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it’s easy once you know how.

Link: Advanced image filters for Flash Player

Posted by James - 09/03/10 at 09:03:38 am

These filters aren’t really going to visually blow your mind – I think they’re a little more on the techie or specific-use side of things, but that being said, they are very clever & pretty unique so they deserve a mention!

Image processing library for Flash Player: http://blog.joa-ebert.com/imageprocessing-library/
It’s a load of cool filters for images in Flash, including some of the more fancy image enhancement tricks that I can’t say I’ve seen anywhere else, like contrast correction, HDR filters, that sort of thing.

I find the best place to find out all of the gory details with this is in the ASDocs, which lists everything. [http://je2050.joa-ebert.com/imageprocessing/]. Now, on it’s own it might not seem that groundbreaking, but when you combine some of these effects creatively you get some interesting results.  Take the Normalize filter as an example; not much to look at on it’s own, but I’m pretty sure I’ve seen some blog somewhere talking about the Normalize filter being awesome for colour correction on photos.  And I’m sure every webcam image could probably use a helping hand from the BrightnessCorrection class or the GammaCorrection class.

Link: FlashSURF – complex image recognition in Flash Player

Posted by James - 24/02/10 at 09:02:59 am

FlashSURF is an image recognition library for Flash, distinguishable from other projects like the QR code and face recognition libraries by the fact that it’s just too damn clever. It’s a full colour, high resolution image recognition library that works in real time off a video feed (such as a webcam).  And it comes as a compiled SWC for flash so it’s ready to be used now.  You should at least check out Eugene’s post on the stuff to get an idea of it’s capabilities.

• Blog post: http://blog.inspirit.ru/?p=386
• SWC download (Google code): http://code.google.com/p/in-spirit/source/browse/#svn/trunk/projects/FlashSURF
• Example projects (Google code): http://code.google.com/p/in-spirit/source/browse/#svn/trunk/projects/FlashSURF.Examples

Seriously, some people are just too damn clever.

Minimal components: For when you don’t feel like using Flex.

Posted by James - 23/02/10 at 09:02:11 am

Nothing wrong with Flex of course, but Mark’s experiments got me thinking about using Bit-101’s MinimalComps [google code] all over again.  What are they? Well, they’re a set of simple components – Buttons, Checkboxes, basic containers – that are very lightweight in terms of the the size they add to your final SWF, and the processing power that’s needed to render them.

Why use the components? Well the Flex framework gets a bad rap for being pretty hefty on the download, and can be chuggy on the processor too, if you’re not careful.  MinimalComps doesn’t have this problem because it doesn’t require the Flex framework, and is pretty much the epitomy of minimalist design, which looks cool when you’re throwing your tech demos out there.

Well, I thought I’d give it a shout out!

Fixed: AIR update framework broken!

Posted by James - 29/01/10 at 10:01:30 pm

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:

Continue reading Fixed: AIR update framework broken!…

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

Posted by James - 28/01/10 at 09:01:12 am

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.

Read more about ORM:

http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/october2009/articles/article7/index.html

http://www.adobe.com/newsletters/edge/december2009/articles/article7/index.html

Webcam Face detection demo: Now with source!

Posted by James - 22/01/10 at 09:01:43 am

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.

Continue reading Webcam Face detection demo: Now with source!…

Link: Flex AutoComplete component

Posted by James - 11/01/10 at 03:01:20 pm

If you’re ever looking for an autocompletion component in the Flex framework, I’d strongly suggest you check this one out: http://hillelcoren.com/flex-autocomplete/ Quite simply it’s awesome, it’s fully featured and packs a helluva lot of options into such a small package.

I swapped an old ComoBox component for it just now, and it worked fantastically with no additional configuration.

Check out the demo for it here: http://web.me.com/hillelcoren/Site/Demo.html