Log this one in the “Totally out there” bin. Also in the “doesn’t really work, but shows off a cool notion that could probably be done if we were smarter and weren’t using an underpowered web plugin” bin. And the “Big Brother / 1984″ bin.
Inspired by the love our Augmented Reality Twitter Shirt recieved and our recent foray into face detection, we decided to put the two together. At the moment, the script doesn’t detect a specific person — that’s where the (kind of) comes into play. But imagine associating specific faces with twitter (or “face”book… …. sorry) usernames and you’ve suddenly combined the power social networking with video monitoring that would make the Brit’s CCTV system cry like it just got relegated to League Two.
This actually came about as a happy little accident while trying to bend FLARToolkit to our will (tracking multiple instances of multiple symbols – a total pain in the ass. But that’s a story for another time). It just so happened that we were rocking out to Kiss’ “God Gave Rock & Roll To You” and it suddenly occurred to us that “Hey, it wouldn’t be so hard to make these things make sounds when they disappear.” So we did. And it was awesome.
So we here at squidder have been playing around with the FLARToolKit a lot recently. Pretty amazing stuff really. And while fooling around with it, something (perhaps obvious) occurred to us: We love flash. And we also love t-shirts. And Papervision. And Twitter.
And, suddenly, we had a way to combine them all together.
Below is an early technical demo, in which a barcode, containing a twitter username, is embedded within our FLAR pattern. This is important because you don’t need to create a new pattern for each username. Instead, the flash reads the person’s username (up to 8 characters, encoded in 6 bit chunks) and then pulls that person’s latest post from twitter.
The source code is a mess, but we’ll be posting some more how-to details soon. In the meantime, enjoy the video demo below!
Set up your sentry turrets, because google is coming for your flash content. Sure, it’ll look fine after the initial pass. But just let it gestate a few days and the innards of your flash movie will be splayed all over the place.
It really remains to be seen how this new development from The Company Google will affect us flash developers. In some ways, it could be bad — imagine an instance where only some of the text is embedded but not necessary representational. Yeah, yeah, it’ll index data calls as well, but still, you should probably stick to some good ol’ SEO best practices for now… On the other hand, it probably spells relief for clients, which can only mean more work for flash devs everywhere… and disaster for Earth.
We at squidder wanted to highlight an oldie, but goodie, package, from our heros over at Big Spaceship labs. Out does just about everything you might want a logging tool to do, including the ability to exclude certain classes from speaking out at will.
Strength & honor, Big Spaceship. Strength & honor.
The mad genius over at PixelBreaker has come up with a really clever javascript/flash hybrid implementation of the mouse wheel for mac. And to top it all off, integration with SWFObject is already done. Seriously, SWFMacMouseWheel, ring is in the mail.
Here’s a cool one: Matthew Tretter over at ex animo has come up with a particularly clever way of using JSFL to avoid redundant actionscript bytes when building complex applications by excluding actionscript classes (which you could easily do in AS2, but not so easily in AS3). Well played, jasofel, well played.
We at squidder often talk about the best way to bring SEO and accessibility to our flash work. And in many ways, the work is simple when you add in fancy tools like SWFObject — just spit out the content you want to appear to a search engine in the div that gets overwritten!
But what if you’ve got an extremely complex site, with many sections, pages and drill downs that you want to make accessible? One option is to simply spit out all the content, no matter how long, into that same div. Yes, that will get indexed by search engines, but not only does it make the page you’re loading very large, it also doesn’t link users directly to the content they searched for.
That’s where SWFAddress and mod_rewrite come in. Full deets after the jump.
We’re late to the game as usual on this one, but if you’ve ever had a client who wanted MAXIMUM standards complacency and compatibility, its time you checked out Faust flash augmenting standard, evangelized by the future-loving folks over at space150.
Basically, its a really clever way of passing the content that you’re overwriting when you use SWFObject directly into the flash. Super clean and requires only one data call. Handy for things like navigation bars, which while fancy in flash, can also easily be viewed (and indexed) without flash. Hats off, space150, hats off.
If there’s one thing that could be a ton cooler in AS3, its the audio capabilities. Yeah, we’ve all had fun making spectrum analyzers, but that was back in the hazy, drug riddled days of 2007. This is 2008 and 2008 demands better audio stability and features.
That’s where the “Adobe, MAKE SOME NOISE” (sic) campaign comes in. Besides yelling at us, the project aims to end the spotty performance of the existing Sound packages, as well as push for some new, and nifty sounding (HA!), features for the next round of flash.
