Seeing Is Believing

Flash Player 10.2 \\ StageVideo

2011-02-09T23:29:00.009+01:00

Dear people of Earth, Flash Player 10.2 is out!

There has been a lot of talk on the optimalisation of video rendering and the use of Stage Video API:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashplayer/stagevideo.html

So I decided to do a little benchmark test.

Flash Player 10.2 without Stage Video API: fullscreen browser (1680x1050)

CPU 112%

Flash Player 10.2 with Stage Video API: fullscreen browser (1680x1050)

CPU 39.5%

HTML5 Video (Vimeo) small resolution (640x360)

CPU 63.7%

HTML5 Video (Vimeo) fullscreen (1680x1050)

CPU 100.7%

I think the Stage Video API is big step forward and we haven't seen the last of it.

Here are the pictures:

Flash Player with Stage Video: CPU 39.5%

HTML5 Video fullscreen: CPU 100.7%

Flash Player without Stage Video: CPU 111.2%

HTML5 Video (640x360) CPU 63.7%

The Adobe MAX Unaward show: An adventure

2010-09-12T11:03:00.009+02:00

I think I may have found a new passion. A passion that will steer my life in a new direction.

A direction that will bring me joy and fulfill all the wishes I desire.

This new passion is called: Acting...

The always lovely Serge Jespers from Adobe called me up one day and asked me to join him on a project he was getting started with. He wanted to create a widget called: 'The Max Unaward show'.

However, he was not looking for some extra horse coding power. No, he needed an actor.... What, wait, me?

But people, when you get a call from Serge, no matter what the question is, your answer is yes! (ok maybe not for every question...)

And so the adventure began... We had a crazy day of doing preparation and shooting the video.

We started out with shopping for the most crazy 'tv host' outfit we could find. Yep it felt like the 'moron' brothers day out :-) and headed out to Amsterdam where Klaas Jan Tukker and Ton Frederiks from Adobe joined us to help with the project. I there realized that Ton really knows a ton (no pun intended haha) about video and video editing.

I wore Serge's shoes, who were like 4 sizes too big for me, for most of the day.

And my daughter loves the shirt so she adopted it with love:

Read all about the project and the making off here:

http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/09/02/give-yourself-a-max-unaward/

http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/09/03/max-unawards-behind-the-scenes-part-1/

http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/09/06/max-unawards-behind-the-scenes-part-2/

http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/09/07/max-unawards-behind-the-scenes-part-3/

http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/09/08/max-unawards-behind-the-scenes-part-4/

http://www.webkitchen.be/2010/09/09/max-unawards-behind-the-scenes-part-5/

Serge did a tremendous amount of work on the widget and writing about it.

Thanks to Serge, Klaas Jan, Ton and the Adobe crew!

Go now and Unaward yourself here:

http://max.adobe.com/widget/

I am out there with the big boys because I already won a MAX Unaward:

With love,

Wim

The guy who will stick to computers instead of acting.

Do you want Steve Jobs to control you porn collection?

2010-05-14T10:52:00.008+02:00

I have been following the discussion between Apple and Adobe with increasing amazement. Somehow I still have a problem believing that the Flash ban is a pure technical issue. I think it's about protecting a business model. Which makes sense but...

A little future doom scenario (atmosphere wise, think Bladerunner)

1. Imagine Apple will implement the same business model for your desktop or laptop as they do on the Iphone/Ipad/Ipod. Which essentially boils down to: just use the almighty Appstore.
If you say: "no chanche in hell, that would be commercial suicide". Why is it then, that the iPhone/iPad are what they are now?

2. So if you want to install or download anything on your computer you will have to pass the Appstore. There is no get out of jail free card here. No downloading from the web what YOU choose. No, you can only download from a collection of what Steve and his employees like. (just like on the iPhone).

3. What if, just for the sake of argument, there's no app for it? Let's say a good porn app. I did a test and searched for "porn" in the Appstore. Besides some lame sex jokes, a porn name generator and, you read it well, an app to deal with porn addiction (sic: finally I got help), there is nothing worthy of the name.

4. Porn in this case serves my point because it's a metaphor.
Let's take it a step further: Replace porn by free news gathering for instance.
What if that controversial book or communist newspaper you want to read or a disputed video you want to watch has been banned by Steve on his almighty iPad? Yep, a device optimized for reading books and newspapers... Or maybe you would want to choose for using let's say NeoOffice instead of KeyNote on your new Appstore enabled laptop? Or you would want to play DarkOrbit (www.darkorbit.com) on your new computer that you bought yesterday (time of writing 60.000 people online)... I guess Steve's not gonna want that...

That's not gonna happen you say? We'll see... Steve can do what he wants, it's his business. Great products, great marketing, nice and shiny, working well (most of the time), all very true... But for me personally, I think I'm not gonna wait for the almighty Appstore true censorship to take mine elsewhere...

Let's see, what else is there... There is an operating system that permits me to install whatever is out there. It's called Windows. Wait there's another one... It's called: Linux or wait there's more: it's called Android... and on and on...

I say hooray for 'open' and freedom of choice!

Flash On The Beach: my session is online

2009-10-29T12:46:00.004+01:00

The Flash on The Beach Jam sessions and elevator pitches videos are online. Yes!

John and the team have been working hard to get it all done and they did a great job.

My elevator pitch session is online too. Check it out here:

http://www.vimeo.com/7292596

or here:

http://www.flashonthebeach.com (scroll down and click Wim Vanhenden).

or here :-)

FOTB09 - Elevator Pitch - Wim Vanhenden from John Davey on Vimeo.

Cheers!

Flash On The Beach rocked!

2009-10-05T17:05:00.003+02:00

Once again Flash On The Beach rocked!

Bottom line... FOTB is rock 'n roll...

If you are into all things creativity and programming you must at least go there once. The spirit of Jimi Hendrix lives on in Brighton people.

For a good and full overview please visit Flashmagazine, they have an excellent report waiting for you.

I was in the Elevator pitch sessions, which was very cool. 3 (yes three) minutes is not a long time to say what you want to say but all of the speakers did a great job. I met some very interesting people doing some great work!

It's been a blast to be a part of FOTB!

Check out some pictures and video of my talk. Thank to Dimitri for the video!

Thanks to John and his crew for doing it. Never mind the bollocks!

Flash On The Beach: Speaking @ elevator pitch

2009-08-17T13:16:00.002+02:00

Yes! I will be 'performing' at the upcoming elevator pitch @ Flash On The Beach 2009.

The title of my session is: "Internet art: scrape, rip, steal and visualize"

If you are in the neighborhood stop by to cheer!

Thanks to John Davey and the FOTB team!

Session on Flash Catalyst

2009-08-13T14:24:00.009+02:00

I just returned from a Flash Catalyst/Flash Builder session I gave at the Adobe headquarters in Belgium.

The always healthy Christoph Rooms, who is at this moment on a beach somewhere, asked me to. And who am I to refuse Christoph right? I got some help from my friend Maarten Cox and the people at iDA MediaFoundry. Thanks for that guys!

I must say Flash Catalyst is a pretty nifty tool... if you know what you are doing and even better, if you know what you are going to do.

Let me explain: If you buy a BMW 7 series, you don't buy this car only for driving. You bought it because it's exuberant and you want to show off. If you you are not into showing off and you just want to drive you would buy a regular car.

Now Flash Catalyst is your regular car. If you stick to that thought while working with it, you won't get any surprises later on. Don't expect it to do al the super fancy stuff. Then you should have bought the BMW 7 series, in this case a mix of more complex integration of Flash CS4, Flex and Flash Builder 4.

I really think that Flash Catalyst is going to be a great tool for the designer/developer workflow when it comes to interaction design and wireframing. It is perfect for RIA's and maybe even a full Flash website. But for the latter be aware of our car antology.

Instead of creating a RIA I tried to create a website example with one button and one extra page.

Thanks to Dietlev and Karel from Boulevart providing me with psd's and graphics and things.

Check it out here (click on the middle polaroid to go to another page):

http://www.wimvanhenden.be/catalystdemo/Main.html

By the way, this example, including scrollbars and stuff, is made with 0 coding, that is zero coding!

Conclusion:

If you plan ahead (there is going to be an intro...) and your photoshop file is well organised and without too many special features (remember the BMW7?) , merge as much as possible, you can create an example like this in about an hour:

http://www.wimvanhenden.be/catalystdemo/Main.html

Remember that Flash Catalyst is still in beta and the team is constantly improving it.

Useful links:

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashcatalyst/

http://www.digitalbackcountry.com/flashcatalyst/tutorial01/screencast/index.html

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashcatalyst/articles/building_datacentric_app_flashcast_flashbuilder.html

Michael Jackson Tribute Site

2009-06-27T00:04:00.001+02:00

Michael Jackson tribute...

over at LittleMissRobot.com

Michael Jackson will outlive Prince!

Little Miss Robot

2009-06-19T16:58:00.003+02:00

http://www.littlemissrobot.com

...stay tuned...

Flash and the HoloCube

2009-05-05T23:04:00.005+02:00

I've been running some preliminary tests with my work 'We Are The World' running in a device called the Holocube.

The Holocube is a fully integrated 3D projection platform.

It is originally designed to display product presentations but you can project anything in it really.

I am using the FlashPlayer 10 3D capabilities to extrude the displayed text.

And just a quick word of advice.

If you want to mirror (the Holocube needs a mirrored image) a textfield in Flash do it like this:

var metrics : TextLineMetrics = _textfield.getLineMetrics(0);

_textfield.text = "Hello World";

_textfield.scaleY = -1;

_textfield.y = _textfield.textHeight + metrics.ascent + metrics.descent;

The Holocube and some of my other work will be showing at my exhibition at the Zebrastraat Art Center in Gent, Belgium.

Opening next Thursday 07/05 @ 8:00 PM.

You are now invited!

Muchas mega thanks to Jan and his crew at Holocube for the support!

Adobe's Alchemy and Mac OSX Tiger: not working?

2009-04-29T12:19:00.004+02:00

I've been trying to compile the simple StringEcho example that comes with the Alchemy SDK, but without success.
Read more/dowload about Alchemy here: http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/

Now I am working on OSX Tiger and I am pretty sure all of my settings are correct when it comes to following along the step by step tutorial at Adobe's website.
The strange thing is that I don't get any compile errors and the compiler returns an object file, but no swc... The log files do not show any sign of inconsitency...

I have had some help from people over at the Adobe forums, but the conclusion we come to at this time is that it's just better to switch to Leopard. And indeed no problems with Leopard.
Follow the conversation here:
http://forums.adobe.com/message/1926352

Conclusion so far: Do not try Alchemy on Tiger, use Leopard.

Regular sunday morning at my house...

2009-04-26T11:09:00.002+02:00

Princess Helena reminds me of me, all the time...

Get your degree in Computer Sciences for free!

2009-04-24T20:38:00.003+02:00

Do you want to become a computer scientist or engineer and be up there with the pro's?

Do you wanna see how they do it at MIT, Stanford, Harvard,...

Here's your chance and it's all for free:

http://academicearth.org/subjects/computer-science

And one the best 404 not found pages I've seen in quite some time!

Belgian Adoube User Group Meeting: Inspiring evening

2009-04-15T12:30:00.004+02:00

Yesterday evening the Belgian Adobe User Group meeting was great!

It was good to see some of the guys again. I had a few beers and enjoyed the great line up.

Gijs from Webwave also having a few beers...

Cheers Gijs!

This time not so much about the tools or coding itself but much more inspiring sessions. More of that in the future if you ask me.

1. Volstok/Telefunken

http://www.volstok.com/

These guys are creating some fine pieces of video and animation.

Already famous for their 120 episodes counting series called: De monsters.

Monsters: 013 meisje wip from Volstok Telefunken on Vimeo.

They presented us with some very good insights about their production process.

In their flow they animate one 30 second spot in 3 days using After Effects. (they are at episode 120..sic)

It goes something like this:

1. Live shooting with an actor

2. Character is drawn in Illustrator with the different body parts seperated

3. Shadows on the character with Photoshop

4. Animation in After Effects (masssive use of the Puppet tool and expressions)

2. Reginald Van De Velde

http://www.suspiciousminds.com/

Reginald practices the art of Urban Exploration.

Basically this is entering abandoned buildings and taking photographs.

All of this is done with a set of rules and respect for the sites explored.

When it all comes together, the story behind the location, the right atmosphere, the light and a good photographer some amazing photographs, whom truly form an heritage for those to come, come out of this.

Check out Reginald his website and see for yourself...

3. Mike Van Cleven

http://www.mikevancleven.com/

This photographer based in Belgium is mostly known for his fashion and editorial photo-shoots.

Among showing numerous of his pictures and how he did it, he also talked about where he came from creativly and where he wants to go.

For me that was one of the most important topics in his talk.

Mike started a project called the collaborative. This is an effort to bring creative people in various fields together. The first project kicked off with is a calendar where Mike provided only pictures of naked girls on a white background.

Then the photographs are handed over to digital artists to do post production without any creative rules except that breasts and the pubic region should be covered.

This results in some very inspiring result. Check it out on the collaborative.

It was a great evening and very inspiring.

Thanks to the AUG crew!

Boulevart: New Blog Online

2009-04-07T14:53:00.002+02:00

Yes! The Boulevart blog has found it's way into the virtual world.

Special thanks to Thomas and Erlend for working very hard on this one.

Exciting things happened here at Boulevart the last couple of months. We went through some changes, developed exciting new things, won awards, …
A lot to talk about but as you might noticed, we did not really communicate much lately. Not that we did not want to, we were just waiting for the right timing.
Together with our re-styled blog we think that time has finally come. We gave our online communication platform a fresh new look and feel, but that’s not all. From now on our blog will no longer act as just a technical lab, we felt that it was time for something bigger.

Read more here:
http://blog.boulevart.be

Thomas Joos: Mobile from concept to development

2009-03-30T09:59:00.005+02:00

At the last dutch Adobe usergroup meeting my colleague Thomas Joos did a very interesting session with some inside looks about mobile development.

In this session, Thomas will give you an inside look at what exactly happens before they launch Flash and start developing mobile applications. Having a cool idea is a good start, but it's not the only key to a sucessful application. You will get some tips and tricks that will help you to work out your concept more properly.

His talk in his dutch but I'm sure if you contact him he will answer all your questions.

Check it out:
http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/site/list_messages/237

Also check out Serge Jespers session where he dives deeper into the new possibilities of Adobe's mobile platform.
http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/site/list_messages/236

How about that: I won an FWA award!

2009-03-21T19:40:00.004+01:00

I am really excited about winning an FWA award for my portfolio website http://www.wimvanhenden.be

I've been working quite some time on it, changing the concept over and over again.

I wanted to create a very experimental website which would focus on user input to build up the site not using any other graphical assets, except for text.

I stayed close to my initial idea for a long time but even most of my colleagues couldn't grasp it at first (no offense guys :-)

So considering it is a portfolio site and at some point people need to access some data, I remodeled it, to make it a bit more conventional.

But working on websites and concepts like this is a never ending story.

I am working on some stuff with the guys from HOLOCUBE, so stay tuned for more...

I would like to thank everybody at Boulevart for the support, Valentijn for his wisdom and the FWA team for having the FWA.

Enjoy!

http://www.wimvanhenden.be

I got featured in new book by Taschen

2009-03-02T10:52:00.003+01:00

I am very proud to announce one of my websites got featured in a new book published by Taschen. The book is called Web Design:Navigation and showcases websites working around new concepts of navigation.

The site in the book is the website showcasing my work We Are The World.
Thanks to the crew at Taschen and Julius Wiedemann in particular for being out there and focussing on art and websdesign.

Win last tickets for FITC (sold out)

2009-02-18T20:53:00.000+01:00

The lovely people from the Adobe User Group Netherlands have some extra tickets for you to win.

Just fill out the form and maybe you’ll get lucky:
http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/enquete/

Cheers!

Adobe Flash in episode of USA version The Office

2009-01-28T15:11:00.001+01:00

Very weird conversation about Flash, Acrobat and Quark in an episode of the usa version of The Office (episode 7 of season 5).

The writers completely missed the point but lesson learned: Flash is everywhere!

Sorry about the bad framerate, but it's the message that counts right :-)

Happy New Year! How to f**ck up 20 million dollars

2009-01-08T16:02:00.003+01:00

Happy New Year everybody!

To make you feel good during these harsh times, check this out:

This is the story about Riot-E.

In the year 2000 a few guys started a company for creating mobile concepts. They raised a budget up to 20 million dollars (coming from Nokia, News Corporation, etc...) and then they screwed it...

Good documentary about ego's, bad decision's, manic depression and liars.

http://www.joost.com/33f7z91/t/RIOT-ON!-Riot-On!?channel=33f7o4w#id=33f7z91

MAX 2008: round up. The one with the hair & Catalyst

2008-12-19T14:10:00.003+01:00

Sorry for this late update, but it's been busy since I got back from Milan but I have to say this year MAX was a very special one!

I lost my hair, for real.

With Boulevart we won a MAX award with our 'Rock Werchter' mobile guide and the Iphone port we did.

I made a bet with my colleagues and I lost.
You can see the result here.

It's been great and I had a lot of fun meeting up with all of the guys from The Netherlands and Belgium.

I went to a very inspiring 'agency summit meeting' we're I met up with Rick Williams from AKQA and I had a good chat with Branimir Angelov from Gugga.

There was so much going on but what you need to remember is that Adobe is working on all different fronts (horizontal and vertical) for all web builders out there:

multi-service + multi-screen + multi-user
design + development + deployment

A new product Catalyst, previously known as Thermo, will become a key factor for developers and designers creating rich media.

Adobe is putting up a lot of effort in trying to figure out how to make everybody understand each other. The coming of Flex and Actionscript 2/3 created some confusion as in how to put up a good workflow from design over development to deployment.
Catalyst is Adobe's answer.

It is not yet fully in bloom and Adobe still has a lot of work to do before this product will be the robust tool everybody is looking for.

Production company's will have to start thinking of how the are going to organize the production process in terms of designing experience websites, rich internet applications or a combination.

Catalyst will bring developers and designers closer together but I won't work without the necessary effort of everybody involved.

For developers my guess is that within the coming years every swf out there will rely on the Flex framework. Flash CS4 is back in the game for motion designers and design in general, there is Catalyst now and Flexbuilder (Gumbo) will even be more mature than ever.

Now let's go and kick some!

Adobe MAX Milan 2008: NERDS UNITE

2008-12-01T12:38:00.002+01:00

An overview of the main hall... No matter how hard we try, we will always be nerds...

Adobe MAX 2008 Milan has started:Prologue

2008-12-01T12:15:00.004+01:00

Adobe MAX 2008 started!

Thomas, Wannes, Dimitri and myself arrived yesterday.

It was good seeing some of the friends back.

We had the real pizza only 2 hours after our arrival, not bad :-)

During the evening there was a gathering of the Dutch and Belgian User Group with a short session on Catalyst (formely known as Thermo). Afterwards we had some drinks and food, always good!

Thomas, Dimitri, Wannes

No comment...

First Pizza! Wannes & Thomas!

The guys from the Dutch Adobe User Group

Flash art: We Are The World projection in the center of Brussels

2008-11-26T23:39:00.004+01:00

Tomorrow is kick off day for the Cimatics festival in Brussel. This is an international audio visual festival held at different locations in Brussels spread over 3 days.

I am proud to share the line up with people like Casey Reas, Byetone, RYbN, Antoine Schmitt and many more.
There will also be work from the people from LabAU and screenings from Transmediale.

Friday evening my work 'We Are The World', will be projected on the side of the Crowne Plaza hotel at Place Rogier in Brussels.
I'm talking a HUGE projection here. Tonight we ran some tests and the results are wonderful.

Check out the pictures from the testing session.

I love these machines

My Banksy image desktop 20/25 meters

The crew

From a distance

Flash on the wall

Boulevart's Thomas Joos Finalist @ MAX Milan

2008-11-25T22:26:00.004+01:00

My colleague Thomas Joos at Boulevart has done it once again!

His Rock Werchter Mobile Guide was selected as an Award Finalist entry for the Adobe Max Milan 2008 Awards in the ”Develop” category.

Vote for Thomas here:
http://max.adobe.com/eu/experience/#?s=5&p=3

This is über cool and we at Boulevart are very proud to be one of the finalists.
Nice job Thomas!

Heading for Adobe MAX 2008: Milan -- Session list

2008-11-24T14:17:00.009+01:00

I am glad to be attending the Adobe MAX conference held in Milan this year.
I'd like to thank the people from Adobe for their support and I hope to see some old and new friends there.

We're gonna have fun for sure!

Last year I did a session with Nicolas Lierman.
This time I'm off the hook, so I can go on and enjoy all the seasons without having to worry if my computer will work, will the projector not fail, will my hair be ok, etc...

On the wishlist:

Sessions:
Definitely have to check the keynotes.
There are so many good sessions planned.
I guess I will have to try to find the right balance between technical and inspirational sessions.

Here's my (first) list:

Building High-Performance Applications for Adobe AIR by Mihai Corlan.
Community and Flash Player by Justin Everett-Church.
Revolutionizing Behavioral Analytics with Adobe AIR by Nicolas Lierman (go Nico go!).
Hands-on with Thermo: Creating Interactive Designs by Serge Jespers and Andrew Spaulding.
Here Be Pixels by Mario Klingeman.
Flash Player Internals by Jim Corbett.
Breathe AIR into Your Brand by Tom Krcha.
Creating Marketing Platforms Using the Adobe Flash Platform and Flex 3 by Branimir Angelov.
Society of Digital Agencies (SODA) on the integrated customer experience by Michael Lebowitz (Big Spaceship) and Richard Lent (Agencynet).
Makin money with Adobe AIR by Grant Skinner.
Developing exceptional brand experiences by Ivan Todorov (Blitz).

All of these guys have done some very very cool stuff.

You probably experienced this too,... Attending sessions like these give you the feeling you don't know anything anymore, but at the same time they are the perfect energy boost. Love it!

Technologies: (thx Serge)
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/alchemy/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/textlayout/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/durango/
http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/pixelbender/

I can't wait now, sleeping bad, sore throath, you know,... ah. It's gonna be a blast!

See you there!

Flash Art: Opening We Are The World

2008-10-15T12:24:00.005+02:00

Last week-end my first solo exhibtion openend at the Actionfields gallery in Brussels.

All my work is done in Flash and Java.

For more information please check my website:

http://www.wimvanhenden.be

(please consider some of the images on the site are nsfw)

It's been a lot of work. Not only the last minute programming, as usual, but arranging everything, getting the stuff up etc... But I am glad it all turned out well.

If you have the time, drop by.

Here's an impression:

Actionfields exhibtion rescheduled to October

2008-09-21T01:17:00.004+02:00

My exhibition at Actionfields gallery in Brussels will start October 10th!

So here's the repost from August.

Many fine artist like Ben Kruisdijk & Conny Kuilboer, Stefan Annerel, Thomas Huyghe, Greet Van Autgaerden and many others have exhibited there.

For more info please visit www.actionfields.be

I would like to thank Vincent Verbiest for believing and having me in his gallery. Vincent is a cool guy who cares for art and the artists he works with. Thanks Vincent.

I also would like to thank Carl Jacops for believing in me, listening to me, giving me good advise and mentoring me. Thanks Carl.

Selected works:

We Are The World

The Interpreter

The Participator

If you wanna know more about my art, please drop me a line or just stop by and stay tuned on my blog and website.

Did I mention all of my work is done in Flash?

Well it's all done in Flash :-)

Flash 3D engines: clipping benchmark test

2008-08-06T18:48:00.005+02:00

Whenever working in Flash and 3d I always start out with the same setup.
One plane and on that plane a cube. I think that's a nice setup to get your environment ready, setting up the camera and stuff.

While using Papervision, I noticed when moving the cube some clipping occurred. The cube was disappearing under some of the plane's faces.

So I did a little test with 4 of the most used 3d packages around.
1. Papervision
2. Away3D
3. Sandy
4. Alternativa

The setup is always the same.
The regular plane object of the package with a regular colormaterial applied and a regular cube object with a bitmap material applied to it.
The tweens are done with Tweener. All the settings are default except for camera y and z positions in order to get the same cameraview, well sort of, for all the tests.

Download the sources here.

As you can see Sandy and Alternativa produce the best results.

Note that is is no speed test or a full comparison. Some of these engines have great features the other ones are lacking of and vica versa.
It also may be possible by using more advanced features of Papervision or Away3D the clipping problem could be solved, but that is out of the scope of my test.

If anyone knows how to improve the clipping, please let me know!

Chuck Norris and Flash!

2008-07-31T10:43:00.003+02:00

Dude, if flash is good enough for Chuck Norris’s website then it’s good enough for everyone else. If Chuck finds out your bashing his preferred web technology, then he might stopAndUnload(you).

That says it all. Great comment on a guy not liking Flash by Wes Rice in a post done by Lee Brimelow over at the FlashBlog. Read it here.

http://www.chucknorris.com

Don't forget to check out the Christian Area...

Remeber: If Flash is good enough for Chuck Norris, it is good enough for everybody!

Cuil: The new hype can't handle me...

2008-07-30T12:44:00.005+02:00

I tried a search on myself at Cuil, the new self proclaimed hype that will make Google look like a litle choir boy (sic..). It turns out they can't handle me...

It must be that millions of people are looking for me, or they have a server problem. It must the first option for sure.

Click the picture and see for yourself...

It's good to be famous... Feel like Frank Ze now :-)

Session video's from Adobe User Group Netherlands

2008-07-28T14:22:00.004+02:00

Although I couldn't be present at the latest Adobe User Group meeting in the Netherlands, it was great!

How do I know? They've got it all on tape.

Check it out the sessions here:

http://www.adobeusergroup.nl/2008/06/26/videos-meeting-7-flash-aus-deutschland

Great speakers like André Michelle, Mario Klingemann and Carlo Blatz.

Just on the side, Mario is always, and I mean always, good.

He says his new title is: 'Lead Computational Artisen' (or something) which in my opinion is just the same as NERD... But that's no problem, because we all are.

The streams are really great and the people from the dutch user group are doing some nice work.

Thanks to the dutch Adobe User Group!

Adobe AIR Photobooth: Crazy Cam

2008-07-17T16:01:00.005+02:00

Yes, now Windows users can use Photobooth as well.

Thanks to my collegue Maarten Cox who released this AIR app called CrazyCam.

Read more or download at Maarten's blog or at Boulevart Labs

Nice work dude!

btw, the robot in the picture is mine. I have it since I was like 6 years old. It really feels nice to have this guy in this app now.

Exhibition: Wim Vanhenden @ Actionfields Brussels - art with flash

2008-07-08T22:58:00.008+02:00

I am proud to inform you that coming august I will be exhibiting at the Actionfields gallery in Brussels.

Many fine artist like Ben Kruisdijk & Conny Kuilboer, Stefan Annerel, Thomas Huyghe, Greet Van Autgaerden and many others have exhibited there.

For more info please visit www.actionfields.be

I would like to thank Vincent Verbiest for believing and having me in his gallery. Vincent is a cool guy who cares for art and the artists he works with. Thanks Vincent.

I also would like to thank Carl Jacops for believing in me, listening to me, giving me good advise and mentoring me. Thanks Carl.

Selected works:

We Are The World

The Interpreter

The Participator

If you wanna know more about my art, please drop me a line or just stop by in august and stay tuned on my blog and website.

Did I mention all of my work is done in Flash?

Well it's all done in Flash :-)

FLex/Flash developers playing in a band...

2008-06-06T22:01:00.003+02:00

Just a quick note after being back from Romania which was really cool. Nicolas Lierman and myself worked there with the guys from www.ddnet.ro

Thanks to the guys from DDNet (Gabi, Marius, Chris, Bogdan and all the others) you made us feel welcome! I'll hope to find the time soon to post some pictures later.

Today I found out that my new colleague and founder of the Prana framework, Mister Christophe Herreman played guitar in a band called Liar.

I was in in a band called Janez Detd once and our bands were on the same label and I am sure I must have seen Christophe playing but I never realized it till now.

Rock on Christophe!

Live from Romania

2008-05-30T18:37:00.001+02:00

Capture and write an audio stream with Adobe AIR

2008-05-19T13:06:00.003+02:00

A small demo, including source files, in how to capture and record an audio stream in AIR.

You can listen to the audio stream and write it as an mp3 to your desktop.

I got the idea to try from my colleague Wannes Coolen. Thx dude!

In the example I use the internet radio audio stream from Studio Brussel.
This is the biggest alternative radio station in Belgium.

In general it works like this:
1. Use URLStream class to access the stream
2. Transfer the stream into a bytearray like this:
var bArray : ByteArray = new ByteArray();
stream.readBytes(bArray);

3. Write the bytearray to the desktop with FileStream

4. You are done.

Please never mind the looks of this application, it's about what's inside :-)

Download demo AIR app here

Download source files here

Enjoy!

Neopets on AIR coming to you!

2008-05-15T10:51:00.004+02:00

People over at http://www.neopets.com, owned by MTV/Nickelodeon, are doing a port of their platform to Adobe AIR.

If you watch the video, you will see this will become one of the coolest apps out there. It may remind you a bit of one of the first God games out there called Populous.

It's not released yet, but keep an eye out:

The people over at MTV seem to recognize the potential Adobe AIR has to offer their business. An application for Nickelodeon is already released at this moment.

"With Adobe AIR, we can deliver highly interactive, easy-to-use applications that Nickelodeon fans can enjoy right away. It lets us take our services and brand from the web to the desktop, keeping viewers engaged whether they are online or offline."

- Jason Root, Senior Vice President, Nick.com

I strongly believe in the power of Adobe AIR not only for business applications but also for applications in the entertainment , community & social industry's with apps directly focused on consumers.

And yes, as developer it's just fun to do :-)

A small reminder: a few screenshots of the Tamagotchi test 'Stinky Panda' and off course the Google Analytics Desktop Suite we did at Boulevart

also posted at labs.boulevart.be

Multi Mania 2008: be there or be square!

2008-05-13T11:41:00.008+02:00

I will be doing a session at the upcoming Multi Mania conference the 23th of May.
I will be talking about Flash and Air, and how you can do some really cool stuff when you combine them. I am not talking you're average mp3 player or standard business application here people!

Multi Mania is one of the biggest multimedia events in Europe.

With more than 30 international speakers and +800 attendees this is one not to miss! And most of all, it's free of charge!

I will be in the good company of guys and girls like: Peter Elst, Ralph Hauwert, Aral Balkan, Mario Klingemann, Stephanie Sullivan, Hoss Gifford, Bart Chanet, Seven Productions, Group94, Serge Jespers and so on...

The atmposhere will be good, there are great speakers, there is free luch and there will be a great party afterwards, so I'll see you there!

A word of thanks to everybody involved in organizing this FREE event is in place here.

Muchas gracias Multi Mania team!

Don't forget to stay in touch for the great mobile app for Multi Mania my collegue Mr. Thomas Joos is developing. Check it out here:

http://vilebody.wordpress.com/2008/05/06/multi-mania-mobile-conference-guide/

Working at Qi-ideas

2008-05-13T11:14:00.006+02:00

Like I said before it's been very busy. I've been working on a very big project and when the time is right, read when the client say's it's ok :-), more on that.

But in the meantime I've been in the Netherlands for some work.

2 weeks ago me and 2 of my collegue's: Raf, Indra, joined the lovely people at Qi-Ideas in Amsterdam.
We did a 'Flash rush': five days, three flash developers and lots of coffee on a project for Nivea called My Silhouette!

It's been intense but we had a great time. Everybody at Qi made us feel welcome and we were well taken care of!

Holland rules!

Thanks to everybody at Qi-Ideas and special thanks to Sander, Emily, Django and Niels.

Niels, thanks for taking us out into town. We had a great time man!

Check out:
http://www.qi-ideas.com
http://labs.qi-ideas.com/
http://nyls.blogspot.com/

1. First minute of arrival. Raf checking the WiFi...

2. Indra & Raf and the Qi-building in the background... Impressive

3. As a Belgian, I say to you, Jean Marie Pfaff is everywhere.

Raf doing his thing...

Party at Qi (Niels on the left)

Flash @ Bozar: Museum of Fine Arts in Brussels

2008-04-26T12:33:00.010+02:00

Hello my dear fellow readers,
It's been very busy past few weeks, and I will get back on more stuff I have been working on, but I am proud to inform you that one of my works has been selected for the Canvas Collectie.
4700 artists with a total of 14.000 works registerd for this competition. In total 250 artist were chosen and their work will be exhibited at the prestigious Museum of Fine Arts Bozar in Brussels.

No need to say I feel honored with this accomplishment.

The work that has been chosen is called WeAreTheWorld and is a real time search engine scraper, completely written in Flash.
I think this is the first piece of art done in Flash that will be displayed at Bozar.

A premiere for me and Adobe as well I should say!

Read more here:
http://www.wimvanhenden.be
http://multiblog.vrt.be/canvascollectie/
http://labo.canvas.be/content/we-are-world-v1

Screenshot @ Culture Club Gent

Prints @ The Guesthouse Antwerp

Testing @ my livingroom

FITC Amsterdam 2008 : Britney is back!

2008-02-25T12:01:00.002+01:00

As I am seated here next to Peter, Nicolas his presentation about the Google Analytics Suite is about to begin.

Together with Wannes and Sven I arrived at the creek of dawn and were present for the keynote by Mike Downey, Serge Jespers and Richard Galvan.

Most important features to remember:

1. Britney Spears is back according to Mike Downey.
2. AIR 1.0 is officialy out now!

The new Flash IDE, code named DIESEL, seems like a return to animation. In the days of Flash 5 lots of animators, including the ones working for TV, used Flash as a development tool for their animations. When AS 2.0 came out the focus was shifted more towards scripting but the new features of Flash CS4 is about getting back to the roots.
There's lot of improvement on tweening, tweening paths, there is basic 3D support, an advanced keyframe editor, inverse kinematics and so on...

Usergroup: New Year get together ruled!

2008-01-28T22:03:00.000+01:00

Last week-end the Belgain Adobe User group got together to celebrate the new year. And a celebration it was!

There were great speakers and sessions and we closed the place with too much wine and cigars.

1. Serge Jespers on Flexbuilder 3 and AIR.
There are now 8.000.000 downloads a day for flash player 9 and about 500.000 AIR runtime installs allready.
A great feaure in Flexbuilder 3 is the automatic creation of a project from an existing database. The setup is simple and Flexbuilder creates all your projects files and php files. You could even use this just for the creation of the php files for further use in Flash!
Don't forget about the runtime shared libraries. You can have the Flex framework cached which decreases file size dramatically.

2. James Ward on BlazeDS
Blaze Data Services is now what the Lifecycle Data Services used to be.
A lot of cool stuff for Flex.
The profiler, the messaging service in AMF and did you know that AMF already has standard compression. Check out this amazing demo about the power of AMF:
http://www.jamesward.org/census
Still a pitty to see a lot cool stuff for Flex you can not use in Flash (AMF messaging, profiler,...)

3. Christophe Herreman
Christophe talked about the Prana framework wich is quite impressive.
Prana is about Inversion of Control (IOC), learn more about it here.
It's about programming against interfaces, dependency pull, constructor injection and setter injection all controlled with a XML dialect. Although I have to admit it's not always easy to get your head around some of these concepts and to implement them in fast packed Flash projects (not Flex) it's very usefull to try familiarize yourself with them.

4. Jerome on lovelycharts.com
Lovelycharts is an online diagramming application written in flex. It's in beta now and it is impressive. As Jermo says it is easy to use, fast and does what it needs to do. Nothing more, nothing less. I think I will be throwing all Visio and OpenOffice tools to do this overboard.
Check it out here.

I especially would like to thank Koen for setting this up. It was a fun evening and I had a good time. I stayed behind with Peter, Steven, Marc, Gijs and Koen, we had more drinks, cigars (thanks Gijs!) and closed up at my place.

Here's some pictures, for more pictures check out Wouter his pictures here.

Serge doing Britney Spears

Christophe Herreman going deep

Jerome lovely

Koen, our chairman dirty dancing

The ADOBE wine!

Gijs on the run with the ADOBE wine!

Peter and Koen

Mr Dunn (the best hair in the world!)

Mister Verbruggen (thanks for lending me the money dude!)

Koen and Peter at my house

Marc and Gijs having a last cigar

Me infamous: featuring on Adobe's OnAir blog

2008-01-17T21:46:00.000+01:00

I am proud and honoured to be featuring on Adobe's OnAir blog!

Together with my collegue Nicolas Lierman, who did the Google Analytics Reporting suite , we were interviewed by mister Serge Jespers about Air and the suite.

Click here to see the video at the OnAir blog
Or here for Serge's own videoblog (this one is faster).
While you are there, subscribe to it. You won't regret it!

I think this rocks! The sunglasses are just there for the show element.
It always rains in Belgium..
Thanks a million, yes I say respect, to Serge!

Combining Flexbuilder and Flash CS3: Video tutorial

2007-12-13T11:47:00.000+01:00

We all know Flexbuilder is a much beter tool for coding Actionscript than Flash CS3, and if you don't know, give a try right now with this video tutorial I made.

With most of the stuff today being about Flex one should not forget that Flash developers are still out there.
For real... I pitty the fool who would try to do something like this alphaomegathegame in Flex. Don't get me wrong. It can be done (maybe Red Interactive did it) but it's not the road I would walk (for now that is). But you can combine Flexbuilder and Flash CS3 in your daily workflow.

This tutorial covers the basics in setting up the development environment. There is more to it and we'll get back on that in the future, but this should get you on track.

Click here to see the tutorials.

Enjoy!

crossposted at labs.boulevart

Mariah Carey Desktop toy: Alpha release

2007-11-20T09:14:00.000+01:00

I have had so many requests to realease the celebrated Adobe AIR Mariah Carey Desktop tool, so here it is for you to enjoy.

Click here to download it.

How it works:
1. The timer is a countdown to Mariah's birthday.
2. Click the Flickr logo and your desktop will be filled with Mariah pictures.
3. Drag the pictures around.
3. Drag an mp3 onto Mariah's head and watch the pictures dance.

Stuff for the next version:
1. Framing pictures.
2. Extra navigation, closing the pictures.
3. Better handling of the dancing pictures.
4. Fireworks and a video of Mariah instead of a picture :-)

Remember:
1. It's an Adobe AIR application, so if you don't have it, install the runtime first.
Download it here.
2. Adobe AIR is in beta, so changes can occur making this version of the Mariah Carey tool instable.

Some screenshots:

Flex components in Flash: Example with source

2007-11-18T13:19:00.000+01:00

Here's how to load a Flex component in Flash and communicate with it through events.
This can be pretty nifty if you want to use the much better components that ship with Flex in your Flash application.

Click here to see it in action.
This example uses a simple button, but you could use a more complex datagrid if you'd like.

Here's the flow:

1. Load the Flex swf into your flash
2. Wait until the loaded Flex component reaches frames 2 (all Flex swf's have 2 frames indeed)
3. Add the eventlistener (for the event defined in the flex) on the application property of the loaded object. This property is actually a property of the SystemManager class. Remeber the SystemManager class does not exist in Flash. It's a Flex thing.

Here's some sample code to use in Flash:


import flash.display.*;
import flash.events.*;
import flash.net.URLRequest;
import flash.utils.Timer;


var loader:Loader = new Loader();
var timer:Timer;

//load the Flex Component
loader.load(new URLRequest("ButtonTest.swf"));
loader.contentLoaderInfo.addEventListener(Event.COMPLETE, loaderDone);
addChild(loader);


function loaderDone(e:Event) {
timer = new Timer(100);
timer.addEventListener(TimerEvent.TIMER, handleTimer)
timer.start();
}

function handleTimer(event:TimerEvent):void {
//cast the loader.content into MovieClip to access currentFrame.
var myclip:MovieClip = loader.content as MovieClip;
if (myclip.currentFrame == 2) {
//use application property to attach the event listener
myclip.application.addEventListener("iAmClickedFromFlex", clickedFromFlex);
timer.stop();
}
}


function clickedFromFlex(event:Event):void {
trace("clicked");
}

Flex code: (just a simple button)

<?xml version="1.0" encoding="utf-8"?>
<mx:Application xmlns:mx="http://www.adobe.com/2006/mxml" layout="absolute">
<mx:Button  x="5" y="20" label="I am a flexbutton" click="dispatchEvent(new Event('iAmClickedFromFlex'))"/>
</mx:Application>

This message has also been posted on Boulevart labs

Mike Chambers and Lee Brimelow in Belgium

2007-11-12T20:49:00.000+01:00

Mister Mike Chambers and mister Lee Brimelow were the guest speakers at our Belgian Adobe User Group.

It's been really great to have these 2 guys with us. Mike and Lee did 2 sessions on Adobe AIR.

Mike gave us some general insights on AIR and what Adobe will be doing in the future. Keep an eye out for Hydra and Thermo.

Lee is pretty new in the Adobe team and he did a really great session.
He's a funny guy, if you have the change, go and watch him or watch the video here.

Lee is a flash developer and works with AIR mostly from Flash.

Topics on Lee's presentation:

1. Using Flash or Flex? Let the project decide:

Pro Flex:
Flex rich component set
Flex Builder 3 coding experience
Flex data binding

Pro Flash:
when using animation
Video (FLV Playback component)
No extra weight from the flex framework.

2. System Tray is in AIR now :-)

3. Hacks to launch native procesess.

This was live blogging. The sessions are now done and some pictures and the video will be up soon.

Take care!

Adobe MAX: Exclusive video

2007-10-25T22:09:00.000+02:00

I still have to write about day 3 at Max, I know but last week has been extremely busy.
With Boulevart we are working on some cool stuff for DuvalE and some guys on the team are doing a great video site for Cronos.

Me, Nicolas and Richard dragged everybody in front of our camera for some real live footage.
It was great. Richard is working on a better version at the moment. So stay tuned!

Adobe MAX 2007: Day two & three

2007-10-18T11:31:00.000+02:00

DAY TWO:

We stayed up pretty late the first day so we had about 4 and a half hours of sleep. Then already I got the feeling this was not going to change the coming days.

So to get our heads cleared we thought attending Lee Thomason's session would be a good idea:

1. Inside the flash player
This was definitely one of the most interesting sessions. We all work with flash, just doing our thing everyday. But we never actually realize what really is going on under the hood.

Lee Thomason gave us a some very good insights without making it too complex. I'll sum some of his key-points up for you.

1. Flash is retained rendering vs immediate rendering.
This means Flash always waits for the frame (updateAfterEvent) to do the rendering.
Except for Bitmap data in AS3 which is always immediate.

A tip for performance testing. Use bitmaps to measure time because they are immediately rendered to the screen.

2. Just in time compiling.
This is a standard for compiling actionsctript into bytecode.
Also known as the famous Tamarin open source project.

3. Coding tips for optimization
Used sealed classes
Integer array access
avoid globals in deeply nested code (keep globals out of loops)

4. Garbage collection
The main thing to remember is that Adobe will not release a public API for garbage collection.
This strategy is well chosen, because the garbage collector will be due to many engineering changes in the future.
If a public API would be available, the team would be tight too much to this API for future changes.

5. Text rendering
Animations ons 'Saffron' text, which actually is the method for advanced anti-aliasing on embedded fonts, should be better in flashplayer 10 version.
Font/text rendering is a difficult issue to tackle because of the many varieties and specifications around the world.

6. Some points on Flashplayer 10: code-name Moviestar
cross domain caching
fullscreen will support hardware acceleration
H264/AAC audio encoding
multi threaded rendering
encrypted streams
AS3 sampling profiler but only for Flexbuilder3, not in Flash :-(
mip mapped bitmaps downscaling of images without quality loss or artifacts.

2. Closed session on Mobile
In the afternoon Nicolas and I attended a closed session for +/- 20 developers organized by the Flash Mobile Team. Kathy Charneco did a great job in taking care of us and leading the session.
Present were Carlos Ulloa, Stefan Richter, team from Blueskynorth, team from Lightmaker, Mike Jones, Steven Verbruggen, Frederik Claerhout, Koen De Weggheleire and people from the Adobe team.
To me its seems now that most flash developers underestimate the flash mobile platform.
As Chris Petty from Blueskynorth stated, flash lite is present in many phones and is standard in almost every new model that is released on the market.

For developers it seems that maintaining 2 code-bases is mostly too much overflow and the incapability to adress specific api's, like bluetooth or text messaging are 2 big issues. The latter is of course very platform dependent, but when working on mobile platforms I think there is more to gain with giving up some independency in order to be able to create full functional mobile applications. Let's face it, developing for mobile already is very difficult because of the different screen sizes, platforms, keypads, etc... you. So why not create platform depend api's to address these extra features? This being said, FlashLite 3 is out and Flash Home for mobile is coming up. This is a complete operating system in Flash, yeah!

For consumers initiatives like a marketplace with new applications, the latest downloads/updates, etc... would be very useful. It seems user need to be more aware of the fact that they have Flash on their phones. Everybody in the world now knows what a Flash website is, so this perception of the technology should be consolidated on mobile phones as well.

I was very pleased with this initiative. It seems Adobe is aware of their community and what they have to say. Thumbs up!

3. Koen De Weggheleire: Playing with pixels.
Koen from newmovieclip and the leader of our belgian Adobe user group hit us with his knowledge about pixels and bitmapdata. Koen is a bright guy and he has a special style of presenting like nobody can. He can combine fun things with complex technical stuff without anyone getting bored. It's just hilarious to see Koen waving, jumping, turning at the stage, demoing his creations. Nice one Koen!

4. Closing party
The higlight of the day for sure!
It was a great party. There was lots of booze, there was a great live band, there we casino games and great card magiacians to entertain us. Richard, Nicolas and I dragged lot's of people like Justin Everett Church, Ben Forta, Serge Jespers, Aral Balkan, Carlos Ulloa, Andrew Shorten, Stephanie Sullivan, Thibault Imbert, Benjamin Dobler and many more in front of our camera. We had a great time and a montage will be available soon.

DAY THREE:

Things to remember:

1. Watch out for the new release of Flash:
Live preview of flv's in the IDE
New tweening system with bezier curves (bye bye motion guide) and tweens are now attached to the timeline and not the the object anymore
Kinematics! yeah!

2. The release of flash player 10
3D support
Advanced text layout
Custom filters, effects, etc.. Hydra
C/C++ support

3. Flash Home
The flash operating system for mobile

4. Thermo
A new software package for designers to create Rich Internet Applications

5. AIR
AIR is taking on the world. It seems everybody is finding his/her way into AIR.

The New Creatives: Cheap, fast and good.
Hoss Gifford

I saw Hoss Gifford last year at Flash on the Beach and his session blew me away back then.
Maybe it's just me but in session like this, I always leave the room with my sketchbook filled with idea's.
Wise words from Hoss:
Cheap, fast and good. A project can only be 2 of these at the same time.

AS3 Design patterns
Leo Schuman

Leo talked about, in his own unique way, some of the basics of the observer and the singleton pattern.
Important to remember is that programming to interfaces really works and that composition is to be preferred over inheritance.

Advanced Video Encoding
Giovanni Antico

This was a good last session for me. I am not the world's most renown video expert, so Giovanni's clear explanation of video was quite enlightening.
Check out his files of the presentation.
http://www.gantico.com/blog/2007/10/video-encoding-session/

For more fine pictures visit
http://about.boulevart.be

The crew hanging out with Serge Jespers

Me and Carlos. Say hi to your mom from me dude!

Me and Mike Jones.
Mike is a very nice guy and I am glad to have met him.

Adobe MAX 2007: First Day + Our session

2007-10-16T10:03:00.000+02:00

I had some troubles with my internet connection yesterday evening at my hotel room, so with some delay here it is. The first day at MAX :-)

1. The Google Analytics Reporting suite, our own session:

Nicolas and I had a good time doing our presentation. We started with some Sandra Kim tunes, before diving into the hardcore world of code. We enjoyed it and the reactions on the application are very good and encouraging. Keep an eye out on the analytics website

For more pictures on our presentation check out: about.boulevart.be

2. Peter Elst on Best practices in Actionscript 3:
http://www.peterelst.com
As always Peter's sessions are pixel perfect. Most of the stuff het talked about I am already familiar with, but I went to support Peter. But remember, and we all know this, when going live ALWAYS DELETE your trace statements. Peter did a simple test with an array filled with 10000 elements. With trace statement 11 seconds to do a loop, without the trace statement 41 milliseconds.

3. The keynote:
Kevin Lynch, Ben Forta, Mike Downey, Justin Everett Church and the rest of the Adobe crew presented us with all the latest of Adobe: AIR, Flash player 10 codename Astro, Hydra, Flexbuilder 3,...

4.Xavier Beumala & Carlos Rovira: Flex in Flash
http://www.madeinflex.com
Xavier and Carlos talked about combining flash and flex. It seems that with the release of flexbuilder 3, the flex team has put a lot of effort into simplifying the skinning of components. The flex component kit is now standard in Flexbuilder 3.
Still to me it seems the workflow of skinning components or using flash to build them for Flex is not yet optimal. There are still to many parameters and rules to cope with to call it a fluid workflow. Important was the usage of Flex components in Flash . It's quite simple actually. You have to put an onEnterFrame event listener on the loader object once the flex swf is loaded and wait for the second frame. Then the flew swf is all yours and you can start listening to events dispatched from the Flex component.

5. Mario Klingemann on The Blind Sketckmaker.
htpp://www.quasimondo.com
Mario posed himself the question: "Can computers generate art?". He developed a few tools in AIR to help him find the answer. Basically he feeds his software images and with the usage of the image filters he retracts data from the picture in order to categorize it. The he let's the compouter generate images from a blank canvas and hold them against his database to check wether the picture the computer generated is art or not.
It was a very inspiring session to me and will make get more into the filters for sure. The point is the idea and not the technology and Mario is ahead of the class.

And yes, we had some great cava afterwards :-)

I am speaking at Adobe MAX Barcelona!

2007-10-15T09:54:00.000+02:00

This is live blogging from the Adobe MAX event at Barcelona. Yihaa!!

First let me tell you it's already been great so far. We arrived yesterday, just went for a quick meal at McDonalds and headed back to the hotel to work on our presentation. In the evening I was invited by the people of Adobe Benelux to have diner at this cool place by the beach called Bestial. A big cheerio to the Adobe crew.

I had a great time. I was seated right next to the loveley Serge Jespers and it seems his table manners have been improved by now.

But today it's time for the real deal.

I am joining my collegue Mr. Nicolas Lierman on stage this afternoon for a demo presentation of the Google Analytics reporting suite. No suprise I am very excited.

I will be outlining some general information about AIR and why everybody should use it along with some less serious but very cool applications I made. There will be the Stinky Panda Tamagotchi and a desktop Mariah Carey (yeah really!).

Stay tuned, I will be back for more.

A few snapshots for you to enjoy:

The TV in my hotel room welcomes me personally. How cool is that?

We flew just 2 hours and here they are: Palmtrees rule!

Mr Nicolas Lierman looking sharp by the pool

Diner with the Adobe crew

Adobe AIR: Beta 2 drag and drop + window

2007-10-09T16:19:00.000+02:00

Adobe released the beta 2 for AIR.

There have been some changes in the API. So if you did some projects in beta 1 you will have to change your code.

window is replaced by nativeWindow. For example:
stage.window.x is now stage.nativeWindow.x

The drag and drop API has been changed dramatically:

The classes TransferableFormats and TransferableData are gone.
You will now have to use the Clipboard and ClipboardFormats classes.
Dragging in for example:

import desktop.Clipoard;
import desktop.ClipboardFormats;

private function onDrop(e:NativeDragEvent):void {

DragManager.dropAction = DragActions.COPY;

var dropfiles:Array = e.clipboard.getData(ClipboardFormats.FILE_LIST_FORMAT) as Array;

}

So to sum it up:

1. use clipboard.getData instead of transferable.dataForFormat.
2. use ClipboardFormats.FILE_LIST_FORMAT instead of transferableFormats.FILE_LIST_FORMAT

Take care!

Adobe AIR summercamp ROCKED! We won!

2007-08-27T15:56:00.000+02:00

Nicolas, Frederic and myself were invited by the good folks over at Adobe to come and compete at the Adobe AIR summercamp benelux.

And yes, we won! We are attending MAX in Barcelona this year, thanks to Adobe

Nico, Frederik you guys rocked, thanks for working so hard, the great teamwork and the spirit. I love you guys!

We created 'Stinky Panda'. A 3D tamagotchi that lives on your desktop. You have to feed it music and pictures, you have to put it to sleep and you have to clean it's crap. I kid you not. It will pollute your desktop fast with 'crap'. So you better clean up.

More on Stinky Panda and his future over at Boulevart labs.

Special thanks to Serge from Adobe, for inviting us, for setting this up and for helping us out during the night walk, respect and muchas gracias dude!

Many hugs to Benjamin Dopler for his insights on the ByteArray class and for being a wicked guy. Thanks man!
Thanks to Christophe Rooms from Adobe for his work on the drag and drop API, the databases and his support and last but not least Lilly from Blue Projects for organising and having some 30 nerds walk in line.

The guys from Lostboys ended up in 2nd place with a slick VJ mixing tool with an incredibly cool interface.
3rd position was for the guys from TribalDDB with something called the AIR Hole. A tiny application but with lots of power. You can send files directly to someone else by dragging it into the hole on your desktop.

It was great to finally meet some of the guys who's work I was allready familiar with.
I had a great time with Eric and Thijs from Lostboys, Joey and Jan Willem from TribalDDB, Andre from Atos Origin, Sander and his buddy from Satama, Sakri from Nascom, Pascal from Thesedays and on and on...

Thanks to all the teams for their support!
It was a blast and I hope to be seeing some of the guys back really soon.

I'll be on holiday for the coming 2 weeks but I will be back!

Adobe AIR and Flash CS3: Demo with source

2007-08-13T16:21:00.001+02:00

Here is an AIR demo that encapsulates some neat AIR and AS3 tricks.
It is called the Kevin Bacon Drag and Drop.
You have to drag an image file (jpg, png or gif) to the top of the screen.
When you drop the file it will fall down.
Make sure it lands on Kevin's camera and your picture will appear on the screen behind Kevin.

This a summary of all the features implemented in this demo:
1. compiled and written within Flash CS3 (not Flexbuilder)
2. the Adobe AIR drag and drop API
3. pixel perfect collision detection in AS3
4. the use of custom events and event bubbling
5. Ratio scaling for images

Thanks to Grant Skinner you can now compile AIR files from within Flash CS3.
Download and read the instructions here:
http://www.gskinner.com/blog/archives/2007/07/creating_air_pr.html

The Adobe AIR API documentation is build in the Flex3 Language reference (look for the classes with a blue dot next to them)
http://livedocs.adobe.com/labs/flex/3/langref/

Download the installer file here:
http://cases.boulevart.be/blogs/DragandDropGame.zip

Download the source files here:
http://cases.boulevart.be/blogs/DragandDropGame_source.zip

Here's a few mac and windows screenshots:

crossposted at labs.boulevart.be

Look who's a web 2.0 expert...

2007-08-07T13:56:00.000+02:00

pointed out to me by this fine dude: aboutnico

Check this out boys and girls:
http://techcrunch20.com/panel-of-experts/

Click the link and search for Mr MC Hammer!

Career change anyone?

Propod: Is Flash a tool for blogging?

2007-06-05T11:46:00.000+02:00

With the release of FI's blog done in Flash, I started a post out at labs.boulevart.be to discuss if Flash is a suitable tool for blogging?

Join the discussion here:
http://labs.boulevart.be/index.php/2007/06/05/fi-propod-is-flash-a-tool-for-blogging/

Word!

gemaaktwatmee.be: Campaign for Jupiler

2007-05-22T11:42:00.000+02:00

Commisioned by TheseDays, we worked at flash development for the campaign gemaaktwatmee.be for Belgian beer Jupiler.

Our developer Maarten worked together with the Thesedays developer team mostly at database communication using Json and Monorail.

There is an article at www.marketinginteractive.be too (in dutch).

Thanks to TheseDays.

Build and compile AS3, Flex2 and Apollo applications in Eclipse on Mac OS X

2007-05-18T10:47:00.000+02:00

Tested Unit, the blog of Mister Sven Dens is online.

Sven is sitting right next to me here at the office and his first post is a litle jewel for all Flash/Flex developers.

He created a template that contains everything you need to build and run Flash/Flex/Apollo apps from ActionScript source files or MXML (Flex2) source files.

Donload the template here or visit Sven's blog for the source and more details.

Good work Sven!
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Silverlight for Flash Developers: Demo with source code

2007-05-15T09:51:00.000+02:00

With Silverlight being the talk of the town, especially amongst Flash developers, what is the best way to get your head around it? Right... Get your hands dirty. There ain't much to gain from talking about stuff you never tried :-)

The best way to get started was to go out and try some very basic stuff for game development. So I started out with basic character controlling.

Download the silverlight plug-in, if you don't allready have it, and check out the result:
http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/silverlight/ladybug/fullscreen/default.html

I am on a Mac so I did not use any IDE for the creation of this demo.
Windows users can use Visual Studio or Expression.
I only used TextEdit (Notepad) for Windows users. So you could say that Silverlight is platform independent. This demo was created on a Mac. Maybe some IDE for Mac will arise in the open source community one day. You could use Eclipse for your javascript development for now. Documentation that comes with the SDK is pretty good, so you should have a 'Hello World' pretty quick.

What you need:
1. html file
2. a xaml file (pronounce as "zammel")
3. min. 2 javascript files
4. the Silverlight plug-in
5. TextEdit or Notepad

Download the SDK here.

Developing Silverlight vs Flash:
It's not all that difficult to get it working, but it can be pretty confusing if you are a Flash developer. Because I didn't use any IDE it was very hard to debug and I am not a javascript master so I had to 'cheat' sometimes.

1. Scripting and manipulating objects is done in separate files. You define your UI elements in the XAML file and you manipulate them in another file with javascript. Or at least most of the time. Not so for animations. Pretty confusing indeed...

2. I made quit a mess trying to get simultanious keyboard input, but it works. I got frustrated over booleans not working (no debugging tools) so I faked them with strings, sorry...

3. There is no 'onEnterFrame' boys and girls. There is however a work around. You create an animation with duration zero, you set a callback handler where you restart the animation and where you can put your code to be executed.

4. Prototyping is back. You will be seeing a lot of these things: myobject.prototype.mymethod = function doThis() . I've only got rid of this 2 years ago and I feel that it's not doing any good for the OO approach.

5. No support for creating custom events if your are not working with C# or Visual Basic.

6. No collision detection for images. There is a HitTest method but you can't use that on images. Only on the Stroke object.

7. Bitmap manipulation in Flash (the bitmap API) is much much more mature.

8. The switch from Actionscript to Javascript is not that hard.

9. Embedding in an html page is a complete drag. I tried to embed my application in this blog but it doesn't work at all. Microsoft provided a service called Silverlight streaming. Here you can upload your application as a zip file where you add a manifest.xml file from where it can be streamed. They provide you with some extra code and code to embed your app on an html page but I can't get it to work. It is pretty easy if you have full control over the server where you host your pages but embedding a Flash app is much more straightforward.

10. Working with animations is completely different in Silverlight than in Flash. It is done in the XAML file where you work with storyboards. An animation is an object, you can target and manipulate your animations in the according *.js file.

I feel Silverlight has a long way to go, but .NET developers should be able to get a grip of it fast. It is still in Beta so I guess stuff like bitmap manipulation, cleaner embedding, collision detection, event handling,... are allready on the table over at Microsoft. Or they should be...

Download the source code here:
http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/silverlight/ladybug/silverlight_ladybug_source.zip

Word!
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Work, work, work

2007-05-12T08:06:00.000+02:00

To all my dear readers,

I know it has been a while but it's been very very busy the last two weeks. I know you've heard it before but it's true! Really.
Check it out:

Game development:
I have been doing a game for a recruitment campaign for Microsoft Dynamics, commissioned by the nice folks over at McCann:
http://www.lanceerjezelf.be/game.aspx

The game was done in the Asap framework and I must say it works very good. Development speed has gone up and everybody is working according one system which is a good thing. It's good, believe me! We did coding, design and photography for the game from zero to completion within 6 days.

Game development 2:
I haven been doing an offline installation for Suzuki. This jackpot installation was used at a 4x4 event in Brecht. Check out my test environment:

My collegue Bart doing a stresstest (look at him all stressed out...)

Second Life:
We have opened our own island, commissioned by our mother company Cronos, at Second Life and had a first event there with Radio1 and Boek.be:
http://slurl.com/secondlife/Cronos/152/157/34
Go there and watch streaming video's of presentations of books presented in a special package for 'De literaire lente'. I am very proud of our island and what we achieved there so far.

Silverlight:
I got my hands dirty on Silverlight

Internal stuff:
I've been working on our Subversion setup or at least I was mostly anoying my collegue Sven who actually did the setup. But we are on a roll now. I am so glad everything works fine now.

Yes, all of this in merely 13-15 days my friends...

More on all these things in following posts.

Respect!

Microsoft Silverlight and JavaFX: What about the flash developer?

2007-04-17T12:47:00.000+02:00

Silverlight: Beta release.

JavaFX: Alpha release

Silverlight:

"Silverlight is a cross-browser, cross-platform plug-in for delivering the next generation of media experiences and rich interactive applications (RIAs) for the Web."

This sounds very much like the Flash player plug-in doesn't it?

It indeed is Microsoft's answer to Adobe's wellknown Flash player. But remember, it is still in Beta so changes will be made along the way.

In fact the only technology capable of delivering fast packed media experiences at this moment is Flash. Or would you prefer to give Ajax a try to create something like this:
http://www.gettheglass.com/

So you can state that Adobe has a monopoly within this niche of the internet business.
So now Microsoft claims to be ready, or almost ready because Silverlight is in beta, to take a piece of the market. Will they succeed? As we all know, they have done it before.

Flash has been MY tool, it really feels like it is mine, for years now. I can do almost anything with it: skateboarding, riding horses, swimming,... So yes I must admit, some say that is not professional behavior, my knees weakened a bit when I heard the news. Where would this leave me, what should I do, will Microsoft crush my beloved Flash or will Flash be like the I-pod? Just the most popular one out of many alternatives?

Flash has grown to become a steady environment with a huge and strong community. I don't see this crumbling down so fast. So don't panic but I agree with Steven from Minorissues that Silverlight should be taken serious:
http://www.minorissues.be/blog/index.php?itemid=189

JavaFX:

"The demand continues to grow for secure, interactive content, applications, and services that run on a variety of clients. To simplify and speed the creation and deployment of high-impact content for a wide range of devices, Sun is introducing JavaFX, a new family of products based on Java technology designed to enable consistent user experiences, from desktop to mobile device to set-top box to Blu-ray Disc."

It seems that Sun is mostly aiming at Ajax with this one.
Their focus is mainly on multi platform development. Sun completely missed the interactive webcontent boat. Their applet hasn't really changed since 1996 or so, while Macromedia's Flash platform seemed to be versatile enough to grow and become market leader for interactive web content.

Again we'll have to see what happens.

Conclusion:

A lot of things are happening for multimedia developers these days. What technolgy should one choose, which 'side' should one choose?

For me, it is not about choosing sides. As a multimedia developer you should always embrace new things. You should by some new books and study.
The boys and girls at marketing departments, the deals within the industry and the user will guide us...

A true Nerd is never scared... Never!

Word!

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More impressive work: Red Interactive

2007-04-02T12:21:00.000+02:00

I read about this nice site over at boomblogue:

http://ff0000.com/universe/

The site is in beta and for you to test.

Impressive and very well done!

Royal Boulevart Football Club

2007-03-27T09:53:00.000+02:00

Yes,

Alive and kicking the Royal Boulevart Football Club!

Talented as we are, we will rule the universe!

Our first game will be the 11th of April against the These Days Football Allstars

Thanks to the believer and chairman Claudio

Eye Project: impressive work from Yugop

2007-03-26T10:20:00.000+02:00

Brought to me by Zuppaman and brought to you by Yugop and Takayuki Fukatsu:

Eye project

A video posting site for the Japanese telecom company KDDI. One of the first AS3 commercial projects with some impressive scripting including papervision running in the background.

enjoy!

Fonky Flash is online!

2007-03-21T10:55:00.000+01:00

Yes, Mr. D Jannes has got his first post up!

Fonky Flash

Read about what he did with L-Systems in Flash.

He is sooo nice, he even shares his code with us.

Nice work dude.
Catch you on the flipside!

Adobe releases Apollo alpha on Adobe labs

2007-03-19T10:35:00.000+01:00

Yes it's here!

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/apollo/

Download, play and have fun!

It also seems that the product managers from Adobe are thinking about changing the name for the official release.

I feel, and many developers with me, the name should stay.
You can take the poll here:
http://blog.everythingflex.com/2007/03/15/apollo-the-great-debate/

Big cheerio to the Apollo team!

The Apple Sudden Motion Sensor (SMS) to Flash

2007-03-11T22:33:00.000+01:00

Not only the keyboard of my MacBook lits up in the dark, it seems to be equiped with a Sudden Motion Sensor or SMS.
This motion sensor is designed to protect your hard disk when the computer is dropped or undergoes severe vibration.

The Sudden Motion Sensor is designed to detect unusually strong vibrations, sudden changes in position or accelerated movement. If the computer is dropped, the Sudden Motion Sensor instantly parks the hard drive heads to help reduce the risk of damage to the hard drive on impact.

Ofcourse the sensor can be used for more vital applications as well. How about a game of Pong anyone? It has been done in Processing, so why not give it a try in Flash. Just for the sake of it!

Here is an example I've build using Java and Flash.

I know the ball is going at 'loser' speed, but hey it's MY party and I cry if I want to!
Download the source code here:

http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/AppleSMS2Flash.zip

Included are the Unimotion library and the Java API to work with it, the Flash files and the Java socket server.
The big picture is you use the Unimotion library in Java for detecting the motion and then send it to the Flash through a Java socket server.

Related links:
Lincoln Ramsey (created Unimotion library)
Daniel Shiffman (created the Java API for Unimotion)
Grant Skinner (for the Flash collision detection)
Info about the SMS

Mr Tom Anthoni is alive!

2007-03-09T10:21:00.000+01:00

May I introduce you:

Drowning in a sea of Flash

The blog of the talented and handsome Mr. Tom Anthoni!

He will blog of all things flash and other cool stuff. He is a cool guy and I hope he will have a long and prosperous life in the virtual world!

Cheers dude!

Mike Downey demonstrates Apollo

2007-02-28T10:13:00.000+01:00

Mr Mike Downey, who looks a bit like Quentin Tarantino if you ask me, from Adobe demonstrates an eBay-branded application created with Apollo.

Apollo is a cross-operating system runtime that allows you to install desktop applications that are built using web technologies like HTML, JavaScript, and Flash.

Although Zinc has been around for some time now doing a good job, this promises to be very cool and give us Flash developers a new point of view for creating rich applications.

Here's the link:

http://www.adobe.com/devnet/videos/apollo_demo07/index.html

Word!

Google is in my house!

2007-02-26T12:02:00.000+01:00

The wall!

2007-02-23T09:26:00.000+01:00

Zuppaman told me they removed the These Days wall with one giant Val Kilmer poster.

So this link is a tribute in honor of the old These Days wall...

http://blog.thesedays.com/thewall/

For the insiders: 'De Wim kan het niet aan' is still there.
Sweet guys, really sweet... :-)

BoulevArt impressum: A day at the office...

2007-02-21T11:41:00.000+01:00

BoulevArt, a day at the office...

1. One of the finalist of World Press Photo is right behind me...

2. This is DJ Dirk Bielen, also known as the AD who loves obscure eastern german techno...

3. Join us!! Your desk is waiting :-)

4. We needed a wall just like the developers at These Days. Love you guys :-)

5. This is the stuff our project managers do... hmmm

Herman Asselberghs wins at Transmediale

2007-02-08T11:13:00.000+01:00

Belgian artist Herman Asselberghs won the Transmediale festival this year with his film 'Proof of Life'

The work 'Proof of Life' by Herman Asselberghs is testament to the power of art to bring its audience into the present. Its layering of meaning and the interplay between different times and spaces, mirrors current multiple realities saturated in images of terror,the viewe) is impotent and in a perpetual state of emergency. 'Proof of Live' is an artwork which first and foremost speaks to a universal and splintered human condition through both the description and metaphor of incarceration.
Consistent with a long history of text based interventions, Asselberghs plays with a space denoting an, 'absence of presence and presence of absence' with strong resonances, reminiscent of the film essay by Alain Resnais, 'Night and Fog'. Sitting between audio performance and site specific installation, this work demonstrates the power of the text. Contemporaneous in form and content, referencing and further propagating mediated witness and solace, ‘Proof of Live’ invites us into a space in order to question the degree of our own comfort and the abstraction of the world around us. (transmediale.07 jury statement)

I submited my project Beautiful Mess, but there were 1030 submissions so I won't take it personal they didn't select me :-)

Congratulations Herman Asselberghs.

Live in Second Life

2007-01-31T09:41:00.000+01:00

Yesterday evening at 11.00 pm CET Windows Vista was launched in Brussels with a concert from Praga Khan.
One Agency took care of the event in Second Life.

I was there and here are some screenshots:

Compile AS3 on OSX without FlexBuilder

2007-01-26T11:49:00.000+01:00

A glorieus moment in time...

After 10 years it finally happend, I got myself a Mac.

I have always been very happy with my pc and spreaded the message that Mac's were used by girls or the more girlie type kinda guys...

Well now I have one myself. So yeah I am in touch with my feminin side!

I have to say that I enjoy working on this machine more and more. The keyboard lights up in the dark! How funky is that? That is actually the main reason why I got it really.

So one of the first things I had to do was setting up my development environment.
That includes playing around with AS3 yeah!

So here's a litle 'howto' on compiling AS3 on the Mac. Flexbuilder is a much more complete solution (codehinting, debugging, ...) but is not free and Flashdevelop which is great does not support Mac.

So I am using Eclipse, Ant and the Flex2 SDK.

You can download the tutorial and project files here: (project files are included)
www.seeingisbelieving.be/blog/as3onosx.zip

Thanks to Steve Nelson from BFPUG for setting up the project templates.

Yves Pauwels won an FWA (another one)!

2007-01-23T21:57:00.000+01:00

I don't know Yves personally, but he has done some great stuff.

Today he won an FWA for this one:

http://www.pedro-verhue.be/

Very well done and congrats dude!

An old interview with Yves (2003) on the FWA:
http://www.thefwa.com/interviews/int85.html

Sticks ans stones

2007-01-18T22:29:00.000+01:00

My good friend Steven passed me through 5 sticks. This means I have to reveal 5 things about myself most people don't know about me.

I know it's been a while since he asked me. Steven my deepest apologies for being so late but here they are.

* From the age of 10 till about 17 I played handball. I played with a club called Ajax in first division (at that time). I even got a national selection when I was 16. It seems they are in big trouble at the moment if you read the news at their website (dutch).

* I got my first computer at the age of 9. It was a Tandy TRS-80 Color Computer model II. I sometimes cry in bed at night because I sold it...

* I played guitar for several years in a band called Janez Detd.

* I am more a Pearl Jam than a Nirvana kinda person.

* I care a lot about good hair...

Papervision3D: another flash 3D engine

2007-01-12T09:38:00.000+01:00

Thanks to self proclaimed flash evangelist Nicolas who pushed me into the flash 3D engines I started playing around with Sandy (see previous post) and Papervision3D.

Papervision is an engine written for AS2 as well as AS3.
It is still in private beta but the results are stunning. I have been goofing around with the AS3 engine and it's really performing well.

You will need flash player 9 to view this:

Check it out in a new browser window :
http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/papervision/PaperTest.html

Download the source here:
http://www.seeingisbelieving.be/papervision/PaperVisionTest.as

This demo features around 300 objects on stage with 2 sided bitmap material and a moving camera. I have never seen 3D performing like this in Flash.

Sandy is performing slower and you need the pixlib framework too.
I know it is not really fair comparing an AS2 to AS3 application when it comes to performance.
But the AS2 version of Papervision seems to be performing better than Sandy as well. Feel free to comment :-)

Sandy however supports much more primitives and methods than Papervision3d. Papervision only has mesh, plane and point while Sandy implements box, hedra, plane, sphere, cylinder, line, etc..

Anyway all the guys and girls (it seems there are too few girls doing stuff like this) who are putting things like this online deserve a big cheerio!

CHEERIO!!! and thanks to the open source flash community!

Sandy: a flash AS2 3D engine

2007-01-10T14:47:00.000+01:00

Here's a little test I did with the Sandy 3D engine.

You can find it here:
http://osflash.org/sandy

In the video you see Helena, my 2 year old daughter cheering 'pianisimokey'. She rules!

We are hiring senior flash developers!

2007-01-03T09:30:00.000+01:00

Join us now or weep forever baby!

These Days and Nokia

2006-12-20T10:31:00.000+01:00

We just finished 3 projects for Nokia, check 'em out:

http://indewolken.cnmoves.com/

http://www.nokia.be/beeldigewensen

http://www.cnmoves.com/local/index_vl.html (dutch)
http://www.cnmoves.com/local/index_fr.html (french)

If I say so myself, some pretty nifty work from our crew.
Very well done everybody!

Cheers

Underdog.be brings you Santa!

2006-12-18T11:59:00.000+01:00

Mr. Wim Wauters and the underdog crew released a nice 3D Santa Claus game.

http://www.underdog.be/games/santas-surprise/

Very well done guys!
Check out some other fine work done by the crew:
www.underdog.be

I just need to mention here that I had the pleasure of working with Wim and I hope we can do it more in the feauture.

A floating island anyone?

2006-12-13T10:02:00.000+01:00

The last couple of months I started noticing a lot of floating islands in webdesign.

You see, I allready told everybody this 4 years ago: "Someday floating islands will be hot!"
Some made fun of me, some of my best friends abandoned me, some tried to put me in a mental institution.

See who's laughing now!

BeastAnimation does Lotto

2006-12-11T16:59:00.000+01:00

Beastanimation, co-founded by my good friend Steven De Beul, created a new commercial for Lotto.

You can view the commercial and read about it here:

http://www.lotto.be/pages/show.aspx?Culture=nl&pageid=magazine/pub/spot%20superlotto&cache=33919f2a0

Nice work Steven and Ben!

Digital wind... Better than the real thing

2006-11-24T15:15:00.000+01:00

Check out the campaign for Lynxblow:

http://www.lynxblow.com/

Blow into the microphone or speakers and the girl will react on it.

Great video integration and very well done.
The 'I am lazy' button is a very cool feature. You don't have to set up your speakers and in return you get a nice preview of what to expect when you do find the time to set up everything.

It reminded me of this nice piece of art:
http://tampopo.kentaroyamada.com/

Cheers!

Beautiful Mess_v1

2006-11-20T11:52:00.000+01:00

A personal project.

check it out:

www.beautifulmess.org

It's a real live search engine keyword scraper with text to speech.

It's for sale: 25.000$ for a lifetime license(projector included)

Hell Yeah!

Contact me
wim.vanhenden@telenet.be

2006-11-15T15:58:00.000+01:00

This clip is taken from the dutch show Willy's en Marjetten.

This is a fantastic one!

'Nu weten we meteen waar die syfilis van nonkel Armand vandaan komt: In Zaire'

I think that's funny!

Adobe, Mozilla, and Tamarin

2006-11-08T10:36:00.000+01:00

Adobe's contribution to the Mozilla project of open source code for their ActionScript Virtual Machine (AVM2).

This sounds really interesting.

Check it out:

http://www.hecker.org/mozilla/adobe-mozilla-and-tamarin

Thanks to Nicolas for sending this to me

MIT OpencourseWare

2006-11-03T10:55:00.000+01:00

The massachusetts institute of technology better know as the MIT now has OpenCourseWare.

MIT OCW is a large-scale, Web-based electronic publishing initiative funded jointly by the William and Flora Hewlett Foundation, the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation , MIT, and generous support of the Ab Initio software company.
MIT OCW's goals are to:
Provide free, searchable, access to MIT's course materials for educators, students, and self-learners around the world.
Extend the reach and impact of MIT OCW and the "opencourseware" concept.

I am now watching a video about the analysis of Algorithms.
The OCW initiative is very interesting for people like me to get an inside look of what those great minds like John Maeda are teaching the lucky ones.

Animating with code

2006-11-02T09:21:00.000+01:00

A very fine open source project for animating everything in Flash, including the new filters:

http://www.mosessupposes.com/Fuse/

Check it out yeah!

The greatest website ever created

2006-10-25T10:40:00.000+02:00

Indeed this is the best website ever created
http://www.tenaciousdmovie.com/

It allready starts with the intro:

Quote:

Ok dude grey won't cut it, this website gotta be black. Paint it black. Black is the color of rock, because black is the absence of light.

Besides the fact this site is hilarious, tongue in cheeck it is well build and packed with cool stuff.

One of the best features i have ever seen is the rock the internet feature.
An extreme makeover for any site you suggest but in their own unique way. This is very very well done!
The best part is you don't have to fill in huge forms, leave your email address etc,...
This is how it should be.
Be funny and don't try to sell anything.

Look what they did to this blog:

http://www.tenaciousdmovie.com/rocktheinternet/?id=2485

Hail hail hail!

Movie websites: The past, the present

2006-10-25T10:10:00.000+02:00

This is how movie websites looked like about 10 years ago:
http://www.sonypictures.com/classics/city/

This is what they look like now:
http://www.eragonmovie.com/main.html?cid=us

If you are somewhere around 30 you will remember the times you were waiting 7 minutes to view a 30 second trailer in a format of 160/120 pixels. And at that time it felt like you were the premier witness of something magical.

Now we allmost have it all. Sound, effects, animation,...
But still the average medium resolution of a trailer is somewhere between 320/160 and 480/260. This means we've added about 200 pixels in 10 years.
Maybe not that much? But then again, it shouldn't really matter.

I was as excited back then, as I am now and will be in the future.
It's like with television. Nobody missed it back in the days it didn't exist.
15 years ago we didn't care for broadband technologie or Flash or Ajax, because it was just not there.
We'll see what the future brings.

Past:

Present:

Projects, projects

2006-10-23T10:42:00.000+02:00

Yes we are doing projects too people!

This is the latest one in production. Doing stuff with vectors, zooming in and out.
Pretty cool actually.

Drawings done by Bert:

http://www.duasa.be

Check out some screenshots:

Flash:

Browser:

Serge is out there!

2006-10-23T10:36:00.000+02:00

Check out Serge Jespers own podcast:

http://kitchencast.podshow.com/

Serge dude, thanks for doing this. I'm a fan.

Motion tracking in Flash 8

2006-10-06T17:06:00.000+02:00

I have made a screen capture of some of my motion tracking tests in Flash 8.
I also created a recording function as you can see in the movie below.

The left screen is the captured data, the right screen is the original incoming data.
I was using the flashlight on my cell phone as the light source, which was not very reliable.
But it's working.

The data is captured at a rate of 1 millisecond at 800/600 resolution. That is not bad, not bad at all.

Here's a view of my very professional setup :-)

Behind the scens of a website part II

2006-10-03T09:37:00.000+02:00

The fine folks from http://www.agencynet.com/ have put the making of ownyourownC online.

Some shots:

Check out all the pictures here:
http://flickr.com/photos/agencynet/sets/72157594302132588/

It's like I said before, read this article, the days one could do with some Photoshop and some Flash are way behind us now.

Nice work and thanks to agencynet for putting this making of online.

It really is time I start working with the fine people at:
www.beastanimation.be

2 wise men...

2006-10-02T11:35:00.001+02:00

Frank Zappa on the Arsenio Hall show february 1989.

Flash Player on Linux

2006-09-29T11:41:00.000+02:00

Yup, this is what we nerds do in our spare time.

Me and my buddy Peter, got the standalone flash player 6 working on Linux distr. Fedora Core 5. It didn't work the first time offcourse (it's always like that). Problems with missing libraries and stuff. We had to install some libraries from the Fedora 4 core and suddenly it worked.

We all know the feeling when stuff like this suddenly works. For about 7.3 seconds you really think you are the smartest one on the planet.

It's a pitty that Adobe doesn't support newer standalone versions than version 6.

Muchas gracias to Mr. Peter Galle, for setting up the Linux and walking me through it!

1. Encountering problems...

2. We made it!

3. SWF with animations and scripting