ricardocabellov5.5

http://code.google.com/p/nativeclient/

Is it me, or this one looks like a serious flash killer? (And I actually hate when people use that [product]killer word combination).

Seriously... Specially now that Actionscript 3 has become quite dev-only thing. If google can make this one work, I can only see trouble for Adobe.

EDIT: I'm pasting here a email I've sent to the internal Hi-ReS! list which extends a bit this post:

Basically, this is a double kick.

First to Microsoft for trying to compete with Flash player by copying the worst side of it (scripting language).

Second to flash, because the whole community is always complaining how bad optimised the player is and how slow it is still compared to OS based applications. You know, compare flash earth with... redbull earth.

This is just opening a door to all the C/C++ Graphic programmers out there to the web. Letting them use what they know (C/C++) to create application/experiences/experiments viewable from any browser. (As long as they have the plugin and/or use Google Chrome).

Processing uses Java, and people that weren't happy (with flash performance) moved to Processing/Java in order to have richer visuals on the web. Java hasn't really been doing well online, the applet is annoying most of the time and takes a lot of time to load (and shows a ugly loader). This even beats that.

It is, of course, not going to be a night/day change, but I think this has way too much potential if they handle it well. I still don't know if it's sofware-rendering only.

And hey! They have Quake already, and flash (publicly) doesn't!

Is not at all the effect I was trying to do, but it ended up quite decent too. I'll keep trying... Until then, enjoy the trip :D

Source file.

UPDATE: I've changed a bit the .as (and the .swf) so it checks if there is a webcam available. I guess I should update someday all the other examples...

Haha! Nicely done CBS!

Hopefully this post will be displayed properly some day... in some browser...

EDIT (Post firefox 3.5 release): Aparently if the file has the .ogv extension, it wont play on Firefox 3.5. Wasn't it that .ogg videos were going to be renamed to .ogv to avoid confusion? I just renamed the file to .ogg and... surprise! it works.

I've been trying to use Senocular's duplicateDisplayObject() for a while and I've experienced a lot of crashes of specific versions of Flash player and also unsuccessful results when used within an AIR application. After playing around quite a bit with all this, the best way I've found is to avoid duplicating the instance but duplicate the element on the domain/library instead.

I'm pasting here a snippet of how it works:

/*
 * node.@src example: file:///home/[username]/Desktop/[project]/files/assets/home/ball.swf
 * Cache.get() its basically a Dictionary where I store all the externally loaded files using the url as keys
 */

var mc : DisplayObject = Cache.get( node.@src );

var pathArray : Array = String( node.@src ).split( "/" );
var filename : String = String( pathArray[ pathArray.length - 1 ] ).split( "." )[0];  

if ( mc.loaderInfo.applicationDomain.hasDefinition( filename ))
	mc = new ( mc.loaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition( filename ))();

mc is now a clean duplication (as far as I know) of the original class. In my setup I expect the element that I want to be duplicated be named with the exact name as its container's filename (.swf), which is perfect for FlexSDK compiled stuff, but need some teaching for Flash IDE.

This is, of course, compatible with any kind of Object (not only MovieClips/Sprites/DisplayObjects)...

Last time I saw one was the first time I went to work on Germany, while being in London I've rarely seen a sunrise. I mean, properly, with the beach or a mountain being on top of the sun, instead of a bunch of bricks. Specially because I leave to work at 9am, but I would like to see the light going in the windows while trying to wake up.

Somehow I woke up at 7am today, and I was able to see the sunrise today, but not the real one, this one...



I guess that will do... not!

It was about time to put the showcase on the homepage again. When I released it first time it worked more or less fine for a month and then Firefox released a new version that made the site very buggy. At the point it was a flash menu that when clicked setted the URL address with swfaddress and loaded the actual link on a iframe. That double action code seemed to be a bit of a problem.

http://mrdoob.com/

This time it's a mix of PHP5 and Javascript. It's my first time with PHP5, but SimpleXML was very easy to get used to. In half an hour the PHP was reading the xml and creating the structure. On the Javascript side, I have already tested jQuery before, so I wanted to give it a try to MooTools. I liked the fact that once you're done you can create your own .js file with the things you are really using. This one took more time, but in the end it was also very simple, just take a look at the code.

This time doesn't use the #/XX style links, it reloads the menu every time you select an item, but I've done my best to keep it very small and also it would get cached anyway. It is still not finished, still have to put the source links and visited links graphic but the base is there.

Browser Testing time...

I developed it on Firefox/Linux, and I noticed it was a bit choppy sometimes. Specially when the swf piece at the bottom is a bit cpu heavy. Interestingly enough this didn't happen when it was 2 swf, I guess the vm is doing some magic there. Once it was finished I tried it on IE7/Windows first thing, and for my surprise the layout was all perfect (!!!), although the click didn't work too well, I'll work on it other day. Then on Chrome/Windows everything seems to be just perfect, no chopy animation at any point. I still have to try it on Safari but I got the feeling the results will be like on Chrome. Opera/Linux is the worst in this case, when mouseovering the menu items the swf just stops. Ha.

If it doesn't behave nicely in your browser, feel free to email me with the details and I'll see what I can do. :)

I usually don't blog about other people's work, but Zeh Fernando's (read Tweener) work always creates in me the urge of sharing with everyone. His latest work is, in my opinion, his best work so far and is something I've been silently following since he started. Fnk is, basically, a vvvv done in actionscript.

In a few weeks, if I came up with an effect I want to try, I can tell you that the first thing I'll try is to prototype it in Fnk and if it's good enough then I can try to code it myself for getting the fastest speed. But think about Fnk for prototyping by now as it's a bit slow at the moment. I'm sure it will be optimized at some point.

It's always admirable how the man can spend so much time on his projects until they take the desired shape. Fnk is still in alpha version, and as a matter of fact, mouse interactivity output from the Display node has been just added, but now that he is on the actual development phase the project is improving at a impressive speed.

Here you have a couple of videos to see what's all the buzz about: