Retrieving and using blob size from CCV with AS3

One thing I have been wanting to do for a quite a while now with my touch screen is use touch size data to determine the size of lines drawn on the screen. The other day I finally got around to researching experimenting with CCV. It turns out that CCV can send the width and height of blobs along with coordinates and other data but its not turned on by default and there is no option in the GUI to turn it on.

Here’s a quick demo using a paint brush:

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Inspiring Inspiration #7

A collection of cool video, motion graphics and interface design, mostly if not all from Vimeo…

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AS3: Calculate the perceived brightness of a colour

This short post is mainly just a reference for myself but could also come in handy in your projects. I wanted to set text to either white or black depending on the brightness of the colour it was sitting on. I came across this post which provided a formula and some C# code so I was easily able to convert it to AS3. Since red,green and blue are not equally as bright – eg. blue is darker than green – its not as simple as taking an average of all the channels. So the following formula uses some factors to weight the channels in relation to how bright they really appear.

brightness = sqrt( 0.241 R2  + 0.691 G2  + 0.068 B2  )

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A simple way to get native alerts with Adobe AIR

In an AIR project I am currently working on I wanted to have native alert boxes in my app rather than building custom pop up boxes. There is no built in way to get native alerts in AIR and I remembered reading this interview over at leebrimelow.com a while back where a developer at Illume used StageWebView to trigger an alert from a HTML page. So I decided to make a class called NativeAlert that uses AIR’s HTMLLoader to trigger alerts.

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