New job. Exciting project

There has not been much activity here lately, because I have been busy getting into my new job at FI (a.k.a www.fantasy-interactive.com)!

I am currently working on a new exciting project which will create quite a buzz in the industry. Code name ProPod is a new media blogging platform that will rock your socks off.

Presentation of Flash Player 10 aka Astro

This presentation was filmed at the MAX Chicago 2007 by Aral Balkan.
The video shows a sneek preview of some of the new features of Flash Player 10 such as the new text engine, new 3D features and the new bitmap effect scripting language called Hydra. With Hydra people can create their own custom filters in a ActionScript/C
like environment.

Flash Audio/Video updates

Most of you flashers already know about the new Flash player that support
H.264 video and AAC audio.

This is a huge step for all you who are interested in Flash and video, since producing high quality video for Flash has been limited to the ON2 VP7 codec or the older worse VP6.

Now Adobe has implemented a limited sub set of MPEG-4, 3GP and QuickTime movie support whih basically means is that instead of converting your video to VP6/FLV with FFMPEG you can progressive stream .mp4,.m4v,.m4a,.mov and .3gp files using the NetStream API you use to load FLV files now. It only need to have a .FLV file extension.

Another great thing is the support for all audio sampling rates from 8Khz to 96Khz. The old players were limited to 11Khz, 22Khz and 44.1Khz and any other would be played incorrect (slower or faster).


Read more here:
http://www.progettosinergia.com/flashvideo/flashvideoblog.htm#120907

And here:
http://www.kaourantin.net/2007/08/what-just-happened-to-video-on-web_20.html

Resize images 2.0

Everyone who work with publishing images on the web have faced a situation that you need to change the images physical proportions; height and width. I usualy open up the good ol' Photoshop and batch resize the images to the desired height and width. But what if you could resize without make the image smaller or loose information like in cropping? Well smaller ofcourse but I still want to keep that look and feel of the image but it just need to fit in my web design.

There is now a pretty cool technique called Seam Carving to help you with this.

Mario Klingeman at Quasimondo has written a great article how to use Seam Carving in Flash, and yes there is also source code available! :D

Check it out here >>

Papervision3D public Beta

Papervision3D moves from private testing to a full public beta.




Everybody is welcome to download and start playing with it. We believe you will find it very easy to use and to integrate into your Flash 8, Flash CS3 and Flex projects.

Papervision3D Components for Flash CS3

John Grden has released great Papervision component to Flash CS3
Look at the features:

* Design-time render and editing in Flash IDE

* 3 Material types supported - BitmapFileMaterial, BitmaAssetMaterial and MovieAssetMaterial

* Creates MovieScene3D and Free or Target camera

* Manages resizing / centering of Papervision3D scene [optional]

* Dynamic masking to constrain the viewable render area to the bounds of the component [optional]

* Full API and access to Scene, Camera, Collada objects to code around

* Automatically loads materials via Collada file [when materials list is not given]

* New Custom Panel for modifying rotation, camera zoom, camera focus, camera Z at design-time

New remix!

I made a new remix. This time it's P-Diddy and 666 Mafia.

Flashy drum machine

All you who are into electron music know what the Roland 909 is. This drum machine is with the 808 a legendary piece of electronics. Mostly famous for the hard beats of the Detroit house genre and is still the base for lots of techno and house tracks. The flash guru André Michelle has created a realtime 909 drum machine for you all to play around with. This is a must see (hear) for everyone that is the least interested in music and/or Flash. http://live.popforge.de/
Enjoy

Wii + Flash = WiiFlash

WiiFlash allows you to control your Flash games and applications with the revolutionary Wiimote.

It supports multiple Wiimotes, IR bar and Nunchuk and integrates very well with Papervision3D. All you need is a Bluetooth enabled PC and a Wiimote, of course.
If you want to play with it, go and get the code and subscribe to the WiiFlash mailing list.