Author Archive for wouter

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Flash On The Beach 2008

Published on October 3, 2008 in Conferences. 2 Comments

Awesome.

I got back from the conference yesterday, feeling both inspired and depressed (because it’s over again). We got to see a lot of great sessions, and I think most of us returned with a lot of new ideas, starting with reserving 20 minutes each day to play around :-)

It all started with Rob Chiu’s impressive sequence, which perfectly set the tone for the next 3 days:

These were the sessions I attended after that:

Monday:

Richard Galvan – Flash Now and in the Future: Some new, and some old stuff on the Flash platform
Marco Casario – Mash-up widgets with Adobe AIR: Showed us how easy it is to incorporate API’s in your AIR apps
Branden Hall – Brilliant Ideas that I’ve Blatantly Stolen: Inspired me to (code-)play some more with Flash itself.
Geoff Stearns – YouTube Lessons Learned: Interesting to see some background info on one of the most used swfs on the internet. Saw some funny youtube video’s aswell :-P
Erik Natzke – Beyond the Knowledge: The Art of Play: One of my last year’s favorites, showed some more background on how some of the drawing was done.
James Paterson – Modulating a Lot: This guy creates some CRAZY WEIRD interactive animations. One of this year’s drug addicts.

Tuesday:

Mike Downey – The business side of AIR: how to sell your clients on AIR apps
Jeremy Thorp – Emergence
Grant Skinner – Things Every ActionScript Developer Should Know: Great to see that Grant is telling the same that we are teaching our students
Jam Session: Keith, Mario, Joa, Andre and Carlos each did a 10 minute session showing us a selection of the stuff they do
Lee Brimelow – Platform Jiu-Jitsu: Saw some cool wrestling video’s, linked to Flash platform idea’s
Robert Hodgin – The Best 8 to 12 Hours of my Life: Personally made the book store sell out their Processing books last year :-)

Wednesday:

Geoff Lillemon – Stop and Smell the Internet with Geoff Lillemon and Anita Fontaine: Really weird (but cool), Tim Burton style fine art.
Andre Michelle – Adobe made some noise! Andre is one of my favorite speakers, the stuff he does with audio in actionscript is crazy.
Koen de Weggheleire – Play With Pixels, bitmap manipulation with AS3: co-owner of Happy Banana, funny session about matrices and bitmapdata.
Mario Klingemann – Here be Pixels: This guy blows my balls of every year. The way he solves certain problems is just crazy…
Jonathan Harris – The Art of Surveillance and Self-Exposure: Stood in front of 800 flashers, saying there hasn’t been made a masterpiece in flash yet…

Thank you John & the FOTB team to throw another great conference, thanks to all the speakers for inspiring me (see you in Miami?) and thanks to my employer for giving me a chance to attend FOTB08!

Actionscript 3.0 Gradients and Curves code generator

Published on September 21, 2008 in Actionscript 3.0 and Flash. 2 Comments

Now and then, I have to use the drawing API to draw a gradient, or a bezier curve. Every time, I have to dig through the help, to check the meaning of the different parameters, and where they belong in the function call. To make this more easy, I created a little code generator for gradients, and for drawing bezier curves with Actionscript 3.0.

Gradients code generator:

Beziers code generator

CakePHP SwiftMailer 3 Component

Published on May 7, 2008 in cakephp. 8 Comments

I had some issues today using the cakephp swiftmailer component. It still relied on the older version (pre version 3) of swiftmailer. There are quite some changes between SwiftMailer 2 and 3, and I decided to adjust the SwiftMailer component so it works with SwiftMailer 3.

Please note that this is the PHP5 version. To get it working in PHP4, you need to change the constants in the connect_sendmail and connect_smtp…

Download CakePHP SwiftMailer 3 Component.

Multi-Mania 2008 registrations open now

Published on April 29, 2008 in Conferences and multi-mania. 0 Comments

We’ve just opened registrations for multi-mania 2008!

Multi-Mania is a yearly one-day conference and award show in Kortrijk (Belgium) where 800 people from the multimedia industry in mid Europe come together to share knowledge, to get inspired or to connect and network. More then 30 speakers from around the world are presenting sessions on audio, video, design, development, 3D and game development .

During the evening there is an award show where you can see the best multimedia projects from the upcoming talents. We close the day with an exclusive 2M08 party till the late hours ! Entrance for the Whole Enchilada is FREE but you need to register to reserve your seat!

multi-mania: first names announced

Published on March 22, 2008 in Conferences, kortrijk and multi-mania. 5 Comments

We’ve just announced the first names for multi-mania! Peter Elst, Jason Levine, Ralph Hauwert, Dave Schroeder, Stephanie Sullivan, Aral Balkan, and Marco Casario will speak at our event.

It’s also possible to sign up for our open awards. Send in your work in one of our 4 open categories, and maybe you will win a prestigeous multi-mania award!

http://www.multi-mania.be

Multi-Mania 2008 announced

Published on February 12, 2008 in Conferences, kortrijk and multi-mania. 1 Comment

Multi-Mania 2008 was just announced! This year’s edition will take place on friday 23th of may 2008 in the XPO meeting centre, Kortrijk. Already looking forward to this awesome multi-media fest!

Flex Flowcharts

Published on January 30, 2008 in Actionscript 3.0 and Flex. 17 Comments

Last saturday I went to the Adobe Usergroup meeting in Gent (Belgium). It featured the Adobe Prerelease tour, Christophe’s presentation about Prana and, last but not least a presentation about lovely charts. Loverly Charts is an application to created flowcharts and diagrams online. This reminded me of a project I’ve been working on now and then the last 3 years. It doesn’t have a title / name yet, but it is a flowcharting application aswell.

You can created flowcharts, which are stored in a database. The flowcharts have metadata, like the perspon who is responsable for that chart, name, description, etc… Each step in a flowchart has metadata aswell. Charts can be linked to eachother, so you can describe a main proces which links to sub-processes aswell.

I’ve put a little demo online at: http://labs.aboutme.be/charts/

Enjoy!

benchmarking cakeswx/amfphp

Published on January 20, 2008 in Actionscript 3.0, amfphp, cakephp, cakeswxphp and swx. 1 Comment

Cakeswxphp enables you to use the cakphp rapid application framework as your remoting backend. No longer writing complex sqls, escaping query strings,… As some of you have noticed, cake does slow your remoting down a bit, as more classes are loaded to give you this ease-of-use. I did some benchmarks, comparing amfphp and swx with cakeswxphp 1.1 and cakeswxphp 1.2. I ran the echoData service 10 times, and took the average speed of those calls. These are the results:

SWX: 346ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.1: 350ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.2: 369ms
AMFPHP: 57ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.1: 111ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.2: 126ms

As we already know, AMFPHP is fast as hell. The CakePHP version is 2x slower because of the extra classes & functions cakephp executes. The difference between SWX and CakeSWX isn’t that big.

After that, I turned out eaccelerator (PHP caching / accelerator system) and ran the benchmark again:

SWX: 347ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.1: 364ms
CakeSWXPHP 1.2: 362ms
AMFPHP: 50ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.1: 64ms
CakeAMFPHP 1.2: 67ms

Not much difference between the first results without the caching, except for the Cake AMF gateway: it seems like using a php accelerator makes the cakeamfphp almost as fast as the native amfphp!

I’ve included the benchmark scripts:

cakeswxphp SWX benchmark
cakeswxphp AMF benchmark (AS3)

cakeswxphp: simpler and on cake 1.2

Published on December 18, 2007 in amfphp, cakephp, cakeswxphp and swx. 6 Comments

After some user input, I updated the cakeswxphp packages. I also started a branch which supports cakephp 1.2. There is a change in the gateway locations: you no longer connect to cake_swx_gateway.php or cake_amf_gateway.php, but to swx.php and amf.php (default locations in swx). This should make it even simpler to start with (cake)swx!

Again, you can download it at the cakesxwphp page…

hacking the ipod Touch firmware 1.1.2

Published on November 16, 2007 in apple, ipod and ipod touch. 0 Comments

I just love it. My new ipod Touch. I bought one last week, and I didn’t regret it for a second. The navigation and animations are so intuitive, Apple is really pushing the boundaries a little further again :-)

However, running 3rd pary apps on the touch isn’t that simple. I tried hacking it yesterday, but ran a hack for the earliers 1.1.1 firmware, which didn’t succeed and included copying DMG files and doing SSH and SFTP. Today, I resetted the firmware and tried another hack, WITH succes. I won’t repeat the proces over here, but check it out at Koos Kaspers. I’m already running the iPhone apps, and some 3rd party ones like Apollo (IM client), NES emulator and iSplit. Any other good apps you know of?