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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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.

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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Hey Folks,

I’m here to happily announce a brand new Flash StartPage theme!

Not only did we fix some of the bugs that some of you may have found with the older version, but this one looks cool. 🙂

Head over to our brand new product page to check out how it looks and to download it now.

http://www.gskinner.com/products/startpage/

Cheers

We have just completed and released version 1.3 of our alternative project panel for the Flash authoring environment. gProject 1.3 adds significant new features requested by our user base, including:

• Locations: add directories to your project that do not reside within your main project directory. This can be done globally (for all projects), or per project. Locations will be displayed at the top of the file browser with a new blue folder icon. Network locations display with a variation of the blue icon.
• Network support: gProject now has full support for projects and locations that are on networks.
• Quick Project: this feature lets you create a new temporary project based on the front-most FLA. Great for times when you want to quickly take advantage of file browsing or standardized class creation without a permanent project. Quick projects have all of the features of full projects, and can be easily converted into a permanent project.
• Class path enhancements: the panel now supports new options for specifying class paths, including relative (ex. ../src/classes) and absolute paths. Regardless of the class path location, the classes directory will be aliased at the top of the file browser with a new green directory icon.
• Organize Library: Added a new utility menu item that will organize your FLA’s library based on linkages.

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Here at gskinner.com, we do a lot of panel development. For speedier development, we set the publish settings to spit the swf directly into the “Flash MX 2004/en/Configuration/WindowSWF/”directory. This way, once the panel was published once, you didn’t need to move any files, or even leave the IDE — you could simply close and open the panel.

One of the biggest panel development gotchas in Flash MX 2004, was that in order to refresh a panel, you needed to click the “close” button, and not use the right-click/close panel method. Using the latter would keep the panel open in memory, and not reflect changes when it opened.

When Flash 8 dropped, we were excited about the smarter custom swf panels, which detect changes in the swf, and refreshed only when changes were made. This means that no matter how you close the swf, it will not reload unless changes are made. That in itself is great, but a bug in Flash 8 refreshes only the graphics in updated swfs, and not the external classes. This made panel development in Flash 8 impossible. Until today, we had been doing most panel work in MX04, and in the cases where we need to use Flash 8, multiple restarts were necessary.

The solution?

Dock/undock the panel.

We found this totally by accident, but it works! This is the only way to completely refresh the panel, code and all in Flash 8.