More particle awesomeness

A few weeks ago, I toyed around with particles. I used perlin noise maps to send the particles in the right directions. However the particles were randomly positioned and just a boring flat color… Kris Temmerman addressed that in his latest experiment. As he’s a decent man, he’s always sharing his code, so I just took his render engine, threw in some AIR magic and got myself a PNG sequence generator (for those who don’t speak Ronny: I made an AIR app that generates these image particles explosions and in the meantime saves every step as a PNG file. That way you can create a video based on these frames )

As it turns out I happen to have no life at all, so I went for insanity when I decided trying to get enough images for a 60 seconds sequence (Generating those images took a whole afternoon… I ended up having ±15GB of HQ PNG files).

Anyway, long story short: I’ve got this video I wanted to show you.

You know: Afterwards I realized this could probably be done using After Effects right away… (I wouldn’t know to be honest). But in the end, it’s proven again: Sometimes not knowing how crazy something is, is actually a good thing.

PS: I would share the AIR app, but right now it’s buggy as hell and somehow memory seems to be an issue. Will need to address those first. I promise I will release it sometime soon

What does Marsellus Wallace look like?

You have probably already seen this version of the famous ‘What does Marsellus Wallace look like?‘-part of the cult movie Pulp Fiction… But did you know about this one?

That’s the number one reason to have a Google Wave account, right there.

How to distribute your Flash CS5 iPhone apps via Cydia

Ever since Apple announced that they won’t allow any Flash CS5 compiled iPhone apps into the App Store, creative Flash developers lost their one chance to deploy their existing knowledge to the iPhone.

However: since Adobe released Flash CS5 with the iPhone packager anyway, we can actually deploy iPhone apps created in Flash CS5. The only thing we can’t do is to submit these apps to the Apple App Store (in fact we can, but they will reject them anyway, so why bother?)

However: We can distribute our apps using Cydia! Okay, it’s not the same, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

Setting up a Cydia repository is actually pretty easy. There’s a great tutorial right here!

There’s a little problem though: Flash CS5 creates an .ipa file. In step 3 of that tutorial you’ll need to put your application in the Applications folder. That application is actually an .app file, not an .ipa file. (I’ve tried it using the .ipa file; it doesn’t work )
Getting the .app file is pretty easy:

1. Rename your .ipa file to .zip
2. Unzip the archive
3. Your .app file is in the extracted Payload folder

That’s it! You can now create your own Cydia repository and distribute your rejected iPhone apps to the (jailbroken) masses using Cydia.

Have fun!

Interactive freerunning game on Youtube

You’ve probably seen those interactive Youtube games but I kinda love this one (because it let’s me be that cool guy that does those crazy moves without breaking all of his bones!)
Check it out!

Flash CS5 Error: Invalid Input SWF

I ran into this and since I didn’t find anything about this on Google, I thought I might share this with you guys.
If you have Flash CS5 installed you must have played around with the iPhone possibilities. If however you’re unlucky, you might see this a couple of seconds after starting to compile your iPhone app:

That error isn’t saying much, so if you have no idea what is going on, this might take a while to figure out… (took me about 2 weeks…).

A few months ago, I was having trouble with a JAVA applet not working correctly in my browser so I changed a few settings in the JAVA preferences. Apparently that was a bad idea. When I set everything back the way it was, the error was gone

This is how the settings look now (in case anyone was wondering).