I ran a total of 7.4 km, and you know … I feel great,
really great…
I mean my limbs hurt, my ribs hurt and i’m sporting a rather unfashionible case of facial sun burn, but i feel great
Bring on the glasgow 10k…
Ant
<RANT>
I had some down time to I decide to play around with fractals, obviously I used flash 9 and tried again to unlearn my bad as2 ways.
After a while I realise my as2 are not bad, it’s just as3 is gay as in awful, not the perfectly ok and good the man-loving kind.
The shame is it comes down to only a few simple flaws :
The IDE tries to correct your “bad” ways for you
onPress and onRelease were productivity shortcuts, not problems, repeat ad infinite
The Compiler messages are mis-leading, come from too simple a perspective, and are often plain wrong.
yes the program has ended early however if you looked 2 characters right you would find an surplus bracket , which I would agrue is a more accurate description.
The internal documentation is awful, it’s lost all the human quality which made the previous flash IDEs stand out from the crowd, it looks like it’s a simple generic poor quality javadoc, plus the examples are so poor to the extreme they often don’t explain the core concepts, classes, functions, or their interactions.
Basically the Flash 9 product has all the hall marks of a rushed product, a false generic programming impostor standing where a truely unique IDE/coding/design product stood before.
There is nothing wrong with strictness, I’ve written 10k+ line programs in flash before, I know the bigger the program the more organisation and structure is required, however there is a flip side to this.
Innovation, creativeness, true learning, and general prototyping fun comes from a freeiness away from UML diagrams, away from meetings, namespaces and all other programming burocracies which have become so prominent in modern programming.
Then after you have completely mastered your domain and the knowledge needed to build the final appilcation, you can continue to build the final product in a strict, tradition software engineering fashion, which is as you should, for any professional appilcation.
My point is by unnecessarily closing the loops/hacks and other simple systems available in actionscript 2, the prototyping, innovation and creative side of flash has become harder, so hard many designers and html coders have given up completely trying, and this is definitely a bad thing and something which will only degrade any final products in flash, even if they run faster,
their’s a good saying in Scotland
You can’t polish a turd, and that’s all you’ll get without creativity…
anyway here’s the fractal
These are some experiments me, Jon Howard, and did for hackday, it turned out to be hackhours as we talked and ate pizza for most of the day.
DISCLAIMER: All this code was based on Jon Howards examples, the man is a genius, whenever i’m down in london I make sure I pop by to see whatever he’s been working on last,
last time it was a small movie of his kid running behind a tree in a forest, no biggie right, then he starts panning in 3D.
.
.
I’ve cleaned up the code, basically the idea was to create 3 flash appilcations which would sit on a website and provide the following apis for the javascript on the html page. All the setup for the webcam was to be one line of code.
here’s what we came up with…
BUTTON WEBCAM API
1. Nudge API this was for buttons hit by the person on the webcam:
callback_obj.onWebcamNudgeUp(NUDGE_DIRECTION_CONSTANTS)
callback_obj.onWebcamNudgeDown(NUDGE_DIRECTION_CONSTANTS)
.
MOUSE WEBCAM API
Would of put pictures for the demos did i mention the lack of webcam/Admin Rights I’ve been having
1 pointer demo multi pointer demo source and api docs here
2. Mouse API this was for objects moved by the person on the webcam (it would try to find a finger and follow it):
onWebcamPointerMove(x:Number,y:Number, pointer_index:Number)
.
MINORITY REPORT 2 HANDED MOUSE WEBCAM API
here’s a link to jon’s excellent example, didn’t quite manage to get this one done… demo1 demo2
And lastly the ambious minority report style where the code would try to understand where hands are, and we they are crasped together for the onDown and apart for the onUp:
onWebcamGrabMove(x:Number,y:Number)
onWebcamGrabUp()
onWebcamGrabDown()
.
I would of done more cleanup but due to the unique way the IT is setup in PQ, I can’t install a webcam to continue my experiments… alas the pictures/demo movies taken are from a macbook plugged in under someone’s desk (don’t ask)
The “HTML with SWF — through Localconnection To —> HTML with SWF — external interface —> JS on same HTML Page” examples included in source
Ant
Please note as in all my talks, these are my opinions not the bbc’s
Basically had a bunch of abertay folks round did a wee round u of
my various presentations and added a new one
.
The dummies guide to programmers,
Some days work sucks, it sucks so bad, then you wake up only to work some more, sleep, mate repeat ?
.
Some days you sit up and see the last site you were “admittedly indirectly” working on gets 17 millions hits
.
You know what those days dont suck, they don’t suck at all
http://www.bbc.co.uk/iplayer it rules
Ant
