Actionscript is cool for developers. Not for me.

I love the creative process, I love experimenting, I love discovering new things and doing all kinds of stuff with it. I like to create toys that tell me something about myself. Having said that: I am a passionate Interactive Experience Designer. It’s a title I like because it tells you everything about me in 3 words.

• Interactive: I want the user to be able to control what is happening. The user should always be part of the application. The user should actively be engaging with the application. Whatever happens should happen either because of the user or for the user to get an even better experience.
• Experience: I don’t want them to just click a few buttons. I want my users to like the application. I want them to like it so much, that they start missing it once they’ve closed the browser window.
• Designer: Although most of you know me as a developer, I want to make a point here: I don’t develop. I create.
  I write code in order to create a visual masterpiece, either in interaction or experience; not in code; not in application architecture; none of those non-Ronny words.

That last point is really the reason of why I’m writing this. Having said the above, it should be clear Actionscript has enabled me to create cool stuff. Actionscript has enabled me to create whatever I could think off. But now at this point, I’m eager to go beyond my current limits, and I want to go there fast! 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 »

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

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)

Read the rest of this entry »

De boze boze garbage collector in ActionScript 3

Sinds ik vorig jaar in september begonnen ben met ActionScript 3 te leren, en te gebruiken, ben ik al veel op het probleem gestoten waar ik niet-werkende, of maar half-werkende (ActionScript) tweens kreeg. Ik dacht altijd dat het aan mijn slechte coding skills lag, maar op termijn begon ik toch wat meer zelfvertrouwen krijgen, en besefte ik dat het probleem niet zozeer bij mij lag.

Tijdens het ontwikkelen van de site voor mijn eindwerk in december liep de emmer over: Alweer een project waarin het ActionScript tweenen niet wilde lukken. Gerrit kwam me helpen, en na even zoeken kon hij me vertellen dat de fout inderdaad niet bij mij lag, maar bij de garbage collector in de Flash Player.
Mijn probleem was vanaf dan opgelost, en in elk project waar ik nu ActionScript-matige tweens aanmaak kan ik dat probleem meteen uit de weg gaan, maar ik zie nog enorm veel vragen opduiken waarin dit exact zelfde probleem besproken wordt. Read the rest of this entry »