This time we are going with six people from <theFactor.e> Flash/Flex team. I hope to be even more inspired by this trip, than the previous one.

Stay tuned…

AllOfUs:
A really cool agency that showed some amazing mobile phone apps and interactive installations. They gave me the inspiration to create new experiments (if only they could give me some more time as well).
site: http://www.allofus.org/

Group94:
I was already familiar with their amazing work, but it was really nice to see how they handle their projects and how they solved some complicated Flash problems with really simple solutions. The most surprising thing about Group94 is that they work with only 8 people and yet manage to create so much fantastic products.
site: http://www.group94.com/
old site: http://www.group94.com/home_old.php 

Pleix:
A group of freelancers with various disciplines who join together to create cool commercials, music videos and non-commercial films.
site: http://www.pleix.net/

de-construct:
A webdesign agency who have a great vision towards user experience on their websites. A nice example of this is a site they made for Panasonic:
http://lumixdifference.archive.de-construct.com/
The three cameras that are exposed on the site are presented in a short story. Each camera has it’s own story in which it’s characteristics are displayed. This way the user is not directly confronted with all kind of specs (to compare to find the right camera), but he can simply select a camera by a specific purpose. A very nice approach towards potential customers.
site: http://www.de-construct.com/

Of course there were a lot of other interesting speakers, but for now I’ll leave this post to these four agencies because I need my time to work out my newborn ideas.

Stay tuned….

P.S.

drop a line to the guys of DoubleYou:
http://www.doubleyouhi.com/

According to the site it’s “An international design event” and I mainly hope to find some new (general) inspiration as I’ve been quite lazy recently (as it comes to design and art).
I’ll keep you posted…

Here is an example:

This is just an example and I’m sure you can think of much more useful ways to use this feature.
Hope it heps you along…

Very smart Adobe!

Fortunately I thought of an easy way to get this problem solved; simply copy the remoting classes from Flash 8 to some other directory and set this directory as one of your default Flash 9 – as2 – classpaths. (Copying it into the default classpath with all other default classes didn’t work for me somehow.)

To make it easy for you I extracted the remoting classes and put them in a zip: as2RemotingPackage.zip

PS: I coudn’t find any info about this on the internet so either nobody ever needed it, nobody ever bothered to try and find a solution or this solution is so simple nobody ever bothered to write about it.
Anyway I bother to write about it for those of you who couldn’t find a solution or just didn’t bother to find one.

Hope this will help you…

Game Physics – Engine Development

I’m not really a book person, but when I tried to create a physics engine a while back I ran into a couple of major problems which stopped me from going on with it. I tried it a couple of times ever since but I always found myself stuck on the same problems (complicated collision detection etc.).  Back then I searched for decent books to help me but there wern’t any. Either they were way too easy (coming with all kinds of crappy solutions) or way too hard (most of them all about theoretical physics).

I ran into this book by accident as I was actually looking for an all picture book with cool and stylish web design (Web design index by content).

I haven’t read any of it yet, but looking at the pics inside it is exactly what I needed :D.
I tend to read it in my vacation so you might expect some nice experiments in the near future.

For those of you who are interested:

Game Physics – Engine Development by Ian Millington
isbn: 978-0-12-369471-3

Web design index by content
isbn: 90-5768-069-6 | http://webdesignindex.org

PS: I saw this Ian dude also has a book on AI which sounds interesting too, but that something for the future. (God, where am I gonna find the time…)

When I load an image using the Loader class and unload it later on. It won’t be disposed by the garbage collector.
There are no references to neither the Loader nor the (weak) eventlisteners. After loading the image a couple of times the memory goes sky high .

Here is a (simple) example: LoaderTest.zip

Does anyone have an explaination on why the GC doesn’t clean the loaded content? I would be very grateful!

//slow:
z = Math.abs(x);
//faster:
z = (x

//slow:
z = Math.min(x,y);
//faster:
z = (xy) ? x : y;

//slow:
z = Math.floor(x);
//faster:
z = (x >>> 0);

//slow:
z = Math.ceil(x);
//faster:
z = (x >>> 0) + 1; //mind the brackets!

//slow:
z = Math.round(x);
//faster:
z = int(x);

//slow:
z = Math.pow(x,2);
//faster:
z = x*x; //this one only works faster if the power is a fixed value; for-loops in case of a variable power are most of the time slower than the Math.pow!

Of course most of the above method replacements make your code more sloppy, so I suggest you only use these replacements when the speed of the application really matters (for example in huge for-loops) or in libraries or components which rarely need adjustment.

If you have any good additions to this list please let me know…

Unfortunately many people omit them in their code  . Not sure why though, but my guess is that they are ignorant or just lazy (don’t be offended if you don’t use the this keyword for another reason, but please let me know why).
Even Adobe (and Macromedia before them) neglects the this keyword. None of their examples uses this and it’s nowhere to be found in their own code either!
Shame on them!

At the company where I work we didn’t use the keyword up until a year or two/three ago. Some of us found the keyword to be very handy and convinced the rest (not sure which group I belonged to at that time).

First of all, using the this instance variables supplies you the option to declare a local variable with the same name:
this.myVar = "my instance var";
var myVar:String = "my local var";
trace(this.myVar); //my instance var
trace(myVar); //my local var

(Note that the above code only works in a class and not in the timeline!)

This can come in really handy when you need to store some temporarily data, during a for loop for example.

The second and most important reason to use this, is that it keeps your code clean and neat. It will help you to visually distinguish the local variables from the instance variables. This is vital if you work in a team on the same project or if other people need to work on your project later on (bug fixing, implementing new feature, etc.)
In all these cases it’s important to scan through someone’s code quickly and see at a glance where a certain variable comes from or is declared. If you omit the this keyword you would first have to scan the entire method to see if, maybe, the variable is declared local in this method. While if you do use the this keyword you know for sure it is declared in the Class definition and you know you can use it throughout the entire class (and in case of a public var, throughout the entire code).

So using the this keyword gives you more control over your code and it lets you (and your colleagues) programme in old or other peoples code much faster!

If you don’t use the this keyword at the moment, I hope this post convinced you to try out the this keyword for a while (even if it’s only for one single project) and I’m sure you never want to programme with out it, ever again.

If you already did use the this keyword, maybe this post wil help you to convince some ignorant fools in your vicinity .

Photosynth

It’s a program which allows you to take a bunch of photos from some place and create a 3D-scenery without any sweat. It’s just some alpha version so you can’t use your own photo’s, but it’s still really exciting to view the examples they’ve got on their site (see “try it” (need to install a pc-only plug-in)).

Go check it out:
http://labs.live.com/photosynth/default.html

Here are some explanatory videos:
http://www.ted.com/index.php/talks/view/id/129
http://channel9.msdn.com/Showpost.aspx?postid=220870