Actionscript3, Flash, Java, C#, C++, Algorithms & Imageprocessing
The FOTB Miami website is now up and running. Yes, that’s right! John Davey will bring the FOTB spirit to Miami.
I think John has choosen a perfect location. I am excited to meet new people and to be a part of a fantastic speaker line-up. More information available at http://www.flashonthebeach.com/.
At one point André Michelle, Kai-Philipp Schöllmann and I really thought that we had success after a long time of struggle. We had the audio hack back in the popforge days. It became more and more unstable. Then we used a Java server to have a stable output. We got rid of that one because we had the ultimate solution in our hands: Flash Player 10 with dynamic audio support.
Last week I was on holidays — no laptop, no internet, no mobile. Just wanted to get fresh eyes, relax a little bit — you name it. Yes, that’s right: I missed the launch of the Flash Player 10.
Last friday was an awesome day. It was my birthday, Microsoft released Photosynth which is a product I have been watching since two years and we won the FlashForward Award in the category Sound with our Audiotool.
The Audiotool development became a very interesting topic. We implemented so many things to keep stuff optimized not only on the code layer but also on the algorithm layer. I am really looking forward to talk about some techniques in my session “Audiotool’s Private Parts” at Flash on the beach and Flash on tap.
This FDT update makes me so happy that I have to post about it. The Powerflasher FDT developers implemented the new Vector.<T> syntax. Hooray — we can make full use of the Vector class!
FDT is implementing it also in a nice way. So for instance if you have a Vector.<int> named vec and you write var sprite: Sprite = vec[0] this will result in an error because FDT knows that your Vector was typed int.
There are still some glitches here and there but I hope this will be fixed soon as well.
By the way I am using the beta site to update my FDT — so if you want to have Vector support too you should use the beta update site.
As André already mentioned we have finally got an Ogg Vorbis Encoder in ActionScript 3. André wrote a lot about the benefits already.
Now what I really like about the encoder is the way we could minimize the encoding time by ~50%! I know two implementations of Ogg Vorbnis. One is written in C and another one in Java. What we did first was just getting it to work and it looked pretty much like the C/Java version. Then we started optimizing the code by comparing the encoding results always to reference files. I am quiet happy because on my machine we reduced the encoding time from 32sec to 16.5sec with simple optimizations and tricks.
Where to go from here? Of course we think the best we can do is to open-source the encoder. But there are a couple of other things in my mind. I started modifing Tamarin and added two functions to the Math class. Those convert a Number to its binary IEEE32 single-precision representation and vice versa. With those two functions we could get huge speed improvements for performance hungry tasks like this one. I hope Adobe will not forget about this as well — there seems to be general problem currently trying to support the simple Flash user on the one hand and the “Flash explorer” on the other hand.
I know you may ask what this feature could be good for, but doing floating point math using bitwise operations is a killer when it comes to performance. We are currently not allowed to do this and there is no reason for that.
Hooray! We are a finalist at the Flashforward Festival in the category “Sound”. Please vote for the AudioTool in the People’s Choice section as well.
Great news! Papervision3D developer Ralph Hauwert will come to Cologne to do a two days workshop. I think it is by far the best opportunity to learn more about Papervision and it is great that we will have Ralph here since most of the Papervision3D workshops from the core-team were always outside of Germany. The workshop will take place from July 30th to 31st.
Due to personal reasons I will not be able to attend the AUG Netherlands meeting 2008 and I am really sorry for the inconvenience. I would have loved to talk about Adobe PixelBender and meet-up with everyone but life is sometimes just unpredictable.
My best wishes for the conference — I hope you guys will enjoy it!
I am more than proud to announce that we won the Grimme Online Award in the category “Special”. It is the most prestigious award in Germany releated to new media. Hobnox has been picked out of 1900 nominees and we made it.
The category “Special” has been introduced to cover high quality and highly innovative projects which do not fit into any other category like “Information”, “Education” or “Entertainment”. Regarding to the press statement Hobnox has been picked not only because of its high quality content and design but also because of the Noxtools — and this makes me especially happy.
Hobnox is finally out of beta and open for everyone. You are now able to register an account even without an invite. We are still developing our next big update regarding the AudioTool. I hope to see more of those videos in the meantime!
