sakri rosenstrom blog

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.

oh: 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” oh: 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

:buttrock: The mindblowing beyond LOBOTOMY Aliased 3d text toy :buttrock:

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… oh:

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!? oh: ) 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… :buttrock:

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!

:pirate: