Here’s one of my highlights from Flash on the Beach 2011 – something that I’d never seen before, but blew me away with its coolness.

HiSlope is a realtime video effects framework/library, which allows you to see and experiment with those effects in realtime.  The underlying coding framework sounds interesting, and the final effect is pretty neat.  I have a feeling I’m going to be messing around with it and picking apart the source code some time soon!

In the meantime, you can:

• Check out the demo here: http://play.blog2t.net/files/black-or-white/
• View the blog post about that demo here: http://play.blog2t.net/realtime-as3-face-and-eye-detection-with-michael-jackson/
• And have a look at more posts about HiSlope here: http://play.blog2t.net/hislope/.

QuickB2 is a complete abstraction of Box2D, providing grouped hierarchies, extensible classes, and event-driven callbacks. The high-level interface enables developers to create physics simulations that are impractical to write using Box2D’s API alone. It takes care of things that you don’t want to, so that you can concentrate on your game.

Here are some examples of what it can do: http://quickb2.dougkoellmer.com/bin/qb2DemoReel.swf

Here is a place where you can ask questions: http://quickb2.dougkoellmer.com/forum

I’ve just gone and looked through the demo reel, and I have to say this is quite impressive. Obviously having a nicer to use, ActionScript 3 style syntax rather than the C++ syntax is a bonus, but what really makes this cool is the features that this library has, over and above the basics of Box2D.  Things like shape cutting, soft bodies; breakable joints etcetera.

You can find out more information, and download the source code from Google Code, at: http://code.google.com/p/quickb2/

What is Project Sprouts?

Sprouts is a relatively new project, focussed on ActionScript and Flex development, and makes a whole lot of the setup of new ActionScript and Flex projects much easier. It’s a springboard for new projects, and it automates both the initial configuration of your development tools and the creation of new template-based classes, projects and unit tests. Essentially, that’s what it does out of the box. But in addition to that, it’s also completely configurable (depending on how deep you want to go into Ruby), it’s headless (in that it has no IDE), and it’s platform independent.

Why should you be interested?

From a practical point-of-view, setting up new projects is a time-consuming process. Setting up MVC frameworks, like RobotLegs or PureMVC, are more of a time sink, and setting up TDD is even more so. Sprouts, on the other hand, sets your projects up based on a template and does it for you – MVC framework and TDD templates included. It’s also then extensible and you can, for example, then integrate tasks like FTP uploads or source-control syncing as part of your build process.

How does it work?

It’s all built on Ruby(http://www.ruby-lang.org/en/) and uses RubyGems(http://rubygems.org/) – that’s all you need. No Flash Builder, no Adobe Creative Suite. Mac and *nix platforms have Ruby built in, I think. Windows PCs have to go download a Ruby installer(http://rubyinstaller.org/).

Sample code:

When you’ve got it installed, fire up your Ruby Command-Line window and type:

# Install the ActionScript 3 / Flash Bundle:
 gem install flashsdk --pre

# Generate a new ActionScript 3 project:
 sprout-as3 SomeProject

# Move into the new project:
 cd SomeProject

# Install dependencies:
 bundle install

# Compile and run the main project:
 rake

# Generate a class, test and test suite:
 sprout-class utils.MathUtil

# Compile and run the test harness:
 rake test

The initial four lines of code does what otherwise takes hours to achieve. (If you’re doing like-for-like tasks) It downloads the latest Flash SDK, configures it, creates a new project and compiles it. The latter two commands set up unit test templates and runs them. The unit testing templates never really seemed to make sense to me before seeing them used in Sprouts – a lot of setup, if you ask me.  But with the shell classes being auto-generated, it all seems to make sense now!

Well, now’s your chance to make it happen – they’ve a call for suggestions open to everyone, which you can participate in by visiting the URL http://www.google.com/moderator/#16/e=8e0cc and signing up. It uses Google Moderator, which allows you to vote for, and submit new suggestions for new book titles.

I may be slow on the uptake here, but Mr.doob has some awesome HTML5 and Flash Player showcase pieces over at mrdoob.com. It’s hard to pick a favorite, because they’re all darn impressive, but I’m a fan of the Face-tracking and 3D Scene demo (which I’ve screenshotted above).  It’s based in Flash, because it has to access the computers’ webcam, and is a pretty neat concept.

If it didn’t require the whole webcam-access notification message that makes the whole effect so obvious, I’d definitely want to slide this into loads of projects, just for the hell of it!