sakri rosenstrom blog

Thursday morning, just as I was about to press “publish”, my swisscom *cough*RIPOFF*cough* connection CUT OFF. So, one day late, my highlights:

Sunday

• Step off the plane, get immediately ripped off by some dodgy taxi, good start! (When I say ripped off, I mean an expensive, yet scenic drive through Milan instead of the 5 minutes it took me on my way back )
• Arrive at hotel just after dinner was finished, but in time to meet the organizers and some of the guys. I think the ‘open mood’ for discussion (which prevailed the entire conference) kicked off here.
• Played a game of pool at the hotel bar… The Finnish/French alliance (Cyril and I) pretty much pwned and humiliated the Flemish/Italian one (Koen and Marco ) Good Times

Monday

• After the keynote I saw Michael Labriolas “Dense and Hot: An Introduction to your applications start up”. I had read some rave reviews about his presentation in Atlanta, and the session (to be honest) did get me quite Dense and HOTT . I’d say it was the most entertaining presentation of the entire conference, but also amongst the most informative. Michael put some fairly complex ideas into easily digestible slides… thumbsup!
• I also saw Marco and his Colleague Mattia give a talk about the combination of Flex and Ajax. Ajax isn’t really my cup of tea, but connecting to the html/js side of things is necessary from time to time. I found this a useful and well prepared session.
• Following the sessions, I spent the rest of the day in my hotel room, polishing up my own presentation. And when I say polishing up my own presentation I mean working on one ridiculous example…

Tuesday

• My own presentation. I was quite happy with what I had prepared, I had already test driven it once at nascom. What I wasn’t ready for was the 600×400 resolution on the beamer With awaiting eyes on me, live, I actually edited y positions of display objects to make my examples somewhat intelligible. This kind of screwed my flow, but I got some positive feedback later on so I guess I managed… like I said, anyone can deliver slides, it takes a REAL MAN to jump back and forth from Powerpoint to Flexbuilder, and actually do some coding in between :D. Thanks cyril for the photo (above)
• If I felt bad about my troubles, such feelings quickly vanished while enjoying Neil Webbs Cairngorm presentation. Neil had no technical difficulties. As a matter of fact his presentation was quite brilliant, and very very funny, only, it seemed I was the only one laughing at his jokes Truly, I’ve never seen such good humor fall on deaf ears… cultural differences I suppose
• Tuesday night was well spent at the hotel lobby. They stopped serving drinks, but the conversation flowed… I don’t think I’ll ever forget Tomislav Pokrajcic and his “Croatian Saying”

Wednesday

• I was disappointed by the cancellation of Ivan “the Mars Spider” Zambanellos presentation. With a name like “Mars Spider”, who wouldn’t be disappointed? This was easily made up for by Rostislav Hristovs presentation about SWFAddress. I will certainly be looking at SWFAddress and his examples again, particularly the wordpress example. And, thanks for the T-Shirt!!!
• In the afternoon I checked out Christo Jolif talking about the ILOG Elixir components. It was very nice to see him do some live coding. The products are rock solid. A little expensive. But rock solid.
• Dan Thomas was The final speaker of the conference… This turned out to be a fantastic presentation. It started off with Dan just listing “best practices”. I’m not sure if it was 100% intentional, but the presentation turned into a kind of an open forum, lead and moderated by Dan. Lots of great input from Neil, Robin, Michael and Sam

As promised, my slides and examples can be downloaded from here (warning, 16 megs, apologies for not optimizing my ppt images).

HUUUUUUUUGE thanks to both John and Tom, you guys ROCK!!!

All in all, I learned a lot, made a lot of new contacts and I hope to see all of you again at random occasions at random locations

I’ve been listed on the homepage for a while now, I finally penned the “blurb” to my presentation which is :

Invalidation Routines, Pounded into your cranium once and for all!

The Flex Framework Invalidation Routines are a core tool in a visual component authors kit. This is a relatively small topic, yet, one often skimmed through, frequently misunderstood, or worse, entirely ignored. This presentation will go through the basics in a comprehensive manner, then dig deeper into the details and follow up with several real world examples, with an underlying emphasis on the common battles between designers and developers. The goals are to appreciate the mechanism, how and when to use it, and furthermore to understand where things can go wrong. “Invalidation Routines, Pounded into your cranium once and for all!” is targeted at developers dealing with visual components, from entry to mid level, but will hopefully also contain some gems for the seasoned veteran.

I have to say I’m really looking forwards to this! The topic might sound a little dry (what flex topics don’t? ), but I’ve already got a bunch of ideas to liven it up and hopefully produce a memorable presentation. The reason I picked the topic is simple: Flex has people coming from the developer world and from the flash world, the invalidation routines are alien to both It’s not rocket science, but a ‘must know’.

See you there

…well, not really…

As a devout believer in the temple of RSS, I saw the papervision blog entry : 25 Cool Things to Do with Papervision3D way back in December. Three weeks later I now realize the Pioneer Kuro project I worked on was featured!

Sadly, I did pretty much none of the 3d work (which is the sole reason it’s featured), that credit goes to Patrick Pietens. He created the cube, I implemented it into the Flex app. Still, it was quite a piece of effort, orchestrating the loadings, transitions from papervision to rendered 3d flv movies, to the actual sections of the site. This was a thesedays project designed by Valentijn Destoop, I was outsourced from nascom to do the actionscripting.

apparently the site even received 3rd place at the “uber flash awards”! This is some german initiative… Big time, HUGE…must be… only, I can’t even google a link to it (news from Patricks blog, which is only readable through rss). (btw, Patrick, if you happen to read this, thanks for the kind comments on your blog Was a pleasure to work with you!)

UPDATE: Apparently the .swf was missing… it’s there now. I realize many of you spent sleepless nights shredding your nails with ye sharp fangs. Crisis is now over.

This is actually the first experiment I wanted to do, but I got too excited about the anti-aliased one. Not much to talk about here, just runs through the pixels and represents them as Cube instances. This time I used Tweener for the possibility of “auto animating” Reminds me of that crappy windows 3d text screensaver, except, I don’t have shading… Hopefully I’ll build the courage to install great white soon… Maybe I could be like the cool kids and add fire to it too

There is some ‘flickering’ going on between the individual Cubes. If time permits, I’d like to optimize this to combine as many Cubes into “stretched” cubes as possible. I’ve got a bunch of ideas stemming from these two experiments, hopefully I’ll be blogging a plenty

The mindblowing beyond LOBOTOMY Aliased 3d text toy

Oh yeah, the code is shite, experiment stylee… the useful bits should be easy enough to extract. Just right click view source, then select “TextPixelsToCubes.mxml”.

I’ve been wanting to do this for ages… Matter of fact, this was meant to be my “end of the year” post for 2007, but you know…

So, same old trick descending my sleeve. Create text, grab BitmapData from it, loop though its pixels and represent them with DisplayObjects.

Again, the ‘trick’ is to check which pixels are transparent. An interesting quality of Anti-Aliased text is that the “rounded” or “Anti-Aliased” pixels are the color of the text, except with varying transparency, meaning the text looks good on any color background.

I took advantage of this by generating “thicker” rows in the Z plane for darker pixels… Hard to explain in words, but let’s allow the screenshots and the app speak for themselves.

Click here to fiddle with my toy…

click here, or right click app for source

Naturally, the number of Planes makes it more or less impossible to animate the camera with an EnterFrame or so… It’s still cool to see the camera move around using direction keys. Perhaps with Seb Lee-Delisle’s frame by frame movie generator thingy-ma-bob…

Oh yeah, you’ll probably need a decent screen resolution for this… I didn’t bother optimize, for those screen challenged readers, I apologize.

Enough buzzwords for you? I wanted to use BlazeDS, but the buzzword overlords were not that kind with me Just good ol’ E4X.

Two years ago we (nascom) made the same thing for club vaio. Unfortunately the old version is gone . It was as2 and some “custom 3d” (lol). Customized snowflakes has been done before by others (can’t find links), Seb Lee Delisle made a more realistic snowfall a few weeks back (thumbsup), but this project still has it’s merits The project was sold, with the premise of reskinning the old app, but it quickly became apparent that rebuilding from scratch using a more modern approach would be faster. (How things change in just two years!? ) Using Flex and Cairngorm made the development extremely rapid and enjoyable. I spent 6-7 working days on this. I was encouraged to go for papervision (and tweener) by Lee Brimelow’s papervision3d experiments, mainly I was impressed with how he could achieve such a nice effect with so little code.

Anyway, here’s the screenshots :



Snow fall, I have a basic ‘random wind engine’ using tweener. I set the max number of flakes to 25… on crappier machines more meant creeping slow death.



I’m quite happy with the “random floating” of the detail flakes…

That’s supposed to be my favicon smiley d00d… quite the artist I am…

Behold, The Hercules-Trophy Snowflakes greeting app!

deep link directly to the flake pictured above

Ok, Holidays start here. Happy holidays, more exciting blogging in 2008!

Ice Cube, How… How could you?

I’ve always liked you. Even after Anaconda, and your last attempts I heard on the radio, I still remember… Jumping on my bed, memorizing lyrics and blasting ‘Straight Outta Compton’

“Flash is outta here”… It’s not so much the message, it’s the messenger. I don’t care what Ice Cube thinks about flash, it’s just so damn surreal to hear him say it?! He might as well have said, “Singleton pattern is for Suckas!”. People outside working hours just don’t say things like that. Period. It’s wrong. It’s like seeing your teacher outside school. Or your grandpa talking about sex. Ice cube?! wtf?

Will Adobe respond? Too bad Eazy-E is dead? Maybe Snoop Dogg could churn out some dope ass AIR apps… East Coast West Coast? Puff Daddy? Browser wars are so passe, puhleaze, I for one welcome our new MTV Gangsta driven RIA Platform warring Overlords!!!!11

Last week I started preparing an “Example Cairngorm app” that I could train the new nascom flash team with. Last night, I modified it :

Click to placate your Ice Cube Hate

There’s an HttpService which points to a php script, which in turn returns insults scraped from some online “insult generator” pages. These are displayed over randomly rotating screen shots from the offending video . If the Cairngorm training does happen, I may continue work on this masterpiece!. “AddInsult” (yeah baby, web2.0). “Viewed insults” screen with a datagrid (so sexy :D) . Maybe some HOTT text effects, tomato cannon, even some Fire?!! As usual, you can right click for source, prolly not worth it though. Some original code, some source from here and there…

If you’re new to Cairngorm, David Tucker has some well written tutorial style articles. Not to stray from the topic of Ice Cube, but I’ve been weighing PureMVC and Cairngorm… I lean more towards Cairngorm, but am not crazy about it. There’s a funny (but makes a point) posting at the bottom of this blog entry concerning these two frameworks. But that’s another topic.

Go insult Ice Cube!

For shizzle, ice cube is more this than this

One upping myself here… happens everyday.

I overcame the font size limitation of my previous attempt at the ““Giant Letter Creator”” by focusing on the bitmap image, not the text field. So now, I create the desired text, in the desired font at size 12. Then I grab a BitmapData of it using matrix to scale it, and base the “comment text” rendering on this.

The result is much better… This is total overkill ofcourse, but you know, if you wanna surprise your friends when they update their cvs

Huge commenting text generator

This version even has buttons to generate commenting code!!! (// and /* */), and 5 lines of CSS!!!! DAMN LIFE IS GOOD!!!

And then, There are still a few issues…

Naturally the bitmapdata size limitation in flashplayer… I solved that with, what else, and Alert.show()

THen, for monospace fonts this works great, however, for script fonts etc. the spacing of characters can overlap from time to time, meaning the “big character” sometimes has the wrong “small character” (duh, sounds really scientific, here’s an image):

Huge commenting text generator

Again, the code is still quick and dirty, right click to view source or click here

So I created an as3 3d engine which pretty much pwns and humiliates papervision3d…

…then I woke up from my fantasy and wept.

John posted a “Giant Letter Creator” on his blog. The idea is nifty, but what caught my attention was that I could use my ‘trick’ from the Dazzling Bat Man Text Effect to, (and this is probably the only time in my life I can say this) ONE UP JOHN GRDEN

I know, pathetic, but I’m a dork like that

Anyway, what I figured was I could create the desired text in a big font, take a snapshot of it using bitmapdata, then run through the relevant pixels in the image to generate “huge commenting text” from any font and any character.

Now, I only had a good hour to spare, this version has shortcomings, but here it is (proof of concept style):
Huge commenting text generator

The code is quick and dirty, but there really isn’t much of it Either right click to view source or click here

What is truly craptacular is that in (flex only?) flash the size of a non embedded font has a maximum of 130 or something, bigger than that and nothing happens. I suppose I could fix this by scaling the snapshot of the text field… Maybe next week…

I’m currently working on a multiplayer game (well, 2 player), a flex app which uses Flash Media Server2.
I use the Command Pattern in the app for “player moves”. I have a IGameCommand interface and a bunch of Command classes which implement it. Users select/create moves (command instances) which they send to the Media Server using AMF0 . The Media Server then validates both moves, and sends them back to the players, at which point the client side flashes execute the commands.
Here the tricky bit was the serializing / deserializing, as AMF0 only handles generic Objects… I didn’t want to have this massive switch statement to determine the type of command, then serialize it… Miraculously I recalled this blog post by Colin Moock, and salvation was at hand! I love AS3.

It turns out that in flash.utils there are a few VERY useful functions…

first, flash.utils.getQualifiedClassName() returns a string like : “net.sakri.commands::KickAss” (I’m not sure why the double colon, I’ve seen that syntax before in php and so). As an argument, you can pass an instance of an object, or the classname. This is perfect for the serializing, as the serialized object can be given a variable which holds the “qualified” name of the class that it was serialized from.

Below is an example implementation inside a Command classs (function getSerializedAMF0Object():Object is defined in IGameCommand interface):

[as]
public function getSerializedAMF0Object():Object{

var obj:Object=new Object();
obj.qualified_class_name=getQualifiedClassName(this);

//rest of props

return obj;
}
[/as]
This is kosher AMF0. The server then pushes such serialized commands to both players, and here is the code which releaved me from the nasty switch statement:


[as]
public function commandFromServer(c:Object):void{

var ClassReference:Class = getDefinitionByName(c.qualified_class_name) as Class;
var command:IGameMoveCommand=new ClassReference();
//pass the rest of class props from the serialized object,
//all of which adhere to the IGameMoveCommand interface

}
[/as]
The reason this rocks so much, is that I can now create as many commands as I like, without having to touch the send/receive, serialize/deserialize code. This method could also be used for “real” serializing, meaning, you could store your data objects as xml or strings or whatever, and know that painless instantiation awaits the stored objects return