Took a day to extend the tentacle class to work on 360° and secondary motion from a parent node, but here it is, the first critter for my ocean. Thanks to Keith Peters book ActionScript 3 Animation, useful formulas section for getting me through this. It kicked my butt and fried my brain, but it’s so clear now. Onwards!
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Spent last evening coding some circles & spirals in Flash. I love spirals!
A logarithmic spiral, equiangular spiral or growth spiral is a special kind of spiral curve which often appears in nature. The logarithmic spiral was first described by Descartes and later extensively investigated by Jakob Bernoulli, who called it Spira mirabilis, “the marvelous spiral”.
This kind of simple Math and lengthy tweaking of geometry animation is akin to whittling a piece of wood for me, whenever I have some free time and get the urge to write some code with no particular objective. It’s very relaxing.
It went through numerous iterations over the weekend and truly came to life when I started using Vectors and local3DToGlobal to convert the x,y,z coords to draw the 2D lines. Throwing in some random offsets from time to time helps keep it interesting. I used Math.sin and Math.cos a lot with random offsets to create smooth undulating motion that sometimes reminds me of jelly fish or some sort of under water plant waving around in the current. Other times it takes on a galaxy formation.
Watch it for 10 minutes or so and you will see some interesting spiral explosions. I can stare at it for 20-30 minutes.
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Discovered this Web 2.0 Suicide Machine on Twitter. One day I might use it. 
http://www.suicidemachine.org/
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I have been experimenting with the new HTML 5 Canvas and trying to get up to speed on the syntax. As a seasoned Actionscript 3 developer, I find JS easy to understand but difficult to write. I find myself thinking flash and trying to work a flash approach. Anyhow, I have tried canvas with js and canvas with Raphael and now canvas Processing JS.
They all have advantages and drawbacks. Processing js is giving me the most fun for now and I can’t wait till they finish implementing the entire set of methods, or at least what’s left that can be implemented into canvas.
I have read some eager articles saying that this can replace Flash and will be the end of flash. This may be so at some point in the future, but I can tell ya right now, it’s not even close. With no dedicated VM it craps out if you try anything with a couple hundred worthy sprites on screen. Also, objects are painted onto the canvas and no longer exist as objects you can have a pointer to. You basically have to paint the the canvas each time with your updates, example: Processing uses pushMatrix() and popMatrix() to store and restore stage translations. This is pissing me off and I am still trying to get my head around it. I just want to move stuff around dang it. On the other hand, when you paint, you can have an infinite amount of detail without worrying about overhead, like when you pipe MC’s into Bitmap object in Flash.
It’s all good though and a step in the right direction as far as I am concerned. No plugins, no 3rd party expensive IDE’s etc. It’s all free range and organic, yay. Can’t wait to start working in some div’s, copy etc and growing the graphics and UI for html pages.
As with all things animation and drawing, I like to start off with basic math and growing plants, trees, etc. Processing has no real shading, 3d or drop shadowing built in right now and it’s kind of refreshing going back to the old way of thinking where you have to fake it all.
Here is a screen shot of some alien plant thing I am writing. It takes about 20 mins to draw the entire 360 view. The depth and dimension is all fake like I said, drawing all the highlights, shadows etc in separate passes with slight offsets. Demo of my first processing attempt here.
Rendering Plants with Processing JS
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Thankfully Liam is ok and back in business.
Strike
Posted from my iPhone 3G using QikBlogr.
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It had to happen to my kid right? Bounced right out and got a concusion.
Knockout
Posted from my iPhone 3G using QikBlogr.
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Too bad adults are no permitted to bounce. The kids are having fun though.
Boing
Posted from my iPhone 3G using QikBlogr.
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My latest Flash project launched November 12 was the Charter For Compassion site. The “Collective” is a growing list of compassionate acts done by people all over the globe.
http://charterforcompassion.org/
Over 30,000 people signed up in a week and the collective is growing. The challenges for this Flash project were multi lingual capabilities and the management of infinite data, visualized in a space governed by physics and chock full of user interaction. Each act is like a mini bio, complete with image, video, text, links, buttons etc. Far too much just to load in at once and throw around. I devised a system of progressively loading in chunks, left and right, so the user could move in a linear or non linear fashion through the collective. All the while, maintaining a physical position within the data. The collective can also be launched from an entry point via sharing on numerous networks and thus be capable of non linear progression, etc.
So visit the site, sign up and try it out. Here is a link to a spot on the BBC world news with Karen Armstrong talking about the Charter.
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/programmes/world_news_america/8358005.stm
The Collective
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Working on a new iPhone app for snapping pics, blogging and pushing it to my WordPress blog using WP’s built in XMLRPC server. Here is the proof, upped from the phone. Success!
When I started this last night, I had no idea how to post data from Objective-C to the web. I thought the php side was going to be a snap since I have some experience with it, but I hit some snags there too. It appeared that no matter what orientation I snapped a pic, portrait or landscape, it would end up rotated or flipped on the server but look fine in iPhoto etc.
From what I could gather, the browser does not respect the image orientation like iPhoto does. It was no good just rotating the image server side because it has no clue if an image looks right!, so finally after an hour of research, I had enough info to tweak the server side php to read the exif metadata and get the orientation then take the appropriate rotation or flip steps. Oh well, lesson learnt.
Anyway, that’s the hardest part over I think. On to lots of features and enhancement.
php exif code added post-post. My app is not that fancy.
... $exif = exif_read_data($urlImage, 0, true); $oriented = $exif['IFD0']['Orientation']; switch($oriented) { case 3: // 180 rotate $imageRotate = imagerotate($src_img, 180, 0); break; case 6: // 90 rotate $imageRotate = imagerotate($src_img, -90, 0); break; } imagejpeg($imageRotate, $urlNewImage, 90); imagedestroy($src_img); ...
Yay…
QikBlogr Screen Shot
Posted from my iPhone 3G using QikBlogr.
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My friend and colleague Aaron Gustafson of Easy Designs, LLC created a tip calculator a while back for use on mobile devices that had an interesting twist. Tipr calculates tip percentages, 10, 20, 30% etc. and then modifies the total and the tip by a few cents to create a palindrome. Huh!
In case you don’t know, a palindrome is word or number that reads the same way from front to back, e.g. Madam or $123.21. This comes in handy when reviewing your credit card statement. At a glance you can see if you have been accidentally overcharged by a restaurant or bar or anywhere you might leave a tip. If you always total to a palindrome, you should always see palindrome totals on your statement.
Anyway, to get to my point, I have been dabbling in iPhone development and find it very gratifying to build apps and then pop them right on my iPhone. Trouble is coming up with ideas? So when I can’t, I look for a good candidate that I think needs iPhonification. Tipr seemed like something I could tackle. I am a newbee to Objective-C and useful, relatively simple apps are my limit just now.
So here it is. Or @ least a movie of it. Getting stuff onto the App Store is a whole other ball game.
height="385" codebase='http://www.apple.com/qtactivex/qtplugin.cab'>
controller="true" loop="true" pluginspage='http://www.apple.com/quicktime/download/'>