Rob’s geeky discoveries Blog

15 months since my last post; I have been a remarkably busy man, sorry! Also I’ve got more and more into microblogging via Twitter (@robmccardle) and found that enough of an outlet for splurging public things about technology. Time for a minor update on my little corner of the web though, just in case you’re watching.

I left Glue and joined Iris in September where I’m now Head of Interactive. Still developing on a daily basis, I lead the 4 or 5 strong Flash team here (+ a bunch of freelancers) and my days are split between bookable AS3 dev time and a smorgasbord of brainstorming, pitch work, creative consultancy, scoping, team management and technical R&D (when we’re not too busy which isn’t as often as I’d like). We’re a gloriously flat organisation and use mongrel Photoshop/Flash/Copy/UX/AE/3DSMAX/Assorted Wizardry creatives instead of traditional agency pairs which is brilliant. They’re some of the nicest and most talented folk I’ve had the pleasure of working with and all’s well.

I went to FITC Amsterdam ByteArray workshop & conference http://bit.ly/5lSRzT which absolutely rocked. Herr’s Reitberger http://www.prinzipiell.com and Klingemann http://www.quasimondo.com in particular were outstanding. I left there feeling reinvigorated and creatively inspired as a great conference should.

So; August 2010 I just updated my WP installation to shiny 3.1 behind the scenes and am back in the glorious future.

TODO – Update my portfolio with the ~100 sites I’ve worked on since I last updated
TODO – Post several very useful snippets of code I’ve written in various languages
TODO – Tool up to battle the accursed spammers (main reason I let this blog slip)
TODO – Maybe some sort of JQuizzle WP Skin upgrade when I get a spare minute

I’m afraid I just deleted 36,786 comments this afternoon & reading any of them wasn’t an option so if you’ve trying to get hold of me for legitimate purposes I apologise. Please try the other social channels available via the links on this blog if you want to get in touch.

Warm Regards,

Rob

I got a mutiple face detection in Flash application running smoothly which is rather nice Thanks a million to Squidder and to the original author of the OpenCV file @ Intel, Rainer Lienhart. The deploy has  a zipped up XML document with Haar Classifier pattern recognition…

The AS3 unzips this data, grabs the blob/face detection data, polls frames from the camera and scans them for faces. When it finds them it will draw a rectangle around the detected faces and render them back on top of the video feed.

Check it out at http://bit.ly/HYkJF

A quick nose at the OpenCV Wikipedia stub will show you just how interesting this technology is as it’s used for:

• Ego-motion
• Face Recognition
• Gesture Recognition

FDT made knocking this together and sharing it on SVN in house at Glue a breeze. Hopefully I’ll knock something up with this and share some source other than what Squidder has already kindly posted.

Cheerio

There have been no posts from me for a while as I’ve been building the AS3 carousel section (eBay items) and a series of DoubleClick Ads utilising Twitter feeds in banners and Ebay listings in banners too.  The ads are in AS2 as the DoubleCick TABS system can’t yet take AS3 FYI (coming soon, Cheers Haden for the inside info!). This is all for The Sun Help for Heroes campaign where Ebayers can apply to become sellers and then donate their profits of the items they sell directly to the campaign. We’ve got loads of Celebrities to donate items too and there is a branded hub site pulling all this activity together live within eBay at:

•  http://members.ebay.co.uk/ws/eBayISAPI.dll?ViewUserPage&userid=the_sun_newspaper

In my rummagings on Cross Domain I discovered this good hack for accessing the pixels from Video on distributed CDN’s:

• http://jessewarden.com/2009/03/handling-crossdomainxml-and-302-redirects-using-netstream.html

More posts soon hopefully although my day to day link posting is all being done via Twitter these days so follow along if you’re interested in these things. I am endeavouring to keep my microblogging professional rather than letting you know I am ‘on the bus’/'popped to the shop’ etc so Flash goodies are promised 

I’ve done some work in the past with the Konfabulator (Now Yahoo! Widgets) widget patform and the workflow (no IDE) was that you used to rename the .widge files to .zip and decompress in order to view the JS and XML source. I was nosing at a few AIR apps today (Frienddeck and a Merapi AS3 to Java bridge application – in order to grab Skype metadata) and thought I’d give this method a test and yes you can kind of do the same with AIR! 

 Rename the .air to .zip and decompress (I use Winzip) – it throws an error but you get some source including a .swf which you can then run through a decompiler (I use Sothink) and you get the symbols (PNG’s, Movieclips etc…). This could be useful under certain circumstances so I thought I’d share. Cheerio

Doing some AS3 projects in FDT (Eclipse plug in) with FlashVars & SWFAddress and it’s so good being able to pop into a decent HTML Editor in the same IDE. It’s just as good as EditPlus & free. Lovely. Just drop the .jar in your plugins directory. Details and Sourceforge link here 

Firstly it would appear that Lord Carter’s vision for Digital Britain involves speed reducing, litigation fuelling ISP snooping DRM nonsense á la China, Syria and Australia read more here & behold the zeitgeist in action:

www.guardian.co.uk/technology/2009/feb/10/cory-doctorow-digital-britain

Absolutely not. We will march through the streets of Shoreditch!

And also IE8 actually introduces 2 new browsers to test in because IE7 ‘Compatibility Mode’ does not render sites in the same was as IE7 ????? See news here from IE’s marketing department and a pretty damning analysis from someone with more sense

Please don’t use IE ever! Chrome is blisteringly fast and doesn’t crash because if one tab hangs you can kill that process without losing the whole application and having to kill your session (though god knows what private data is collected while you use it) but I’m split between that and Firefox 3 as it’s got so many amazing tools and I love Mozilla. If Google would only add FFox plugin support though…

Absolutely brilliant forum over at PureMVC. I had some heavy questions today and Cliff & Jason helped me an awful lot with some wide ranging and tricky concepts.  Thanks for the assistance guys

Sometimes the simplest things in life are the greatest

This little beauty does exactly what it says on the tin. Thanks to Airtight Interactive for the spot and the consistently excellent blog

After having a fresh evaluation of all my workflows, tools and processes recently and after quite a bit of time analysing Flex Builder 3 and Flash Develop; I’ve finally settled happily on FDT3 in Eclipse and the Flash IDE as my compiler (Including the AIR & AS_CORE goodies you get for free in Flex & all my favourite 3rd party AS3 Libraries via Eclipse shared Libs). During the experience I discovered loads of useful bits and thought I’d catalogue and share:

FDT can be set up to work with the Flash IDE (no slow workflow of editing SWC’s externally like with Flex) so I can live edit on stage assets as well as code as all mongrel dev/designers like me like to do. It’s also easy to set up Ctrl+Enter straight from the Eclipse IDE (Thanks to Wezside for the handy tip) like I used to with Se|Py. If you’re going to go and install this you might find this useful when you’re locating your ASO & S.O folders & various installation folders you need.

There’s only one annoying thing in that I have to add the classpaths for my external Libs to the FLA document as well as in the FDT Project (see pic) although I think this issue may be fixed or at least easier to fix with Flash CS4 (which I’ve started using on other machines and is awesome) as the settings are XML based in that rather than locked in the binary FLA.

Minor bug bear though, everything else about it I’m really pleased with. Onward to more details of cool features; for example FDT ‘Templating’. As a quick example of when to use this; I like trace – she’s done me proud over the years but I wanted to set up an FDT Template to use trace as as a keyword to enter the following line of code instead to work with ThunderBolt Logger:

[code lang="actionscript"]Logger.info("Flash is calling: A simple string", myString);[/code]

Usually you want to trace the value of a variable that is right in front of you so rather than typing it you can highlight that word in Eclipse & the FDT template will populate it’s generated code snippet with the highlighted value and plonk it straight into your code.  E.G to trace out facade in the code below:

Highlight the word facade and press CTRL+SPACE then when you start typing the first few letters of the Template Command Name ‘tra…’ the list of suggestions populates including your custom Template:

You just click that and it inserts your snippet with it’s dynamic contents like so, et voila!

You create these rules via Eclipse -> Window -> Preferences -> FDT -> Editor -> Templates. Pic below shows syntax:

So thats cool. I also mentioned our linked Library set that Rob and I are working with, there’s loads of amazing Libraries out at the moment, here’s our list (still more to go e.g PaperVision and Flint but this is a good set of great libraries)…

As ever a big thanks to the creators of all of them. Tip of the hat to you all Sir’s

Eclipse is comfortable and solid and gives you access to an existing plug in network which I’ve already found really useful. LogWatcher http://graysky.sourceforge.net/ is a tool that lets you watch any text file on your system. I just pointed mine at the FlashLog.txt created by the FP10 debugplayer and it works just like FlashTracer for Firefox but within Eclipse. I love the ability to check projects directly out of SVN ino FDT via Subclipse and the fact that it’s so easy to work between Mac & PC platforms as Java is platform independent and I guess it’s also cool being familiar with a Java dev environment in case you want to port any existing cool stuff like Saqoosha did with FLARToolkit and some of the stuff Mario Klingemann’s BitMap manipulation stuff he mentioned porting in his lecture at FOTB08.

Flash Develop is wicked and I love to support Open Source but it hasn’t got close to the features FDT can (SWC Browsing, Refactoring, Eclipse base benefits & general subjective tool use pleasure) and V3Beta9 wouldnt save my settings properly

Flex for me is nasty as the split between design and dev is skewed away from the fine traditions of Flash. CSS? No thanks. I won’t miss the bloat and the framework (MXML, yuck) but the thing that I will really miss is the incredible Flex Builder 3 View Source creation wizard which I love. http://livedocs.adobe.com/flex/3/html/help.html?content=build_7.html

I first spotted this on one of Tink’s tutorials and he’s done some cool patches for it too but if anybody knows a way of getting the com.adobe.viewsource.ViewSource classes and zip/framework building scripts working with FDT (On either Windows or Mac), please leave a comment! Hope that was useful to somebody. Cheers

The latest site I’ve been working on has been live in Germany for a week or so now and is running nicely so thought I’d do a quick post in case anyone reading is interested in what I’ve been building lately…

If you can read Deutsch – the live site is http://www.blivebeatology.de – the version I’m linking is a showcase version in English so you’ll have a clue what’s going on. The basic premise of this site is that you upload a picture of your face and get back a video of yourself beatboxing but there’s a hoard of other functionality to explore and a big social element including a Facebook App so you can post your generated videos and share amongst your friends. The amazing video assets are all custom shot by Superglue and we’re very proud of it all. A holiday is in order for me but I shall probably do a bit more of a write up on it at a later date.

So… if you want to try it out or see an example grab a passport style photo of you – higher res and higher contrast the better ( sub 500KB) or if you don’t have one to hand, save this one below to your desktop. You’ll need a decent video player like VLC to watch .FLV directly but our system also generates an AVI. I’ve linked the image below to the generated AVI for this image and you can watch the FLV for it here if you prefer.

The back end will map the image onto one of 4 3D meshes, analysing it and applying one of several matrices to get the best fit and generate the videos on the back end which then send it back to you in Flash. We’re also creating 3GP videos for mobiles which are downloaded via a QR code link and allowing Webcam upload as a photo submission method so have been very busy.

Enjoy the beatboxery