WebcamRelief

[ Link ] I decided to play around with webcam feeds and 2.5D in Flash Player 10. Requires a webcam

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 »

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 »

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

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 »