Well, here we are with version 2 of my Flash spray paint stencils. I’ve been meaning to do a post on this for a while now! I created this version during the development of PixelPerfect - a digital graffiti wall and and photo booth. This time the paint is rendered much quicker by doing away with an embedded for loop that was in V1. This time instead of looping through each pixel on the canvas, I am drawing using copyPixels utilising an alpha bitmap as an alpha channel and matrices to transform them correctly based on the scale, rotation and position of the stencil movieclip. Another cool feature I added was a ‘muck’ layer on the stencil. Now paint that was on top of the stencil stays on the stencil – just like in real life!
09 JAN
Happy new year to everyone. Let’s hope that 2012 is full of awesomeness. There are lots of things in the gadget world that will hopefully become available this year – Windows 8 and subsequent tablet devices, new Nokia Windows Phone devices, iPhone 5 and iPad 3. I think Flash will start to kick butt in the mobile app department too with Stage3D (aka Molehill) coming to AIR for Android and iOS. I also hope to see (or at least an example) of AIR for Windows Phone. I can’t wait for that. I hope to bring more posts to my blog this year too and increase the readers. Perhaps being less slack in promoting new posts will help. This year will also mark 10 years since I began doing work under the name NemenVisual – although originally it was called Nemen Productions. As usual, I also have fresh new blog design for this year which I have almost finished designing and is nearly ready to be turned into a WordPress Template. Check back soon to see the new design!
Oh and by the way, the photo above is a shot I took on NYE at Ocean Grove. The neighbours had some great illegal fireworks which they were setting off throughout the night!
04 JAN
Well its been a while since I posted an update on my DSI coffee table. It is pretty much complete now. The last thing I have to do is get a piece of scratch resistant plexiglas for the table top to create a single seamless top. I would also like to get black perspex for the sides so the table has a piano black finish, but this is a maybe in the future. The reason I have been holding off with the final top piece is because I am still experimenting with different lighting so blobs can be detected through the extra layer of plastic. Currently I am waiting on a second PS3 Eye camera so I can try a two camera setup to hopefully get clearer and less distorted images for tracking.
20 DEC
PixelPerfect is a digital art wall app I built for Classy Event Group using Adobe AIR. After seeing a video I posted over at the NUI Group forums they asked me to build a customised version of my stenciling and painting app for their digital art wall. PixelPerfect uses a new stencilling method which I developed which is not only heaps faster, it also leaves paint on the stencils – something which we hadn’t seen before in previous stencil applications. The app has the ability to load in background images and transparent foreground images and the saving and printing of creations. The service provided by Classy Events Group also enables a photobooth function. The app watches a folder for photos and a DSLR saves images to the folder enabling the user to instantly pull up their photo and draw on it.
04 DEC
On a current project I had to launch files in an application that was not Windows’ default app for opening. Specifically – I needed to open images in Photoshop or Fireworks from my AIR app, even when the default app for .png and .jpg is the Windows Photo Viewer.
As you might already know the File API has had the file.openWithDefaultApplication() method since AIR 2.0. But this wasn’t going to cut it since I needed to open in a specific application. So I turned to the NativeProcess API which allows you to launch a native process from your AIR app (i.e run an .exe on Windows). I decided I should make a post on how to do it since I couldn’t find any good resources or examples for it.
09 NOV
Well I’ve been pretty busy latey and not much has happened on here for over month. I decided I should post some work and experiments I have been doing with building iOS apps with AIR for iOS. So below is a series of video demos of some experiments and actual projects I have been doing recently. All apps were compiled using Flash CS5. Note that none of these apps are available in the public app store.
Adventure Golf
Adventure Golf is a simple mini golf game I worked on for a client last year which was written in AS2. I decided to see how easy it was to build existing games for iOS so I converted all the AS2 to AS3 with minimal code changes/optimisations and Published for iOS. All graphics are pulled from the Flash library, with levels laid out on the stage on different frames. The hardest thing I had to do was resize the stage. Everything else just worked and I was surprised at how well it did considering it was converted from old AS2 code. I would like build this into a full app one day when I have lots of spare time!
02 NOV
Just another quick post tonight. I have bigger one lined up for tomorrow I promise. I just wanted to show a little experiment I did a while back with JavaScript – accessing the Accelerometer and Compass data in Safari on the iPad. Below is a short video demonstrating it if you don’t have access to an iPad. If you do have one – visit the link following the video. I might also mention that the arrow/circle image was all created using CSS3 too!
And here’s the link to the demo.
To get the source – just go to the above link and right click > view source.
31 OCT
Microsoft have released a new future vision video and I thought I’d post it here. It’s similar to their earlier future vision video but this one is probably a little less far fetched. It has some great concepts and some really nice UI design. Check out the video below.
28 OCT
Below is a little experiment I did which involved creating a version of this blog’s image flipping Flickr feed header (which I made in Flash) – in HTML/CSS/Javascript.
Luckily jQuery includes a JSON parsing feature and Flickr provides a JSON feed and so it was very easy to get the Flickr feed. The image flipping was done with CSS3′s 3D transforms and so unfortunately it will only work in Chrome and Safari. Now I just need to work out how to get more than 20 images from the Flickr feed (I need 36 to fill the header), and turn the images black and white. I found a jQuery plugin that apparently can apply image effects but I haven’t gotten it to work yet.