http://www.spikything.com/blog part designer. part developer. all creative Wed, 10 Dec 2008 18:08:49 +0000 http://backend.userland.com/rss092 en I quickly cobbled together this little demo using the new native 3D transforms in Flash 10. Alongside the regular transform.matrix property, DisplayObjects now have a transform.matrix3D property, which controls its appearance in 3-D space. It's pretty easy to play with in Flash CS4, without any coding knowledge - I can't ... http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/12/10/flash-10-matrix3d-demo/ Flash Player 10 is finally here! But does it live up to the hype? Previous major releases of Flash Player have each brought with them significant improvements in performance or added functionality. This time around, the guys at Adobe have been tinkering with a few exciting (and a few somewhat ... http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/10/17/quick-as-a-flash-10/ Playing around some more with my webcam, I cooked up this 3D Earth with Papervision and made it controllable through a webcam (if you have one). The motion detection is rather flaky, since it tracks the centre-point of a whole area of motion - if you move a lot it ... http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/09/04/webcam-controlled-3d-earth/ You know the drill... you open an FLA you've been given and it complains it's missing several never-before-heard-of fonts that you can't find anywhere. Wouldn't life be easy if everything could just be Arial, for example. Try this little JSFL command I wrote (packaged as a ZIP, since it needs ... http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/09/02/when-fonts-attack/ Another reason not to visit the US? The Department of Homeland Security have now given themselves the right to nick your laptop when you go to the states. Someone tell them about the Bill of Rights? I pity the state of the states these days. http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/08/04/all-your-laptops-are-belong-to-us/ You know the situation - a designer has given you an FLA file to build from and either the text is too small to be legible for us mere mortals, or is going to be too large when translated into Russian. Since designers rarely think of these things, I find ... http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/29/when-design-goes-wrong/ I started playing around a little more with my webcam and extended my previous webcam motion detection example - this time to control the camera of a virtual 3-D space from motion detected in the user's webcam. It detects motion area and general direction, albeit with dubious accuracy, but you ... http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/07/15/webcam-controlled-motion/ I recently went up to the Lake District with some friends and did a fair amount of trekking. Geez was it windy! Very pretty though, if a little overpriced. But I guess that's bank holiday weekend everywhere :( http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/06/06/trekking-in-the-lakes/ I played around some more with my webcam today and knocked this out. I also found my webcam already has the IR filter missing (cheap webcam), so it can already see infrared... which will come in handy: http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/19/webcam-flames/ After getting my Wii remote hooked up with the WiiFlash Server, I knocked up this quick Flash demo which draws the blobs of infrared light the Wii remote detects (it can track up to 4 blobs at once), just like the Wii console's sensitivity setting dialog does. I just gave ... http://www.spikything.com/blog/index.php/2008/05/11/wii-paint/