Wow, the guys over at Digital Pictures Interactive have pushed the limits of Flash and Papervision to produce an application that reads your webcam image and renders a Papervision model (in this case a Monster) in real time. The application looks for a printed symbol and judges it’s proximity and perspective from comparing it’s edges. I would have been fine with just finding the object within the  camera and drawing the model, but these guys take it steps further and actually change it’s scale and pitch depending on how the paper is positioned.

Very well done!

CHECK IT OUT!

Here is another cool Papervision app I had posted a while back that involves a different Monster!

UPDATE: It doesn’t seem to just be the classic tweens. Any type of tween (Classic, Motion, or Shape) that I create causes flash to crash after working with it for a couple of minutes. I’m seeing the crash happen when I’m trying to move frames around on the timeline.

It’s 11:30am and I’ve already had my new copy of Flash CS4 crash on me 5 times. Each crash has been related to a classic tween in some sort of way. Either moving the frames around, or even just creating the tween causes flash to crash.

So far there doesn’t seem to be a method that works besides not using classic tweens.

Anyone else having this problem? Maybe it’s just my system? I’m running XP 64-bit.

Tip #2

When recording to a Flash Media Server make sure the camera has activity via the Activity Status Event before publishing the stream. Otherwise you may get a static or black frame at the beginning of the recorded stream.

Camera Class Quirks with FMS » Lost In Actionscript - Shane McCartney.

I’ve been using the Ubiquity plugin for Firefox to do most all of my twitters, but I just stumbled upon a GREAT AIR app that offers far more features. It’s called TweetDeck. I’ve only been using it a very short while, but have high hopes for this beta. Be sure to grab a copy and give it a go!

Try out TweetDeck

The June 2008 edition of Adobe EDGE has a great article on geocoding. Geocoding is getting popular with the release of Yahoo Maps, Mapquest, and Google Maps APIs. Suddenly any user can apply for one of those keys and start mapping locations on their site or even using those APIs to get geo location data to then use within their own mapping engine. That is where this example comes in. Adobe has written up a great article on getting started with using the Yahoo Maps API to get the longitude and latitude of a location, then converting that to 3D coordinates to place on a globe built in Papervision. The example is simple, but feels good and responsive.

Read the article
View the Demo

A couple more Flash Geocoding Examples and Demos

Yahoo News Globe
Spinny Globe
Senocular 3D Globe (Flash Player 10)
FreeEarth (Javascript)

seedylifestyle: WiiFlash with Papervision3D and Phidgets Servomotor.

I had started creating AIR apps since the first beta release and I love how easy it is to create a simple customized tool quickly to help with day to day activities. Until now I’ve been using the WimpyFLV Player with limited success. It was ok, but would have issues playing back files on the network. So I developed my own player that is simple and straight to the point. For development purposes I have the dimensions of the video file in the upper right hand corner and the length of the video in seconds. This helps since you can’t just view the properties of an FLV to get this information. Check out the link below to download the .air file.

Adobe - Adobe AIR Marketplace Photo & Video

Justin Everett-Church, Senior Adobe Flash Player Product Manager, just posted a new demo showing off Flash Player 10’s new 3D capabilities. It’s a fabric demo that uses APE (Actionscript Physics Engine) to simulate the physics. This demo may look familiar to a previous papervision demo (which no longer seems to be live, sorry).

Justin’s Flash Blog

An Adobe Air app that I created a while back seems to have been added to the software site Softpedia and deemed 100% clean!

Download File Furnace 1.0 - Permanently deletes files and directories you drag onto its main window - Softpedia

Javascript is getting more and more powerful, just check out some of these neat demos. Carful javascripters, a browser can only handle so much javascript at once. Flash and Javascript have a time and a place, remember that.

» 20 jQuery Plugins for Unforgettable User Experience

Tips on how to write efficient AS3 » Lost In Actionscript - Shane McCartney

gotoandlearn.com - Flash CS4 Feature Tour

We recently had one of our interns slave over getting a Displacement Map Filter project off the ground and displaying a flat image in faux 3D. After long hours of slavery, his hard work paid off and we recieved this great tutorial that blows most out of the water. Great work Joel, now get me a damn cup of coffee!

lab.joelGillman.com › False 3D in Flash: Displacement Maps

I had written a post a while back about using the Handy FPS box. Recently I was sorting through some code and remembered I had found a prettier more informative as3 fps stats box. This one is from Mr. Doob, you can download it from his Google Code Repo.

Example Code:

import Stats;
addChild(new Stats());

[ via ricardocabello ]

Tinic Uro (Adobe Flash Player Engineer) has yet another great writeup in relation to performance and flash player. His latest article answers a lot of questions and comments Ajax-heavy developers are making against flash. Understandably Tinic defends his software, I guess I didn’t expect him to agree with those stating flash is a CPU hog.

Decide for yourself. Personally, I’m going to trust an Adobe Software Engineer instead of the typcial company Javascript guy that always tries to shit on flash. There is a time and place for both.

kaourantin.net: On Performance