r o b l o g

PayPal merchant offers

admin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:45:25 +0000

Papervision was used to create a rich interactive showcase of offer for paypal merchants. The site is entirely xml driven, has multiple languages and uses swfaddress for browser history and deep linking.

PayPal merchant offers

admin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:45:25 +0000

RedDoorProduction

admin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:33:21 +0000

This brief for this site was to design and develop a simple image gallery of print and photography work. I used slideshowpro (ssp) director as a CMS and hooked directly into the XML feeds for the front end. I was very impressed with the simplicity of ssp and intend to use it again for future projects.

RedDoorProduction

admin — Fri, 24 Oct 2008 09:33:21 +0000

GuerrillaMedia

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:54:34 +0000

This site has sentimental attachment to me as the previous site was my first commercial website. It has been completely rebuilt, but still retains the same accordion interface. The audio is a DJUK original.

Sparkler

admin — Thu, 28 Aug 2008 13:39:00 +0000

Here is a demo of a sparkler effect I created recently for client work.

EIM

admin — Wed, 13 Aug 2008 11:54:22 +0000

Website interface concept developed at Frost Digital for Arpad Busson’s funds management company EIM. The interactive logo was developed in papervision.

House of Cards - stereoscopic

admin — Wed, 23 Jul 2008 00:35:39 +0000

I downloaded the animation data from Radiohead’s House of Cards music video from google code and rendered a frame in papervision. It took me about 10 attempts to download one of the zip files, but when I did manage to download it, you get a csv file for each frame of the music video. I open the csv in excel, and it show four columns of data, x; y; z; and intensity. I then formatted the data so I could dump it straight into actionscript as array data: p.push({x:X, y:Y, z:Z, c:C}); . I had to extend the ParticleField Object Class to allow me to drop the 3D data points from the animation Data. I then rendered two scenes side by side, each with a different camerax position to create a stereoscopic view. If you cross your eyes it really does look 3D.

I have added it as an experiment at robshearing.com

House of Cards

admin — Tue, 22 Jul 2008 04:50:43 +0000

Point cloud data of Thom Yorke from the House of cards video clip. The data from the video clip has been made available on google code. There are two variations, the first is a steroescopic viewer where you need to cross your eyes to see the composite 3d view. The second is an attampt to emulate the viewer on google code.

Arithmetic

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:25:36 +0000

Website for a video production agency. The site is built in AS3 and uses swfaddress for deep linking. There is also a fileshare application to allow the agency and client to upload job related files and make comments.

CheatStreet

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:12:28 +0000

Platform style game built for a microsoft student offer campaign. The game features performace enhancements including bitmap caching and culling of off-screen vectors. There is also an encrypted algorithm for securely updating scores in the database.

GPYR - showcase

admin — Sat, 19 Jul 2008 13:06:31 +0000

Website to showcase the work done by GPYR. The site has some interesting features including a voting mechanism that works only for internal staff and an archive of previous months work. The site also has a CMS to allow producers to easily update the showcase.

AMFPHP vs MediaTemple

admin — Wed, 25 Jun 2008 07:46:41 +0000

I just set up AMFPHP on mediaTemple (gs) and I ran into a bit of a problem where I couldn’t get any messages back from AMFPHP. I’d get an error of NetConnection.Call.BadVersion which apperas as faultCode:INVALID_AMF_MESSAGE in the service broswer.
It turned out to be an incompatability with php 5.2 on the MT server. The solution was simple and elegant, I had to make an entry in the .htaccess file to enforce a specific php version. The answer is on knowledgebase:

AMFPHP incompatibilty with PHP 5.2

Pay Calculator

admin — Sun, 08 Jun 2008 12:10:51 +0000

I have put up a new site, paycalculator.com.au that will calculate your net pay. It works for Australian incomes (single) and has the latest tax brackets. It also shows 2006-2007 and 2007-2008 financial years so you can see how the tax system has changed over the years. My pay is going up by $50 a month!

I used the same css as this blog but updated the header swf feature. I also added a more information section to help explain how the calculations work. There is a links page too, but it’s a bit dry.

I built this in responce to a lack of a good, simple, accurate online tax calculator. During my research, I became a bit suspicious of the calculator on the ATO website, as the numbers just don’t add up! I think there is a rounding problem that causes the calculations to drift. Moreover, all their calculators are awkward to use and often not complete or out of date. Having said this e-Tax rocks.

I’m also thinking of building a google gadget for it. I have a resized version ready to go. Building a google gadget is a pain. During the build I found that their API documentation was out of date and I also get a “can’t publish” error without explanation for no logical reason. At that point I gave up.

Arithmetic

admin — Mon, 26 May 2008 00:25:35 +0000

I have just finished my first proper AS3 site (about time).
I inherited some work done by another developer, but it was left in a state - I think it got a bit too overwhelming for him. So I decided to rebuild the site structure and add a layer of logic behind the code. I used a simple form of mvc where the control and view were grouped. I also built it with swfAddress in mind. This added considerable complication as I have to have a single point of entry from which I could build the site from. The site structure was also described in xml so that it could be content managed - currently manually. I decided not to use E4X as the xml data’s structure was required. I have used E4X back in AS2, it is good for pulling data out of xml, but not so useful as a way of simply parsing xml into object data. I build a rock-solid XML parser in AS2 which would deserialise xml data into object/array structure. It has been used on hundrends of little jobs over the years and saves hours of development time. But as soon as I step into AS3 all my AS2 libraries are made redundant.
I learnt alot about AS3 whilst building the site. The hardest part was probably dealing with errors - in my case errors which occurred when I had to deal with a dynamic menu structure which may have 0, 1 or n nodes. In AS2 you can get away with using an undefined state as a valid condition, but in AS3 it will trigger a nasty error that will only express itself at runtime. Ouch.

Arithmetic

The next phase of development will involve building a fileshare component to allow files to be uploaded/downloaded and commented upon by an administrator and client.

movember

admin — Mon, 05 Nov 2007 05:10:32 +0000

i ♥ etsy

admin — Tue, 18 Sep 2007 06:03:38 +0000

Etsy
Buy Handmade
shearing

Lines & Ribbons

admin — Sat, 01 Sep 2007 12:05:23 +0000

Some experiments with drawing swarms of lines. The technique was developed on Eric Natzke way of drawing tangent curves.

JSON - by the code for the code

admin — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 13:17:17 +0000

Just finished building the json flash feed:
http://blog.robshearing.com/wp-flash-json.php

I used a handy php JSON parser to encode the string. I’m not entirely convinced about JSON. Evangelists go on about it’s inherent readability, however characters have to be escaped and this results in some messy looking text. I see this notation best suited for code and not for humans to read. It’s best if it’s encoded by code and then decoded by code and never sees the light of day. In this respect it is a very readable notation, lightweight and easy to ingest.

For example:
encoding (using PHP JSON parser):
$output = $json->encode($json_feed);

decoding (using adobe’s AS3 JSON parser):
var myObject:Object = JSON.decode( jsonString );

I don’t think it’ll ever replace xml. If I have to manage the data myself I will opt for xml - I can add comments, I can add CDATA, I can waste time deciding whether to use attributes or text nodes and I can take pleasure in making it look nice. But if I just want to shift a big chunky object from one platform to another I’l be encoding with JSON.

Mesh wave

admin — Sun, 26 Aug 2007 07:59:00 +0000

This surface of tiles uses a sample of perlin noise to generate the organic wave motion. Inspired by the MSNBC’s news visualiser.

photos test

admin — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 13:51:59 +0000

Some photos

Custom rss feeds

admin — Sat, 25 Aug 2007 09:09:08 +0000

I’m working on setting up this wp blog to manage the blog and to act as a CMS for a flash site. I have a Category Visibility plugin that hides website posts and only shows blog entries in the blog. For the non-blog posts I’m adding some custom fields that will be used to link to assets. I can then expose these categories to the flash site via rss.

Blog posts:
http://blog.robshearing.com/wp-rss2.php
or
http://blog.robshearing.com/feed
or
http://blog.robshearing.com/?feed=rss2

Actionscript experiments feed:
http://blog.robshearing.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=8

Work feed:
http://blog.robshearing.com/wp-rss2.php?cat=7

I am however finding flaws in this model. The problem is twofold - dealing with those custom fields and making my life easier when I parse the data in flash. I’m thinking of either adding the meta data to the rss feeds, making a custom feed, or make a bespoke JSON feed. I don’t want to add meta to the rss as it may start to break the feeds compliance, also I don’t want no trouble if I upgade WordPress. Making a custon rss fleed is boring, so I’m going to attempt to build a bespoke JSON feed…

AS3 - learning the ropes

admin — Mon, 20 Aug 2007 00:18:27 +0000

I’m getting stuck into AS3 to build my new site and it’s not as straight forward as I first thought. Almost everything I have learnt and taken for granted I now have to revisit and rebuild. Generally however, I’m pleased with all the new coding procedures and class re-writes that adobe have given in the updated language.
Here are three interesting ‘features’ I discovered yesturday:

Stage
Stage can only be accessed though a visible displayObject.
I discoved this when tying to build an AS3 stageManager class. I didn’t want to make the class extend a sprite and have to add it to the displayList. So I decided to pass it a displayList object as a reference that it uses to measure the stage size.

AS3 Singleton
You can’t make the constructor private! So the old singleton is broken. I googled this problem and found that many people pass the constructor a private variable or method so it can only be successfully implemented internally. Problem is that the class looks a bit messy. Then I discovered another implementation by Daniel Hai on http://www.onflex.org/code/

package { public class Singleton {


                private static var instance:Singleton = new Singleton();
                public function Singleton()

                {
                        if( instance ) throw new Error( "Singleton and can only be accessed through Singleton.getInstance()" );

                }

public static function getInstance():Singleton { return instance; } } }

E4X and namespace
I was attempting to read a feed from here: http://kuler.adobe.com/kuler/API/rss/get.cfm?listtype=rating
If you look closly the swatches are on nodes under a kuler namespace:
…

…

468966

…

…
I haven’t come accross this notation before. In AS2 I could just barge in and parse the nodes as “kuler:themeID”. So this led me to discover the namespace class. Whereby, if I understand it correctly, you target the nodes within a specific namespace. Combined with the beauty of E4X, my query became:
var kuler_ns:Namespace = xml.namespace("kuler"); var hexList:XMLList = xml..kuler_ns::swatchHexColor.text();
Isn’t that pretty.

astronaut - music and flickr

admin — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 13:40:41 +0000

A series of tag searches from flickr is done against lyrics to a song. Results are unexpected and amusing.

http://www.avoision.com/experiments/astronaut/

This has got me thinking. I might have a go at ths some time, afterall I’ve already built the engine:
flickr rss reader

Eames’ information machine

admin — Tue, 07 Aug 2007 12:10:03 +0000

A short animated film written, produced & directed by Charles & Ray Eames for the IBM Pavilion for the 1958 Brussels World’s Fair. The movie topic is the computer in the context of human development, more specifically it traces the history of storing & analyzing information from the days of the cavemen to today’s age of electronic brains.

Lee Brimlow on AIR

admin — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:46:43 +0000

A video has just been added to the onAIR tour:
http://onair.adobe.com/blogs/videos/2007/08/01/lee-brimelow-transitioning-to-the-desktop-with-adobe-air/

Lee is great and he works at such a great company too. As for all this AIR, I really have to get started. The results are so much similar to ZINC, but with a much cleaner interface (and I presume more stable and less quirky)

Erik Natzke - new hero

admin — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 14:26:43 +0000

I heard a lot about Erik Natzke way back in flash 5 days. He had a really intersting experimental showcase site. I remember his work was massively respected. Then he disappeared - his site went down and I didn’t hear much about him. So the other day I stumbled over a video of his at FITC in 06.
http://video.google.ca/videoplay?docid=-1458352919661594741&q=fitc
This guy is a true master of the flash meduim and is always pushing it to it’s limits. His work was on his site for a while but now it redirects to his blog:
http://jot.eriknatzke.com/

I loved his swarms and ribbons. So I tried to replicate:
swarm_1
swarm_2
ribbon

The Campaign Palace

admin — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 11:35:01 +0000

Website for an advertising agency, The Campaign Palace, as part of a larger brand redesign in 2007. The site features a 3D background effect, blur transitions, video and a chandelier-inspired image tile transition effect. The site also has a flash CMS site that allows updating of all the copy, images and video on the site.

Faces of Windows Server

admin — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 08:13:52 +0000

Site to promote launch of Windows Server 2008 Beta. The site allowed users to upload an image, which became part of a composite face to represent the averaged face of all the users contributing to the Beta software trial. Bespoke face detection software was used to create the composite face and a morph of the uploaded image into the composite. This was a global site which was customised for 49 locales containing 24 languages, including, Japanese, Vietnamese, Chinese, Romanian and Hebrew (RTL - reverse directional). The solution avoided the use of heavy overhead of localised typefaces, and a system was created that allowed a new language to be added within an hour.

Trying to customise WP

admin — Sat, 04 Aug 2007 08:05:01 +0000

The style of this site comes from Brazil. I don’t know who he is, I just spotted the style at video.onflex.org. I have however got really stuck into customising it for my own pleasure. I have stripped out all that sidebar nonsence and categories and reduced it to a simple clean interface. I also added a little flash piece instead of an image.

Now, I’m not all that fussed about maintaining a blog, I doubt anyone will read it. Primarily, I just want to lean about the software. But more than that, I also want to use it as a CMS for my new site.
I’ll use the title and post for the heading and description, but I also need a link to the flash/image/flv/java file assets. For this I’ll use a custom field. When that is sorted I’ll need to add hidden categories for two of the features on the site - work and experiments. I can then get feeds of these categories that can be use to poulate the flash site. Nice.

Earth Sampler

admin — Sat, 21 Jul 2007 05:13:15 +0000

Random snapshots from Google earth. Built with my own tile mapping API, it interfaces with googles Keyhole map servers. The locations are semi random as I have defined regions which strips of tiles are sampled from.

My first AS3

admin — Thu, 03 May 2007 12:31:08 +0000

I saw this mesh wave thing, and I thought it would be a good effect to replicate in AS3. I had a good idea that the wave used perlin noise mapped onto a 3D perspective. Check it.
I built it in AS2 to see the speed difference and it was remarkable. It was a good learning experience to learn AS3. With AS3, the language has finally matured to be in the same league as JAVA and C#.
Next on the list is papervision, Digg API and that Flex CMS…

Apollo keynote with Kevin Lynch

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:33:29 +0000

Apollo is the future. It brings websites to the desktop.

http://video.onflex.org/2007/03/19/apollo-camp-keynote-from-kevin-lynch/

Human pole position game

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:29:40 +0000

This is a stop-motion animation of an old pole position game where people sitting in a grid of chairs are used to render the pixel graphics. It took 6 hours and required 600 images. Now I think I could do the same type of thing in flash and make it interactive…

Fontifier

admin — Tue, 03 Apr 2007 13:11:15 +0000

Fontifier turns your own handwriting into a typeface. You print out a sheet that has all the standard characters laid out with a space for you to you write in (or draw in). Then you scan it, upload the image and the software turns it into a font!

This font is made with my wife’s lovely handwriting:

www.fontify.com