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.

• 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.

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!

^ This time, that’s an image – saves on the page rendering time!

Another update on the Box2D classes I’m working on.  No new features, but some pretty cool expansions and improvements to the library object creation.

If you check out the previous post, you’ll see that the the dynamically drawn shapes weren’t exactly perfect; nor were they very efficient.  Oh they worked fine, and traced the detail of the shape very well – but it took a decent chunk of system resources to animate and ended up with some overlaid shapes; which all made the Box2D a bit sluggish and the behaviours buggy.

So, stealing incorporating ideas from other projects has been the name of the game – namely the ear clipping optimisation code from Splashdust.net, combined with some of my own cobbled-together more optimised code for tracing curved edges.

Live demo:

Mouse interaction is enabled in the below example – click and drag the objects to check out how it works.

Download the source code for this demo.

* The source code isn’t exactly cleaned up – sometime, eventually, it will be.

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:

Kudos to Richard Leggett for this solution; you can add an event listener for the StatusUpdateEvent.UPDATE_STATUS event, which includes this code:

try
{
var loader:Object = NativeApplication.nativeApplication.openedWindows[1].stage.getChildAt(0);
loader.content.application.visible = true;
}
catch(e:Error) { trace("Wait till Flex 4!"); }

And this will get things back and working again.

More information:

Read the official bug report in the bug management system.

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