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

Flash on the iPhone? Orly…? Ya. Rly.

Well… Actually not…

But: If you are a Flash developer and you know how to compile a SWF then as off today* you can build native iPhone applications using your current AS3 knowledge. Does that sound familiar to you? Well it should because Adobe did the exact same thing when they first announced Adobe AIR.

Adobe just showed a Flash CS5 preview featuring a ‘compile for iPhone’ demo. (Watch a similar demo here) Read the rest of this entry »

Open Microphone pt 1

If you’ve come by here a few times you know I have been experimenting with computeSpectrum and webcam motion detection. At a given moment I wanted to combine the 2 of them in order to use voice commands in order to make stuff happen on the screen. That would be pretty badass, right?

However I soon learned the microphone feed didn’t go through the SoundMixer of the Flash Player, therefor would would not be able to be analyzed. There was a workaround with FMS/RED5 and bouncing the stream off the server but that’s rather overkill (not to mention the lag). Read the rest of this entry »

4 “WTF?!” moments during a Flex/AIR experiment

On a shiny day I was sitting inside, and I don’t know what bug just bit me, but I felt like experimenting with Flex and AIR (instead of heading outside into the light). For some reason I felt like creating a Photobooth clone with only one feature: Taking a snapshot every few seconds and saving it to the disk. During my quest I came across a few findings that were either extremely weird or just plain awesome. Here goes my list of ‘WTF?!’
(If you don’t like reading, but you do want to check out the AIR app, click here) Read the rest of this entry »

Flex, Flash, AIR, Silverlight en ander ongedierte

Ik heb in de laatste maanden gemerkt dat meer en meer verwarring ontstaat als het over Flash, Flex, AIR en Silverlight gaat. Blijkbaar weet een groot publiek niet wat het verschil is.
Ikzelf ben al enkele jaren met Flash bezig, en gezien de snelle evolutie van de laatste 2 jaar kan ik me voorstellen dat er verwarring ontstaat. Maar blijkbaar wordt er toch nog veel verkeerde informatie verspreid, waardoor zelfs schrijvers van magazines de foute weg op gaan.

Hieronder volgt een korte uitleg over deze termen. Ik heb er ook meteen de meest voor de hand liggende software pakketten bij geplaatst, want ook daar durft men soms verkeerd geïnformeerd zijn. Read the rest of this entry »