“The main goal of the Integra project is to create a new piece of software for composing and performing music with live electronics. The environment will be tested in real life thanks to substantial new commissions and an effort to modernise existing repertoire that currently uses obsolete technology. Furthermore, the project is an exciting opportunity to bring together research centres and new music ensembles from across Europe.”  - Integralive.org

We’re very excited to be involved in UI/UX design and Graphic design for this new music software development project. There is a news post here about our involvement. Have a look at the whole site for more information on the groundbreaking work that Integra are doing.

Flash Switcher extension is a well known Firefox extension to switch between various Flash player versions. Also very useful to save or remove the current installed Flash plugin.

In the last two months I have found people around my friends network having a lot of trouble making the extension work with Windows Vista, getting this two common errors while installing the extension:

Component returned failure code: 0×80520008 (NSERRORFILEALREADYEXISTS) [nsILocalFile.copyTo]

Access to folder C:Windowssystem32MacromedFlash is denied. Consider to use an user accesible plugins folder instead (for example: ~/.mozilla/plugins/ )

The solution to get ridd of this error messages is very basic, you just need full access to the macromed folder in your system.

• Go to C:\Windows\System32\Macromed
• Right-click “Flash” folder to open the properties panel.
• Click the “Security” tab.
• Click “Edit” Button.
• Select the current user in “Group or user names:”
• Change folder permissions, normally I change it to have full control.
• Click “Apply” and “OK”

Another question that comes together with this errors is how to customize the Flash Switcher extension.

The default download for Flash Switcher includes a fair variety of player versions but not all and you may need to add newer players to fit your development needs, for example the new 10r22_87 version.

First you need to download the player from the following Flash Player archive:

Archived Flash Players available for testing purposes.

Download Flash Player 10 (debugger versions) (60 MB).

Open your Flash Switcher extension plugins directory, located at (remember I’m talking about Windows Vista):

C:\Users[username]\AppData\Roaming\Mozilla\Firefox\Profiles\xxxxxxxx.default\extensions\flash_switcher@sephiroth.it\plugins\win

Create a new folder and name it 10.0 r22 debug, which is the new version to install. (Released February 24, 2009 due to security vulnerabilities)

Next you need to install the Flash player (flashplayer10r2287win_debug.exe) which goes to C:\Windows\System32\Macromed\Flash

Now copy the NPSWF32.dll file from the “Flash” folder to the Flash Switcher extension plugin directory that you just created.

And that’s all, now your Flash Switcher extension should work without problems in Windows Vista.

Meet the Imageprocessing Library for Flash. It lets you manipulate images and synthesize textures in ActionScript3, most of it works in realtime and there are just too many filters to mention. Different kinds of blurs, bump mapping, encoding JPEG and PNG, curves as in Photoshop, etc. Truly a swiss army knife for your bitmap needs.

Check out the complete reference here and then procede to download!

Flaxus is a software developed by i2off.org and r3nder.net under the TOPLAP manifesto, to perform visual performance in real time.

The graphic piece is generated by code at the same moment of its execution, thus, the artistic experience comes closer to a performance event such as music or dancing.

Read more here.

See online demo here.

Powerflasher have published their release candidate for FDT v1.1.

The most visible changes are:

• Placing the mouse cursor on a variable or type/class name highlights all occurences of it in the current class (Editor “Mark Occurences”)
• Better code-folding
• More detailed settings in Window-Preferences regarding encoding, folding
• Jumping to methods and classes via CTRL + click on the class-name/type
• First steps towards refactoring. If you rename a class or move it to another folder within the Flash Explorer it’ll replace the according names within the class file. It doesn’t change the imports of the project though… see FDT 2.0 announcement below

Here’s the list of all changes.

To install you need to got through the usual installation steps again, using a different URL. Note that this is a Test version. I’ve been using it since a week and so far haven’t encountered any problems.

Here are the installation instructions taken from their site with the test URL:

1. Open Eclipse.
2. Choose “Help”->”Software Updates”->”Find and install…”.
3. Select “Search for new features to install” and choose “Next”.
4. Choose “New Remote Site”.
5. Insert “FDT” as name and the URL “http://fdt.powerflasher.com/updateTest”.
6. Confirm with “OK”.
7. Mark “FDT” and choose “Finish”.

Another exciting news is that they are working on their next major release FDT 2.0 with proper refactoring! Apparently the upgrade prize will be reasonable:

There will be no detriment for all existing FDT-owners with the upgradeprice, so there is no need to wait with licensing.

It took me a few months to start using FDT and Eclipse in my projects only becuase evrytime I wanted to start using it I was very busy doing other stuff.

Well, last week finally I was introduced to FDT by my friend Thomas and I must admit that FDT is becoming the most indispensable tool in my working life improving workflow and productivity.

Some FDT references:

• FDT MainPage
• Optimizing Your Workflow with Eclipse and FDT
• Eclipse/FDT shortcut sheet
• Universal buildfile for Eclipse and FDT
• FDT and the Class Template
• About FDT Workflow, Logging and Shortcuts
• Installing Eclipse, MTASC & FDT in Windows XP
• FDT forum

Wordpress plugin to simplify the process of inserting flash video inside a Wordpress post or page. The plugin is build around Jeroen Wijerings FLV Player

If you want to insert mp3 files inside a Wordpress post or page, you should take a look at WP-SingleMP3

Related entries:

• Fash: FLV resources

Robert Taylor, creator of FlashExtensions.com has set up a small Open Source library of resources regarding Flash and its capabilities such as Drag n’ Drop Selected Text , Detect Line Number and Position of TextField or a set of algorithms to display the right color of text for the right background.

Worth to take a look.

Unfortunatelly Flash 8 doesn’t support bidirectional text, but there is a collection of free classes (Pedram Pourhossein And Farid Arzpeyma), that will bring RTL method to macromedia flash. These Classes were made specifically for Persian language but apparently they can be used for all RTL languages (Arabic, Hebrew…).

Flash RTL Class.

Flash RTL via a simple hack? (non-rhetorical). G.Wigonik

Solution for RTL in Flash? hmm.. maybe, but not for me. oddhammer

Bidirectional algorithm.

Other RTL attemps (Hebrew MX). Quasimondo

Related Post:

• Flash & Right-To-Left (RTL): Less Rain launches dynamic hebrew Flash site.

Following up our post Flash and Video (April 27th), and since most common video players dont support FLV, I would like to add a few more links to some tools to watch FLV files on your desktop:

• Flash Guru FLV Player (Available for MAC too).
• Martijn Devisser FLV Player (Source code included).
• Tekool FLV Player (FullScreen feature).
• FLViewer (It can browse and quick preview all the FLV in your system).

Realated entries:

• FLV and Wordpress
• Flash: FLV resources
• Flash: Full Screen Video
• Flash Video category

Today we have released this small Video Flash game.

One of the keys, technically speaking has been the use of Captionate, a Windows application that embeds two data types into FLV files: Markers, for simple cue points with optional labels and Captions, for captioning / subtitling optionally with multi language tracks and speakers.

Red Bull Air Race Video Challenge

A few months ago, Thomas introduced me to Charles, a fantastic shareware application especially useful for Macromedia Flash developers as you can view the contents of LoadVariables, LoadMovie and XML loads.