Labs

 A space devoted to experimenting with design and technology.
Archive of September 2008
Sep 26, 2008

Tips for new coders

The comments in this discussion are priceless. They're language or platform specific at all -- for you folks out there looking for how to learn quickly, get better as a coder and thrive at a new environment, this thread is a must read.
Jamie Kosoy     2 Comments     More »
 

Sep 19, 2008

Zend + AMF

Lee Brimelow discusses the official announcement of the addition of AMF support to the Zend Framework in this post. A couple of details that caught my eye...

The AMF implementation in Zend is being done by Wade Arnold who also works on AMFPHP. The development of AMFPHP will continue but the Zend implementation will be officially supported by Adobe.

Adobe is working with Zend with the goal of being able to install the Flex Eclipse plug-in into Zend Studio. Not sure if this will make me start using Eclipse, but one of my personal hang-ups is that I needed a separate editor for decent PHP editing.

Update: The former...
Joshua Hirsch     3 Comments     More »
 

Sep 15, 2008

Flash on Tap -- Now in May

Flash on Tap has been rescheduled for May 28th - 30th. This is a killer opportunity for all y'all who haven't yet signed up and want to attend what will undoubtedly be one of the best conferences of the year.

Football season is no longer an excuse. Come. Drink with us. All of you. Sign up today!
Jamie Kosoy     2 Comments     More »
 

Sep 15, 2008

Variable Declaration, aka Iterative Sanity

I was just talking to Tai U, a friend of the Spaceship, about this one. We were discussing how all these new young hooligan coders out there are committing the sin of looping using reserved variable names for iterators. Something sorta like this:


for(var x:int=0;x<foo;x++) {
// x?! what are you doing?!!?
};


Young friends, that may fly for other languages, but in ActionScript you are playing with fire. I have labored for many moons over a better solution for this and the most sensible in my head is described as follows:
Jamie Kosoy     16 Comments     More »
 

Sep 12, 2008

Custom filters (sort of) without Pixel Blender

Following up on Andrews post concerning Pixel Bender I've recently been playing with the convolution filter and I thought I'd share some findings. The convolution filter allows you to pass a matrix of values that are iterated over the pixels of a source image that influence the pixels in the original image. This is more or less what an image filter in pixel bender is doing.
Charlie Whitney     0 Comments     More »
 

Sep 11, 2008

Thoughts on Pixel Bender

Earlier this week, I started reading into Pixel Bender and did some nice tutorials for both creating pbj files and importing them into Flash. With this set up, the pbj is loaded at run time creating another type of external asset to manage. Mike Chambers posted a solu tion for this that allows pbjs to be embedded within a swf. Once I got everything up and working, I noticed swfs using Pixel Bender filters ran incredibly slow. This was disappointing since I was under the impression it was hardware accelerated. Using a PowerPC based Mac, I had a feeling Flash 10 only supported GPU calculations on Intel machines, and with a little research, it was confirmed.
Andrew Nida     4 Comments     More »
 

Sep 11, 2008

Event Fast Forward

In some cases you just want to pass along an Event to it's parent. Instead of writing a new relay function like..

myEvtDisptchr.addEventListener(Event.TYPE, _onEvent_handler);
function _onEvent_handler($evt:Event):void{
dispatchEvent($evt.clone());
}

..you can just use the inherited function dispatchEvent:

myEvtDisptchr.addEventListener(Event.TYPE, dispatchEvent);

you can also redirect an Event:

myEvtDisptchr.addEventListener(Event.TYPE, myOtherEvtDisptchr.dispatchEvent);
Simple.
Daniel Scheibel     4 Comments     More »
 

Sep 10, 2008

Noise and Tile Based Maps, Pt 1.

Some of my favorite games? Toejam & Earl, Diablo II, Warcraft II, and Sim City 2000. What do they all have in common? Some semblance of random. Each game had a way of increasing playability by adding some sort of procedurally generated game map. You never played the same game twice. Awesome.

(Okay, maybe War2 didn't have random. Did the map generator have a random button? Whatever.)

I've been meaning to investigate how some of these games worked their magic for awhile, but only recently really revved up the ol' braingears to figure out how they worked. Here now I provide some links in regards to my research, and an experiment I tried. Hit the jump for more.
Jamie Kosoy     4 Comments     More »
 

Sep 08, 2008

Conference formerly known as Singularity

Due to some potential legal issues, Aral had no choice but to change the name of the upcoming online conference from Singularity to <head>. Early ticket discount is still in effect. Looks like it is going to be a great event.
Joshua Hirsch     0 Comments     More »
 

Sep 08, 2008

ProjectPlus plugin for TextMate

The ProjectPlus plugin for TextMate adds some small improvements to the project drawer, including making it a sidebar instead of a drawer, adding finder color labels, and icons indicating SVN and/or Git status.
Joshua Hirsch     1 Comment     More »