by Grant Skinner

Double Finalist in FitC Awards!

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!

by Grant Skinner

gProject Review by John Grden

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… 🙂

by Grant Skinner

Microsoft MIX06 in Review

I returned home from the Microsoft MIX06 conference in Las Vegas last Thursday (I meant to blog sooner, but I’ve been busy catching up after the trip). It was a good chance to take a look at what Microsoft is working on with Sparkle and their other interactive media (“Expression”) tools. It was also a great chance to hang out in Vegas (and play a lot of Halo) with friends from the Flash world.

A quick thanks to Lynda.com and Microsoft for getting everyone together, and exposing us to the new products. Thanks to Adobe for giving us somewhere to hang out in Vegas, and hooking up the XBoxes. Fragging Mike C, Mike D, Guy, Aral, Chafic, Erik, Beau, Danny, Hoss et al was a lot of fun. Coming in second in the Halo 2 tournament was even better – the final game with Guy was a real adrenaline rush!

Here’s my quick rundown on the products MS showed, my apologies if any of this is factually incorrect, I’m just going from my hasty notes and memories:

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by Grant Skinner

Saving BitmapData to Server in Flash 8

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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by Grant Skinner

Source Code: Image gOOifier

I promised I would be blogging and releasing more source code soon, so here’s a start…

A while back I posted my “gOOify Mike Chambers” Flash 8 experiment, which let you distort an image by “pushing” the pixels around with your cursor – similar to Kai Powergoo or Photoshop’s liquify command. Since then I have had a lot of requests for the source code, so I cleaned it up, and you can download it below.

Feel free to modify it and use it in your non-commercial projects (attribution/credit is appreciated, and I would love to see what people build with it). If you’d like to use it in a commercial application, send me an email and we’ll work something out.

Click here to download the source code.

by Grant Skinner

Create File from Template in OSX with Right Click

There have been a few occasions when I envied Windows users’ ability to create a new empty file within explorer by simply right clicking. Why can’t we do this in the Finder on Mac OSX?

Browsing the forums on MacNN, I encountered this post on the issue, which spurred me to apply my limited AppleScript knowledge (mainly gained while trying to create my flCompile workflow) to create a solution. The result is the “QuickFiles” Automator workflow (aka context menu extension), which takes it one step better than Windows by letting you define template files.

To use QuickFiles, simply open the folder that you wish to copy a template into. Right click in the finder window (or on a file in the window), and select “QuickFiles” from the “Automator” menu. Select the template you wish to copy using the mouse or keyboard (arrow keys, or type the first few letters of its name), and click ok (or press enter). The template will be copied into the folder and selected. Hit enter to rename the file, or cmd-O to open it.

The list of file templates is controlled by placing template files in a “QuickFiles Templates” folder in your Library. Read the Read Me for full information.

Disclaimer

I take absolutely no responsibility for any problems you experience or damages (direct or indirect, including but not limited to loss of data) caused by using these workflows. I have tried my best to make sure they are totally safe, but I am not an AppleScript expert or a command line guru. Use at your own risk.

IMPORTANT NOTE

This version of QuickFiles does not work with OSX 10.6. I have released a vastly improved version of QuickFiles which you can read about and download here.

You can download this handy extension by clicking here. Be sure to read the supplied Read Me for installation and usage instructions.

by Grant Skinner

Gallery Incomplet Wins a Rubber Arrow

Last night was the Flash Film Festival at FlashForward 2006 Seattle. Gallery Incomplet [Note: Moved to incomplet.gskinner.com] was a finalist in the experimental category along with three other great sites. I was really thrilled to win another rubber arrow (number three) for a site which has been so much fun to build – it helps validate the general thrust of my session: that experimental work is one of the best ways to learn Flash and gain community exposure.

I’d like to thank my awesome team back in the office for helping to free up enough of my time so that I could do these experiments. I’d also like to thank my wonderful wife for being very tolerant with me ignoring her, staying up late, and for pretending to be interested when I’d show her half completed experiments.

The conference has been really great so far – very well organized, and some awesome sessions. I think my session went well, except some technical difficulties with my webcam. There seems to be a lot of people here (I’d guess it is the most in a few years). I’ve definitely done a bit too much partying though… I’m ridiculously tired today… but it’s been fun. 🙂

Make sure you check out the other finalists, particularly the people’s choice award winner, Dofus. Anyway, my battery is running down, so I’m out.

by Grant Skinner

Gallery Incomplet updates for Jan-Feb

I haven’t made a huge number of additions to Gallery Incomplet [Note: Moved to incomplet.gskinner.com] since my last update. This is because I’ve been really busy since the holidays teaching my London workshop, prepping for FlashForward and FitC, moving into the new office (more info on that soon), releasing gProject 1.3, and all the usual work / personal things that normally keep me busy.

I’ve been meaning to post code for some of the newer experiments, but prepping/documenting source code for release is a significant undertaking and I just haven’t had time. Now that things have settled down to a dull roar, I plan to do more blogging. This will include releasing a lot more source code and tutorials (ie. real content).

There have been a few notable additions though, and I’ve done a fair amount of work updating the engine with hidden features which are described below.

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