This is more a reminder for myself than anything, and to save others the half hour of grief I went through…

While setting up the Installation Incomplet at FitC, I ran into some trouble. The installation allows users to save an image of themselves playing with the experiments back to our server, and view it online, but this feature refused to work on location. I spent a stressful half hour testing everything I could think of (internet, connection to our server, etc), shuffling modified files between my powerbook and the installation PC on a USB key, before it dawned on me: It was a security sandbox error, but it wasn’t displaying any errors because I didn’t have the Flash IDE installed, just the Stand Alone player.

I remember reading about this from way back when, but it totally slipped my mind. The IDE installs a file that the player looks for to determine if it should throw (developer) errors – without this file, it just fails silently. To make things worse, all my testing had been in my experiments directory which is I’ve set up as a trusted location. Definitely something to remember if you’re deploying any Flash 8 content to other users’ local systems or doing any installation work.

Going to the advanced settings online and setting the installation SWF as a trusted file fixed things right up (although the spotty internet access largely defeated this feature in the end anyway *sigh*).

While I don’t recommend it as standard practice, there have been a few cases where I have found it useful to use a set of static (class level) methods to proxy a singleton implementation. This simplifies access so that you can do this:
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Conferences, installations and playing with AS3 (more on that soon) have been keeping me pretty darn busy lately, so there haven’t been many quality updates to Gallery Incomplet lately. Hopefully I get some time to post more experiments soon, but in the meantime I’ve posted a video of one of my new favourites: Webcam Fluid Dynamics.

This experiment lets you interact via the webcam with particles that behave similar to fluids. They flow downhill, get caught in bowl shapes, and are generally a lot of fun. Check it out here. I’m definitely going to play with this idea some more soon. I’m interested in tying in some kinematics to allow me to chain particles together.

Ideas abound. Time, unfortunately, does not.

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Wow! I was hoping Gallery Incomplet [Moved to incomplet.gskinner.com] would finalize for the Experimental category in the FitC awards, but finalizing in Self-Promotional as well is a total surprise. Check out all the awesome finalists, and vote for a people’s choice winner here.

I’m really looking forward to the conference. FitC is always a blast! I had a lot of fun delivering my talk (entitled “Playing With Yourself, for Fun and Profit”) at FlashForward, and hopefully it just gets better with practice. If you’re going, be sure to say hi!

John Grden, Director of Flash Platform for BLITZ Agency (and creator of Flasc and XRay) just posted a very positive review of gProject and how it has impacted his daily work. It’s awesome to read comments like this, especially from smart, super-capable Flash Developers like John. We never built gProject to make a lot of money, we just hoped to provide a tool that would help people in their job, and develop a model that would let us continue to enhance that tool. For more info on gProject, visit the gProject product page.

John was also extremely complimentary of some training I did with his team a little while back. He’s actually giving me a fat(ter?) head. I’m really psyched to hear that it’s made such a big difference in his career! (and by the way, I do offer on-site training if anyone is interested, just send me an email)

I swear I didn’t pay John for such a ringing endorsement of all things “g”, though I suppose now I’ll have to burn those incriminating photos… 🙂

A while back, I posed a challenge to devise a system that would let you save BitmapData objects to the server from Flash 8 (in AS2). Since then, I have seen a few great attempts, all of which were too slow and intensive to be of much use (imho). I’ve also seen one successful implementation by Craig Swann at webcamtastic (which is a great use of Flash 8 btw).

In the meantime, I’ve been working on my own system. I had 3 goals:

1. It must run quickly enough with webcam sized images (320×240) to not require chunking (spreading execution over multiple frames)
2. The upload to the server must be reasonably fast and small (<200kb for a 320×240 image)
3. The resulting image must be of reasonable quality

I managed to build out the compression/encoding routine in Flash a couple months ago, but then things got busy and we never finished the back-end support. In the last week we finally freed up a couple hours and put together a proof of concept. Overall I’m really happy with it.

It uses down-sampling (to 12bit color) and run-length compression to convert a BitmapData object into a UTF-8 string and sends it to the server via Remoting. It can convert a 320×240 image in just over one second on my G5, resulting in 50-150kb of string data. This is uploaded to the server in a few seconds (dependent on connection speed), and converted into a 50% JPEG, which is of pretty decent quality except for some banding on areas of solid color as a result of the downsampling.

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