t gotten quite to the root of the problem, but I really felt I had to share this. Also there are some imperfections when you disable the orientToPath and scaleByPath properties. I will look into fixing those asap.

I really love the idea of animation movieclips using bezier curves. It looks so natural and yet zo intriguing… I will do some experiments and upload them later on, showing the coolness behind this simple animation engine.

Sources
Download the above demo source (Flash Builder 4 project): Click
Download the BezierAnimatioin class: Click

Webcam motion detection coolness

A few weeks ago I had to create an innovative way to scroll in a page. I have seen tons of scrollbars in Flash and I found it hard to create something completely new. At one point I wondered if I could wire the scrollbar to a webcam using Actionscript… So I started experimenting around…

When I first started I quickly ran into a problem: How the hell do I know if anything is moving? So I actually got stuck right in the beginning.
I went on a Google trip which led me to Koen’s post about motion detection. Koen was checking all the pixels (using nested loops) to calculate color values. I figured this generated way too much overhead. There had to be a better/simpeler way.

In his post Koen mentioned an article, written by Guy Watson, concerning an other way to get motion detection going. To make things simple: Guy just takes 2 pictures – one of the previous frame, one of the current – puts them on top of eachother, and applies the difference blend mode to the upper one: Tadaaa! There we go! The ‘unchanged’ pixels are blacked out. The remaining pixels are the difference in the picture… which reflects movement. Read the rest of this entry »