Innovations

Flash / Innovations / Tools — 1 Comment
17
Jun 10

Flashing forward

Just come across the MultiDraggable set of classes for implementing multi-touch with Flash, via The Flash Blog.

Tim Kukulski’s classes do an amazing job of providing proper multi-touch support by accessing the raw touch events instead of those reported by the OS, allowing for more responsive events and smoother control – which let’s face it, is key to any touch gesture controlled interface. It also gets round the biggest weakness in Windows 7′s implementation of touch support: only handling one gesture at a time.

This, to me, is exactly why Flash isn’t going anywhere any time soon. The Flash developer community routinely release open-source, innovative solutions like this… blowing native functionality out of the water. It’s why developers have always been able to do more – better and easier – with Flash.

Sequence 01 from Lee Brimelow on Vimeo.

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Innovations — No Comments
16
May 10

Sh*tty internet connection?

Google TISP in action

Getting connected is a piece of piss

If you’re one for falling for April Fool’s Day pranks, you might have gotten excited about Google’s latest innovation, Toilet ISP, back on April 1st, 2007. Those crazy Google guys may have been having a laugh but this week has seen the first fiber optic network installed via the sewer system in Ireland making quite a splash.

Fiber optics can provide a future proof data transfer method that can give lightning fast speeds but the prospect of installing another network of cables is a frighteningly expensive prospect. The “last mile” has always been a problem in rolling out infrastructural upgrades but I couldn’t help but appreciate the lateral thinking that resulted in this solution.

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Innovations / Inspirations / Thoughts — 3 Comments
28
Apr 10

Just scratching the surface

With the release date of Apple’s iPad fast approaching (Friday April 30th), it got me wondering whether it could spark a rejuvenation or re-imagination of other ‘larger’ touch screen devices.

Trapped in a glass box?

No, I am not saying that Tom Cruise and his Minority Report glove thingy is the next step in the evolution of ‘buttonless‘ devices… however it maybe closer than you think!

Cast your minds all the way back to 2008 when it was announced that Microsoft Surface units would be in plce in hospitality businesses, such as restaurants, hotels, retail, public entertainment venues and used by the military for tactical overviews.

“Microsoft Surface is a multi-touch product from Microsoft which is developed as a software and hardware combination technology that allows a user, or multiple users, to manipulate digital content by the use of gesture recognition. This could involve the motion of hands or physical objects.” - Wikipedia

Now, I for one have never seen a Microsoft Surface unit in the public domain. In fact it’s only visibility to Joe Public is being used by MSNBC during its coverage of the 2008 US presidential election and also being featured in the CBS series CSI: Miami. So from a public usage point of view… it’s a flop so far but the potential is massive.

On the surface however, this looks awesome and I would love to see it being used in the public domain. I am wondering whether the popularity of the larger touch screen Apple iPad will have any affect on similar devices to Microsoft Surface.

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Apple / Innovations / Thoughts — No Comments
27
Apr 10

Is it live or is it Memorex? Knock-off iPads already in the wild

Can you tell the difference?

Can you tell the difference?

Upset that your iPad has been delayed? More of a Windows guy anyway? Wish that your shiny new tablet had USB ports when it did arrive?

China has the answer. Reuters are reporting that only 3 weeks after the much anticipated launch of Apple’s shiniest new iSomething, pirates have already reverse-engineered, rebuilt and released a knock-off that sports 3 USB ports, squarer design (possibly more like the iPhone 4G) and Windows support.

Sure it’s not the real-deal – and for only $100 in the difference I personally would be holding out for the original, were I in the market for an iPhone I couldn’t fit in my pocket or make calls on – but it does highlight how fast technology moves today. The iPad has been lauded as the game-changer in portable computing but even that can be challenged within weeks of coming to market.

I do find it amusing that even pirate technologists can’t bring themselves to release a tablet without USB ports. Maybe we’ll have the 3D-printer replaced by a 3D-photocopier sooner than we expect.

Introducing... the jPad?

Introducing... the jPad?

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Flash / Innovations / Tools — No Comments
22
Dec 09

Less spaghetti, more source please

I’m a firm believer in stability.

Build it, test it thoroughly, and move on to the next piece of the puzzle. If the pieces are stable, they’ll work in harmony together, and you can build more powerful applications.

Which is where design patterns, and particular, MVC come into their own.

As a Flash developer it’s nice to know that many of the problems I’m trying to solve have been thought about and cracked a long time before Moock taught me how to code (thank you Colin, and your amazing O’Reilly books).

I’d been using a version of MVC that I’d cribbed from the back of Essential ActionScript 2.0 back in 2004, and had even ported it to ActionScript 3.0 as soon as I made the switch, using the new event model. It was pretty rough around the edges, but hey, it had become my baby now. It worked, and I was kind of proud of myself.

Then this year I made the leap of faith of switching to PureMVC, a framework for ActionScript development that was so popular it had started being ported to other languages such as Ruby, Objective C, etc. If it’s that popular, it must be good, right?

Is there a learning curve? You betcha. Is it worth it? I’m sure of it.

What is MVC?

PureMVC structure

See - it's simple.

It stands for Model-View-Controller, and is, IMHO, perfectly suited to the bear-trap that developing in Flash can quickly become.

At its simplest, MVC separates the state of an application (the model) from the display (the view). The controller takes input from the view, updates the model, and then broadcasts a notification that a change has happened. The views are then updated with the new state.

While it can seem like a long-winded way of developing, its structure encourages good development practices, helps avoid spaghetti code, and leads to more modular, reusable classes.

PureMVC has been a learning curve for both Shane and myself. However, the benefits it brings in stability and re-usability make it very, very worthwhile, and I’d recommended it to anyone bulding anything more complex than a banner.

But please don’t ask me to listen to Coldplay.

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Flash / Innovations / Tools — No Comments
10
Dec 09

Do believe the Hype

Wow. Just stumbled across this http://hype.joshuadavis.com/

Screenshot of objectPool class in action

Joshua Davis (one of my highlights from FOTB this year) and Branden Hall have released the HYPE framework. Lots of cool little classes to make beautiful things quickly.

Extremely cool of them to share their genius with us all so just spreadin’ the love…

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Innovations / Tools — No Comments
5
Nov 09

Chroma-Hash

This has divided opinion in the studio today – http://mattt.github.com/Chroma-Hash/

Personally, I think it’s a really interesting idea. At first glance,it won’t make much sense but have a look here for a more detailed description and a lively debate.

Screenshot of Chroma-Hash i action

Screenshot of Chroma-Hash in action

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Animation / Flash / Innovations — No Comments
28
Oct 09

Adventures in Lip-sync: Part 1

Recently I’ve been working on an animation for the pharma division of Harte-Hanks. It’s in our classic MZ-stylee and it’s been fun doing some old-school 2d Flash animation. Zoe’s given me some great illustrations to work with and Charlie’s imagination has been running riot with karate-chopping leaps and flabby men on treadmills. Lots of tweens, lots of Graphic symbols, lots and lots of keyframes. I’ve also gotten to play with CS4′s new IK bones for some of the sequences too but that’s a whole other post.

From the outset though, I’ve been procrastinating about lip-syncing the narrator’s voice-over with the character. My rationale was that any edits to the timing would mean re-doing work… always fun, so best leave it til last, but really it just seemed like it’d be an arduous time-consuming manual task. In all the years I’ve been doing animation in Flash I’ve never found an easy way of doing this. Animation is a craft and it seems the only solution to most tasks is put some time and love into it. That said, code is your friend (and a cruel, cruel mistress) that has often helped avoid the monkey work.

So I went looking for a pre-existing solution… First port of call, as always, was “The Animator’s Survival Kit” by Richard Williams (if you don’t own it, get it!). Then some Googling that rapidly disappeared down the rabbit hole of visemes, phonemes and natural language simulation dissertations. Whew! No easy answers there either.

At the last Bristol FUG, I had a good chat with master-animator Dave Cropley (from Evans & Finch) about how he does it. He pointed me towards software called Magpie that seems to be the standard in the 3d animation world. Nothing seemed to exist in the Flash/ActionScript world though so I decided to roll my own.

Here’s how I did it…

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