2010 January | Psyked

Archive | January, 2010

Fixed: AIR update framework broken!

by James on 29th January, 2010 in Air

Arrgh! All of a sudden the AIR Update Framework stops working. No explanation, no errors; nothing. Where you’d expect to see your update notification popping up, you get a window just like the one above – no content, just the default Flex blue background colour.

The problem is actually a pretty specific one, but it’s not going to fix itself. Using the Flex 3.5 SDK and the AIR Update Framework together causes this issue – obviously some part of the Flex SDK has changed between Flex 3.4 and 3.5, and no-one tested the framework before releasing it! The issue is fixed in Flex 4 and doesn’t occur in anything other than the 3.5 SDK – so upgrading / downgrading is one solution; or…

Hack a solution:

Link: Working with SQLite in AIR, with the help of ORM

by James on 28th January, 2010 in Air

If you don’t know what ORM is read the next paragraph, and it might help. If you do, skip to the links below to learn a little more about how you can make ORM work with AIR and SQLite.

ORM stands for Object Relational Mapping, in basic terms the concept of representing your tables-based data as more familiar objects and classes. Not a big concept after all, it’s one that I’ve been using already in my AIR applications – albeit unwittingly and manually. FlexORM is a project to assist and standardise this process, so it’s worth knowing about and trying out.

Webcam Face detection demo: Now with source!

by James on 22nd January, 2010 in Flash

So a little while ago, Halloween in fact, I threw together a demo of some face-detection stuff I’d been looking at. [Check out the original post here.] We originally had the demo on the MMT Digital homepage, but recently that’s been updated and my demo got lost in the process, so I’ve restored it here, along with the Flex project for it.

Link: Computer mind control with ActionScript 3.0

by James on 20th January, 2010 in ActionScript

This is a very cool experiment – using a socket in AS3 to interface with Brain Computer Interface (BCI) hardware. Check it out at this url: http://seantheflexguy.com/blog/2009/12/30/neurosky-mindset-brain-computer-interface-actionscript-3-0-api/

Demo & Source: Simple Box2D, with curved edges!

by James on 14th January, 2010 in Box2D

(The image above this text is actually the Flash movie, if you hadn’t guessed. Try using your mouse to interact. If it’s blank, then something’s gone wrong!)

I’ve been busy working on my Box2D classes again. (As before here and here.) I’m not quite ready to go through the code with some tutorials yet, but you can download the source for this demo here. This version has had a bit more of a proper code cleanup – I’ve un-hacked some hacks I did earlier in development, and added a few more utility functions, but most importantly this version supports SWF library asset importing of multiple shapes, and shapes with curved edges (which it couldn’t do previously).

I feel like I should put that in bold or something, because it’s probably my most-clever bit of code to date. I’m going to settle for saying it twice though: You can import library objects with multiple shapes, and shapes with curved and straight edges. Have a look at the screenshot below and compare it with the Box2D display;

In Flash IDE: