New remix!

I made a new remix. This time it's P-Diddy and 666 Mafia.

Flashy drum machine

All you who are into electron music know what the Roland 909 is. This drum machine is with the 808 a legendary piece of electronics. Mostly famous for the hard beats of the Detroit house genre and is still the base for lots of techno and house tracks. The flash guru André Michelle has created a realtime 909 drum machine for you all to play around with. This is a must see (hear) for everyone that is the least interested in music and/or Flash. http://live.popforge.de/
Enjoy

Wii + Flash = WiiFlash

WiiFlash allows you to control your Flash games and applications with the revolutionary Wiimote.

It supports multiple Wiimotes, IR bar and Nunchuk and integrates very well with Papervision3D. All you need is a Bluetooth enabled PC and a Wiimote, of course.
If you want to play with it, go and get the code and subscribe to the WiiFlash mailing list.

New Red5 Version Released

There is a new version (0.6rc3) of the Open Source Red5 Flash server. This should be the last revision before the official 0.6 release which is due out in a little over a week.

The final 0.6 will be out just in time for John Grden and I to show off some really cool features of Red5 at FITC next weekend. If you are going to be at the conference please stop in. You won’t be disappointed, as they will be demonstrating some applications using midi, 3D, live multi-track recording and more.
Here are the details about the current 0.6rc3 release:

Major changes since 0.6rc2:
- Bandwidth control code completely refactored.
- Client buffering code completely refactored.
- Keyframe informations are cached so files don’t need to be reparsed
before playback.
- Connections from Flash Media Encoder and On2 Flix Live supported.
- Access to shared objects can be limited.
- Connections can provide a list of remote addresses. This is usefull
for proxied RTMPT connections.

…and of course a lot of bugs have been fixed as well. The complete
changelog can be found in the “doc” directory after the installation.

Installers:

Windows
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/setup-red5-0.6rc3.exe
MD5: 14229425035758379df0fc24f94045

47Debian
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/debian/0.6rc3/red5_0.6rc3-1_i386.deb
MD5: 041c4d388f3346bf435e6989cddecb1fMacOSX
http://red5.nl/installer/setup-red5-0.6rc3.dmg
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/mac/setup-red5-0.6rc3.dmg
MD5: 4b71b3789d5e05e2b2045d14bf770229

WAR (Java 1.5)
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/war/red5-0.6rc3-java5.war
MD5: 4d523f814580ee9fd69adad533e7bba1

WAR (Java 1.6)
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/war/red5-0.6rc3-java6.war
MD5: 4d773cf5dabfe12c915017625c17163c

Instructions on how to install Red5 on Gentoo are available at
http://overlays.gentoo.org/dev/bangert/wiki/Red5Gentoo

A tarball for all other systems is available at
http://dl.fancycode.com/red5/red5-0.6rc3.tar.gz
MD5: 86cf3778fd4512b2bad62e5de27d6e20

Further informations as well as mirrors for the downloads soon can be
found on the official homepage at http://osflash.org/red5

Please bring any bugs you encounter to our bugtracking system at
http://jira.red5.org

If you have questions about using Red5, please subscribe to the mailing
list at http://osflash.org/mailman/listinfo/red5_osflash.org

The first Papervision3D Game

John Grden has released the first 3D game ever using flash, papervision3D and Red5.
This excelent game has started a new era in flash and game development. It is also exciting to see the opens-source communication server Red5 in action.

Web 2.0 The Machine is Us/ing Us Video

Adobe Flash Media Encoder

Flash Media Encoder (FME) is a free Windows desktop program that enables webcasters to stream high-quality Flash Video content to a live audience using On2's VP6 codec.
Stefan Richter has written an informative article about this program, check it out!

North Face Demo Using Papervision3D

Lee from The Flash Blog has created a supercool demo of Movies and Papervision3D
It is made with AS3, and shows incredible speed!

Video player

I've been working on a video player, so here is a sneak preview!
Right now there are two visual effects, blur and light. I',m planning on extend the visuals along the way.

Loading 3D animations

Check this amazing example of how to load a collada animation into Papervision 3D.
Tim Knip has made some great proggress in bone and skeleton animations.



The collada-file is around 5 megs, so please be patient whilst loading

Parsing all keyframes is rather cpu-intensive, after file is loaded yoy have to wait another 20 secs or so.... you may encounter the infamous script-timeout alert of the flash player...

The best song right now - Karen Overton

So you wanna get started with PV3D?

Blitz Ageny wrote a nice tutorial about how to get started with Papervision 3D.
The article explains the first step in exporting your 3d model and how to handle textures for collada export.

http://labs.blitzagency.com/?p=93

Papervision3D - Phong shading

The PV3D engine gets more and more advanced, now with Phong shading!
Check this cool exeample:

Papervision3D - Video texture!

Those guys that are working in the Papervision3D collaboration are really amazing!
Here is a really cool 3D video example of what you can do with PV3D!



The man behind this example is Paul Spitzer.

A Layman's Guide to Flash Video Conversion

From time to time most (flash)developers need to handle web-video. If you don't have the Flash IDE to convert the movie files to .FLV (flash video) you will need a thrd party software.










I have used FFMPEG for a few years and I must say that it totally rocks and there are soo many developers that are most gratefull for this FREE program.

Alx Klive, has written a great guide about converting movies to .FLV using FFMpeg.
http://www.worldtv.com/blog/guides_tutorials/flv_converter.php/

Using Flash, WebService and Client Cookies

In a recent project i converted a .NET/Html login function to a Flash 8 login page.
My Flash first used the WebService and PendingCall to cummicate with the .NET webservice.

It all worked fine, except the fact that the login function uses a client cookie for authentication :P
As I found out, if you set a client cookie in a webservice it can't be accesible from the client.

I did not find any standard way to solve this yet, so i threw the webservice in the "thrash" and made a regular aspx page and used the LoadVars object.

If anyone have a smooth example to solve this please let us know =)

Save bitmap from flash

Using .NET/C# to generate bitmap from Flash 8

*update*
2006-06-20. I added a progress bar to make it more clear what is happening.

I have been searching for cool ways to use flash for creating gallery functions since it's both cool and easy to make great functions. And now when we can generate files on disk it is really usefull!

There are many examples around for this but I did not really find suitable code for me, using .Net/C#, so after messing around a bit i put together a nice solution using a .NET Web service. Please be patient, it will take a few seconds to generate the pixel array and send it to the web service.

Check it out:



The generated image will show in a new window.

Flash

function Generate(obj:MovieClip):Void
{
var pixelarr:Array = new Array()
var bmp:BitmapData = new BitmapData(obj._width, obj._height,false,0xffffff);
var myMatrix:Matrix = new Matrix();
//No positioning
myMatrix.translate(0, 0);
bmp.draw(obj.Picture,myMatrix);

var w:Number = bmp.width;
var h:Number = bmp.height;

for(var a=0; a ‹ h; a++)
{
for(var b=0; b‹w; b++)
{
pixelarr.push(bmp.getPixel32(b, a));
}
}
var wsdlURI = "http://www.2cool2care.com/flash/Service.asmx";
var myWebService:WebService = new mx.services.WebService(wsdlURI+"?WSDL");
var callback1:PendingCall = myWebService.SaveImage(pixelarr.toString(),h,w);
callback1.onResult = function(result)
{
//result is the file name
if(result)
{
getURL("http://www.2cool2care.com/flash/"+result,"_blank");
trace(result);
}
}
callback1.onFault = function(fault)
{
trace("Err: "+fault.faultstring)
}
}

C#

[WebMethod]
public string SaveImage(string Pixels,int Height, int Width)
{
//Create pixel array
String[] PxArr = Pixels.Split(',');
Bitmap MyImage = new Bitmap(Width, Height);
Graphics Gfx = Graphics.FromImage(MyImage);
Gfx.DrawRectangle(new Pen(Color.Red), new Rectangle(0, 0, Width, Height));
int k = 0;
//Loop and paint pixels
for (int i = 0; i ‹ Height; i++)
{
for (int j = 0; j ‹ Width; j++)
{
MyImage.SetPixel(j, i, Color.FromArgb(Convert.ToInt32(PxArr[k])));
k++;
}
}
//Randomize filename and save
Random RandomClass = new Random();
String Filename = RandomClass.Next().ToString() + ".png";
MyImage.Save(Server.MapPath(Filename), System.Drawing.Imaging.ImageFormat.Png);
return Filename;
}

I Hope someone finds this useful!

Take care,
Rob

Welcome!

Hi there!

Pretty cool that you found my bog, since it does not really exists.. that's right, i'm writing the first post right this second :)

Nevermind, what the first message really is about is internet radio.
To be more specific; Proton Radio.
These guys are streaming electronica 24/7, and sometimes it is totally awesome. Cool beats, baselines are mixed with well known songs such as Sweet dreams (yes, Eurythmics), and other classic tracs. I really reccomend!

*please note that some times the music suck a bit, but when you hear these remixes it's all worth it!*

Take care,
Rob

Directory Picker Pro in C#

In my latest project I needed a dialog for picking a directory. I searched through the web, but found nothing that looked nice. First of all I wanted a TreeView for display, and I wanted to view all system drives (with correct names and icons).

How to use:

DirPicker DP = new DirPicker();
DP.ShowDialog();
if(DP.Result==DirectoryPickerResponse.Ok)
{
MessageBox.Show("Ok: "+ DP.SelectedDirectory);
}
else
{
MessageBox.Show("Cancel!");
}

Simple huh?

Go to the url above for source code.

Error Logging in ASP.NET

All coders are quite familiar with error messages. They are quite handy when developing stuff but you dont want them around after the release of your system and the users dont really think they are too funny.

So, how can we get rid of these ugly messages and still get nice information when your functions break down? I have written some code (with some inspiration from other error logging examples) that provide your system with some nice features:

• On error, it redirects the user to a page that in English explains that an error has occurred.
• You can set the object to either send an email or write in the EventLog, or both.
• All the browser information is included in the email for support help.
• It can also present an Alert message to the user

Read the article:
http://www.c-sharpcorner.com/UploadFile/pohlrobert/ErrorLoggingInASPNet11142005060841AM/ErrorLoggingInASPNet.aspx