A few years back our friend Dave Schroeder of Pilotvibe decided it was time to put the Midwest on the ‘flash’ map, and started Flashbelt.

For those who don’t know - its an incredibly educational and inspirational 3 days of presentations, panel discussions and workshops. Speakers typically have a focus, whether industry (advertising, commerce, education) or specialty (flash audio, as3, animation etc) and often are well-known for their groundbreaking work in a specific area or project. Its a refreshing mix of Adobe Scientists, authors/gurus, well known designers/developers and independent experimental producers. Our own Nick Longtin even presented last year.

Whether you are someone who sells interactive projects, designs for the web, or develops flash interactive or other, I would highly recommend catching at least a couple of presentations. You will learn and walk away inspired. It rivals the feeling of Spring in Minnesota for the interactive industry.

June 8-11th in Minneapolis, MN - See you there

I tend to be a very thorough and detail-oriented person… at least I hope so (there are other words for it, but we’ll leave it at that). So naturally, when I’m writing code - whether it’s xhtml, CSS, ActionScript etc - I try and keep things neat, clean and easy to read. I indent like it’s going out of style, I strive for consistent naming conventions, and I use descriptive variable and function names.

Read the rest of this entry »

In an effort to simplify audio visualization experiments with ActionScript 3.0, I’ve developed a SoundData class. The class’s main attraction is centered around the flash.media.SoundMixer.computeSpectrum() method, but it also provides additional control over playback, including startSound(), stopSound() and toggle() methods. The class also allows manipulation over volume and panning.

Read the rest of this entry »

As many of you know, I’ve been spending a bit of my time exploring the cool features in ActionScript 3.0 - some new, some not. Lately, I’ve been intrigued by the SoundMixer class which has a special method, computeSpectrum(), that essentially takes a snapshot of the wave of a streaming sound (or an embeded sound, but I’m talkin’ 100% code here)…

The finer details quickly boil down to binary data, but the power of this is the potential to create audio-powered animations in Flash.

After a refresher in Trigonometry, some tortellini, and a late night (or early morning), I’m pleased to present latest ActionScript 3 experiment!

Read the rest of this entry »

I realize how potentially boring a ‘Dynamic Grid Maker’ might sound, but it is mainly a precursor to some more exciting experiments (some of which are done but are awaiting an official Technology Translated introduction). And just to keep your attention, I’ve added a function that allows you to ‘explode’ the grid. Read the rest of this entry »

‘Twas the night before Christmas, when all through the house, just my keyboard was stirring, along side the mouse … Read the rest of this entry »

I spent a good hour or so yesterday battling a particularly nasty bug. Well, it wasn’t really a bug, just a curiosity that took me on a wild goose chase through several hundred lines of source code. I found a comment in my source from a couple months ago that said “trivial” and nothing more, between an if block and an else block. I thought it meant that the following code (the else block) was trivial, and seriously wondered why, since the code in the else block was actually not trivial at all.

Well, it finally dawned on me–I put “trivial” in the source code to force subversion to recognize a new version of the file I was working on. Trivial meant that the commit was trivial, not the code. Very very frustrating. Read the rest of this entry »