I would like to make things (Teleo), no matter which language I speak (Phidgets), then one day, I will be like him (David Rokeby).

Toolkit for interacting with the physical world:

• Teleo from makingthings.
  
• Phidgets. ( easy to use set of building blocks for low cost sensing and control from your PC).
  
• David Rokeby. Sound and video installation artist based in Toronto.

I am updating a ten year old project so it runs on OS X.

To get optimal performance I kept everything inside one big repeat loop, with smaller repeat loops nested inside (e.g. while the mouseDown, etc.), instead of using go to the frame.

It seems though that now this is seen by the operating system as an unresponsive process, and therefore produces the ‘wait’ cursor.

You can test this with a very basic script:

on exitFrame me
repeat while 1=1
cursor 200
updateStage
end repeat
end

I’m not really up for stripping the code from all the repeat loops (i.e. rewriting everything), if you have a workaround let me know.

Well, probably this is not as fancy as ‘fire’, ’smoke’, ‘particles’, ‘3d’, but I would like to highlight this post from Tinic Uro where he gives some ideas of how to use the new ‘Flash 8 features’ in a different and practical way.

Worth to read: Using Flash Player 8 filters for good.

More ideas around this topic:

I think, since the new Flash Player has access to the pixel data of a webcam, we are close to the possibility of creating hands free devices that will enable many disable people to use their computers, such as Mouse Vision.

Related post: Flash 8 and webcams.

Following up our post Force Download where we discussed a few tricks to download a picture directly from flash using getURL and a simple php script, I feel like continue the post adding how you can achieve the same or even better by using the FileReference.download method in Flash 8.

Cleaner better and simpler:

Sample swf: (just right click the picture to download the image): [flash]http://www.blog.lessrain.com/wp-content/upload/download2.swf,350,200[/flash]

Awesome.

Check the video. And read this.

Now that's weird: it seems to be impossible to cast to an Array in AS2!

The "natural" way of doing it for me would be this:

I'd expect the output to be "1", but it actually prints "1,2"!

Read the rest of this entry »

Senocular has put together a comprehensive tutorial about the Transformation Matrix in Flash 8.

Worth to take a look.

Another small but useful improvement is in the actionscript editor, finding and replacing text in the current file. Now you can find or replace the selected text like in any other text editor:

Flash 8

Flash MX 2004

I haven't work in any single project all this years where the new Flash 8 effects were indispensable, this is why I would like to focus in other aspects of the new Flash 8 rather than bitmap data manipulation which I think it is fantastic but it is being covered everywhere.

One of my favourite things in this new version is the drop down menu in the library panel where you can jump between different libraries. I think this is a huge improvement.

The lesser-known new features of Flash Professional 8 (Part 1)

A project to produce a racing game in flash including advanced physics, handling, 3d graphics and real life tracks.

Via Hidden Resource

Scratching movies with his DVJ machine, at the Curzon Soho, 18th September, 6pm. More on the Curzon website.

Featuring a 45 x 25m spray screen in the middle of the Thames. Saturday 17th September, 9 - 10pm, at the London eye.

More info: Thames Festival site. Hexstatic.