2008-06-17
Sharikura available public?
Some days ago I asked Masayuki Kido if his very impressive 3D engine Sharikura will be available public. Yesterday he replied to my email:
I am going to exhibit Sharikura 3D as an open source.
However, Sharikura 3D is unfinished.
Because Sharikura 3D is my private work,
please understand that it takes time to release.
Well, I just wanted to share these information without putting pressure on Masayuki. I'll understand that releasing the engine as an opensource product is a huge thing. However - I am really looking forward!
2008-05-28
Flash Player 10 - Playing with drawTriangles
Following senocular's great Flash Player 10 Drawing API tutorial I wanted to see what I can do with the new triangles.
If you have Flash Player 10 installed you should see a rotating box below. Click on the movie to give it the focus. The Space key will switch the new TriangleCulling from POSITIVE to NEGATIVE. So you might get an idea of how that works. The num keys will change speed of rotation. ...
I'll have to add that I am not a genius in mathematics but the new triangle stuff is quite easy to use once you figured out how. This demo took me about 1 day [learning included] !
If you are interested to see the sources - no problem - I love OpenSource - Get it here but do not fool me for bad coding practice or missing comments.
Have fun!
2008-05-27
Actionscript 3, in Javascript!
Rich Rodecker has posted a link to someone who created an AS3Wrapper for JavaScript. In the related blog post the creator states that the Wrapper supports the Full Flash API. I had a quick look at it and was really impressed - especially the Papervision Cube demo looked great.
Maybe this will convince some Javascript programmers to discover what Actionscript has to offer. ;)
2008-05-20
Flash Player 10 - Example Text3D
I just started playing with new Flash Player 10 (Astro). The first new feature I wanted to test was the 3D support. In earlier version of Flash you might remember the rotation property.
We now have the following new properties: rotationX, rotationY, rotationZ
Assumed you have Flash Player 10 installed - you will see the basic example. Just click on the below Flash and move your mouse.
Please note the behaviour of TextFields changed a little bit. Device fonts do not need to get embedded anymore if you want to animate them.
2008-05-20
Flash Player 10 - API Documentation
I just created the API Docs showing the new public features Flash Player 10 provides. I think most developers prefer to quickly get an overview of what actually changed. Please find it here http://dev.dschini.org/astro/api/. I am not sure this is complete - so if you find bugs or anything else which is worth to get mentioned please drop a comment!
[UPDATE]
The complete API documentation can be found here. Unfortunately it does not highlight the new functions.
2008-05-20
JSocket
Tjeerd Jan van der Molen has released jSocket which is a wrapper over the Actionscript 3 Socket API. With this JavaScript implementation you can create socket applications that are not limited to the zero terminated packets anymore. I need to give it a try!
2008-05-12
AS3 - URL Class
I could not find it in the net so I hacked something together quickly. A simple URL class that parses an url string.
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/* example usage */
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var url:URL = new URL("http://secretuser:secretpass@example.com:80/foo/bar.php?var1=foo#abc");
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trace( 'scheme:'+url.scheme+'\n'
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+ 'host:'+url.host+'\n'
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+ 'port:'+url.port+'\n'
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+ 'path:'+url.path+'\n'
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+ 'fragment:'+url.fragment+'\n'
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+ '---\n'
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+ 'user:'+url.userinfo.user+'\n'
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+ 'pass:'+url.userinfo.pass+'\n'
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+ '---\n'
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+ 'query.raw:'+url.query.raw+'\n'
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+ 'query.parsed.var1:'+url.query.parsed.var1+'\n'
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+ 'query.parsed.var2:'+url.query.parsed.var2+'\n'
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);
Get it if you have some use for it: http://dev.dschini.org/as3/URL.as (before it gets lost in my archive)
2008-03-27
The RIA battle started!
It all started 2 days ago when I received an invitation to test Aviary. I was more than impressed to see Phoenix in action. It looks like the long anticipated RIA revolution is alive now. And today Adobe launched Photoshop Express. So in case you missed it. Here is the quick summary.
Since today Photoshop Express is available for free and offers 2 gb of free storage. The director of Photoshop Express explained that some of the top engineers behind Photoshop rewrote some of the algorithms in ActionScript 3. At first sight it seems that Photoshop Express is more a tool to manage your pictures online. But diving deeper you'll discover that most important features, like rotating, cropping, [etc] are not missing.
I was very excited when I got the invitation to test Phoenix. I was familair with it right from the start - basically because it feels much like Photoshop. A second view convinced me that Phoenix will really replace Photoshop right away. Even the shortcuts work like expected. Layers and a history management are not missing. Dozen of filters are already implemented. Just go and browse the gallery - you'll already find some amazing work done by different artists. I am looking forward to see how Phoenix will change the RIA world once they go public.
Photoshop Express VS Phoenix?
Some voices (including myself) started comparing Photoshop Express and Phoenix! However, I think you cannot really compare them because both are so much different. Although Aviary, like Photoshop Express, provides the functionality of custom online galleries, Phoenix has much more advanced features to edit images online.
More tools are Peacock and SlideRocket. Both are still not public!
I really have no clue about Pattern editors, so a collegue who definitely knows more about that topic had a look at Peacock. He told me that it looks quite complete.
SlideRocket is a web application that provides everything you need to design professional quality presentations, manage and share libraries of slides and assets, and to deliver presentations in person or remotely over the web.
