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A couple of weeks ago I attended the FitC Amsterdam conference which was great fun. One of the most inspiring sessions I saw was Andre Michelle‘s “Making REAL Music Within Flash” where he talked us through generating sound in flash using the infamous flash sound hack and then showed us how he is redefining what should be possible in flash by building the hobnox audio tool.

I travelled to Amsterdam by train and ferry which meant that I had some spare time on the way back to play and luckily Andre and Joa Ebert have released the complex code behind the flash sound hack as part of their popforge open source library.

So I built my Wave Sequencer. The idea is that it loads in a wav file and splits it into 16 equally sized chunks. You can then re-arrange these chunks to create new variations on the beat. Each 16 chunk section is a pattern and you can create up to 16 different patterns by choosing different patterns from the “pattern bank” at the bottom of the screen.

The loop I’m using is the famous Amen break and I’ve sped it up a bit (and given you a slider so you can control the speed yourself). If you play around with it you’ll see you can slice and dice your own old skool jungle riddims :)

Note: If you are experiencing choppy audio then you are probably running the latest revision of the flash player (9.0.115.0) which breaks onSoundComplete. So join the petition and ask Adobe to make some noise. I’ve compiled a standalone version of the app against the older 9.0.28.0 player and you can download the PC standalone version which doesn’t have the audio issues.

Obviously this little experiment is very rough around the edges and there is a lot that can be done to improve it but I’ve been too busy with “real work” to look at it in the weeks since I got back from FitC and I thought it was better to publish it as is than to leave it to get lost on my hard drive…

My code here is really simple, all of the complex stuff is done by the popforge library. So big thanks to Andre for the inspiration and the sourcecode :) Hopefully I’ll find some time in the coming months to take this a lot further and to turn it into an AIR app which is actually useful!

No Comments | In: AS3, audio, flash | tags: AS3, audio, conference, flash. | #

At the end of last week I visited Stuttgart, Germany for FlashConference and I have to say it was wicked! A week later I’ve finally found the time to write a quick overview of the conference…

First up a massive thanks to Mario for getting me on the guest list and motivating me to make the journey – it was definitely worth it. A top notch list of very inspiring speakers – if I had any complaints it would only be that they tried to fit so much into one day so there was no space between the sessions (not even for lunch!).

The day started with a bit of an infomercial from Adobe, nothing particularly new although I’d never seen Scout before and it was a pretty nifty apollo sample app (basically a web browser with some of the features from Firebug and the web developer toolbar built in).

Then Ilias Sounas gave a talk showing how he had made some of his animations in Flash and talking about the importance of telling a good story. He also screened some of his animations – Circle of life was my favourite.

Next up Peter Elst gave an insight onto developing Flash for alternative devices. Everything from PSPs and Nintendo Wiis to Chumbys and other strange devices. Very interesting stuff and an area I definitely want to find some excuses to do some work in. Luckily Peter also had a bunch of ideas for how to convince your clients that building flash stuff for these devices is a good idea so maybe I’ll be able to use those ideas to convince some clients…

Then Claus Wahlers gave a talk about the Flash CS3 components which he helped to build. They definitely look like they are a major step forwards from all the previous ones especially in terms of how easy they are to extend and skin. I’m looking forward to getting my copy of CS3 and playing with them…

I skipped the next session (“Mercedes-Benz E-Class Experience Paris-Beijing”) because I needed to get some lunch! So did quite a few other people and so I got to meet up with Ralph, Asger, Martin, Peter, Claus and Wouter.

After lunch rushed back in for Mario’s session: “The blind Sketchmaker” – Artificial Creativity and Evolutionary Art in Flash. He started by discussing whether computers could create Art. After deciding that this wasn’t the case (as Art is more than just a picture – it’s a complete belief system around it) he went on to prove that he certainly could! He wrote an AS3/ Apollo app which could analyse pictures by many different criteria and learn rules about what makes a “good” picture. The program could then evolve it’s own pictures applying these rules to decide which direction to evolve in. He then got some of these generated pictures painted as full size oil paintings courtesy of a company in China who sent him some spam. Amazing, inspiring stuff – check out the finished artworks on flickr.

Then came Marcus Weskamp who talked about his experience building Wieden and Kennedy’s site. This site needed a way to display the hundreds of jobs this advertising agency has done and Marcus put his data visualisation skills to good use creating a timeline and 3d nodemap showing how all the projects, offices, people and clients were related to each other. Especially interesting was how the idea for the site evolved as a result of meetings between Marcus and his client.

Next Holger Eggert gave an insight into creating animated films in Flash. He gave an insight into how to construct a good story and use Flash/ Photoshop/ After Effects to make it real and he showed some of his work (and work in progress).

Finally, Andre Michelle gave an overview of advanced audio programming in Flash together with a hack which makes it possible to basically write your own samples in Flash and play them back. He demo’d a bunch of little apps he’s built from 303 simulators to little drum machines to .mod file players and tested the conference sound system while he was at it! Again, amazingly inspiring stuff, I need to find some time to play with all of this!

After that we all managed to get into the speakers dinner/ drinks and thus started a big night in Stuttgart… But that’s a different story!

As I said, the conference was really inspiring and it was great to get to meet all of the people involved too. Now that the hangover has died away I’m looking forward to finding some time to play with some of the new ideas I’ve got and looking forward to next years conference!

1 Comment | In: flash | tags: conference, flash, review. | #

I’m just back from BarCamp London 2. It was really good, lots of interesting talks and a chance to meet some cool people. It was great meeting Carlos (creator of the amazing PaperVision 3D project), Ricardo (creator of loads of cool PaperVision3D demos), Aral Balkan (founder of OSFlash), Graham King, Janette Girod, Niqui Merret, Dan Webb and all of the other great people whose names and URLs I’ve forgotten!

Two of the talks were particularly inspiring for me. The first was Carlos’ PaperVision 3D one (unfortunately it seemed like it clashed with another really popular presentation so not that many people came). I’ve been watching the project closely and haven’t managed to find time to play around with it yet but am constantly amazed by how cool it is and it was great to get some insight into the Maya > Collada > .swf workflow that Carlos has made so easy.

The other especially inspiring talk was by Rhys Jones about web2os. Web2os is a really clever solution to the problem of offline access to web apps. Necessity is the mother of invention and web2os was developed because of Rhys’ long train journeys between Wales and London. Basically a proxy sits on your computer between your browser and the internet and can be instructed to cache requests and results while you are online. Once you go offline it detects this and simulates the server’s response while storing any changes you have made in a local SQL Lite database. When it goes online again it can synchronise your changes. Rhys demonstrated this working perfectly with Google Calendar.

The advantage over other possible solutions (like Apollo, the Dojo offline toolkit and Firefox 3) is that it doesn’t require re-engineering of the website itself (in this case Google Calendar). Instead a little web2os script is written for each website you want it to work with… These scripts end up being surprisingly simple. Also, because the proxy can inject HTML and JS code into the rendered page it also introduces the concept of local mashups. Anyway – definitely a project to keep an eye on – you can check out Rhys’ presentation on slideshare.

I gave a little talk about Flashr. I just gave a quick introduction to the project and then went through the code for a sample application I built in the middle of last night. Then I gave some examples of some of the cool things people have built with Flashr. The slides from the presentation are available on SlideShare and the sourcecode of the “application” from the above URL.

All in all, it was a great weekend and I’m looking forward to BarCamp Brighton in the summer and the potential “FlashCamp” Aral was talking about organising :)

3 Comments | In: general | tags: barcamp, conference, flashr. | #