As mentioned in a previous post, Macromedia has posted Grant’s article titled Varicose-g: High-Performance Graphics in Flash 8 to the Flash DevNet. There is also a place holder for the Creating Alpha Channel Video for Flash 8 article, written by another of our resident Flash-heads Wes Gorgichuk, which should be active in the next week or so.

I’ve been tinkering with new blog designs for a while now (the current design is almost 2 years old), with a loose goal to incorporate some Flash elements into the design. This was crystallized further by my inclusion in the “Flash Community: Perpetual Virtual Jam Session” panel at FlashForward NYC, which poses the question (among others): “why don’t we use Flash to blog about Flash?”.

I don’t believe Flash is a good medium for a full blog, but I do think that my blog about Flash should utilize the platform (ooo… new buzzword) where it makes sense, and that’s what I’ve tried to do in this new design.

Continue reading →

It’s late, but here’s the latest update on GLIC. Things are on track again, and we will be making an official announcement next week (I’m hoping for early next week, but I will definitely be making the announcement before the end of next week). At that time, we should be setting up a mailing list for all interested parties to keep everyone abreast of developments.

I should also be making a big announcement at FlashForward NYC, who incidentally did a profile about me on their blog today – nifty.

As always, I apologize for the delay – the code side of this project turned out to be the easy part. 😛

The question everyone (or at least someone) is asking: Where The Fudgesicles is GLIC? Well, it hasn’t died an untimely death, but it obviously hasn’t been released yet either.

It is getting closer. The papers are all at the lawyer, and we’re doing the final review on it. I’m not going to give a date that it will be released though, because we’ve missed a few approximate timelines by a wide margin already and I don’t want to disappoint anyone further.

The business side of things is obviously taking way longer than I expected, and I apologize to anyone who has been waiting for the components. Believe me, it’s been quite frustrating for me to have a functionally complete set of components, and not be able to sell them, but hopefully it will all work soon. These components really are awesome, and I can’t wait to see what people do with them.

More news soon (I hope!).

And no, this is not an April fools joke. 🙂

The FitC award finalists have been posted, and I’m happy to see that I made the list for Best Canadian Developer and Experimental. Pretty cool to be listed with all those other smart folk. Click on over and check out all the great work. Also, be sure to check out fellow Canuck Craig Swann, who’s on the list three times this year, including Best Canadian Studio – nice work Craig.

I’ll be speaking at FitC this year and hope to see some of you there.

I don’t usually post about my personal life, but I think that the news is relevant, both because I’m marrying the wonderful woman who has made my professional life possible, and because a large number of fellow Flashers have gotten to know Bobi as she accompanied me to conferences worldwide. She has loved and supported me through thick and thin – encouraging me when things were bad, keeping me sane and focused when things were good. Perhaps most amazingly, she’s put up with me, and my rather nerdy obsessions for almost 9 years – in the first few years of our relationship she would even sit on the phone and listen to me mumble while I coded. I’m excited to be marrying such a beautiful person (inside and out), and am looking forwards to many more years of laughing, loving and sharing.

This is an older experiment, but I think it’s still fairly interesting, and I wanted to post it to the blog so that it has a home on my site. This system demonstrates converting user gestures into machine readable information – in this case, it simulates Palm graffiti recognition. Click and drag to write graffiti characters on the input pad, and the system will convert them into characters on screen. Supports almost the full range of graffiti inputs including letters, numbers, uppercase, backspace and punctuation.

Continue reading →

Expanding on the varicose-g experiment I posted a little while back, I tweaked some numbers, and added some new functionality to create vine-g, which shows a rapidly growing vine replete with leaves and flowers. I love experiments like this that you can revisit over and over. Ch-ch-ch-check it out… (again, this is fairly CPU intensive, and requires Flash Player 7 or higher)

Continue reading →