boostworthyisryantaylor

It was a pleasure presenting to the fine designers and developers of Portland’s FlashPDX user group this evening. If you are interested, here is the keynote presentation:

Download ‘rtaylor_flashpdx_fp10_presentation.pdf’

In addition to the keynote, I demonstrated 3D workflows and Pixel Bender shaders in Flash. You can find information on some of the things that I demonstrated in greater detail in some of the blog posts that I posted in previous months:

FP10 Setup, Pixel Bender, and Shaders

A Note About Pixel Bender And Procedural Shaders

The ‘drawTriangles’ Method

Generic Number Crunching Via Pixel Bender And ShaderJob

Regarding The Pixel Bender / Flash Limitations

Pixel Bender DisplacementMapFilter

Pixel Bender HSLFilter

Pixel Bender AlphaMatteComposite

ZBuffer Class For Sorting Depths

If you are especially interested in Pixel Bender, be sure to make it out to Adobe MAX this year for my presentation Pixel Bender Unleashed. Special thanks to Robert Reinhardt for inviting me to present to the Portland FlashPDX group; always a pleasure!

I just returned from a much needed two week vacation in the beautiful land of Cape Cod, Massachusetts. Photography is a hobby of mine, so I took quite a few pictures while I was out there. If you are interested, I threw a few of my favorites into a little web gallery for viewing:

http://www.boostworthy.com/2008/capecod/

For those curious, I shot with the following gear on this trip:

Cameras:

Canon 40D

Lenses:

Canon 10-22mm f/3.5-4.5
Canon 24-105mm f/4L IS
Canon 100-400mm f/4.5-5.6L IS

Filters:

B+W 77mm Kaeseman Circular Polarizer (MRC Slim)

Questions and comments are certainly welcome. Enjoy!

My next presentation on Flash Player 10 and Pixel Bender will be for the Adobe Flash User Group of Portland, Oregon. The presentation will be taking place on Tuesday, August 19th at the new Extended Studies offices of Portland State University in downtown Portland. For more information, contact Robert Reinhardt.

I was honored to present on Flash Player 10 and Pixel Bender to the Utah Flash Platform Developers’ Group this evening. It would have been awesome to travel out there in person and meet everyone; however the best I could do was present over Breeze since I just returned from a speaking engagement in Orlando. If you are interested in reviewing the presentation, I exported my keynote to PDF and uploaded it:

Download ‘rtaylor_uflash_fp10_presentation.pdf’

Additionally, you can also find information on some of the Pixel Bender shaders that I demonstrated and more in the following posts of mine that I wrote over the past several months:

FP10 Setup, Pixel Bender, and Shaders

A Note About Pixel Bender And Procedural Shaders

The ‘drawTriangles’ Method

Generic Number Crunching Via Pixel Bender And ShaderJob

Regarding The Pixel Bender / Flash Limitations

Pixel Bender DisplacementMapFilter

Pixel Bender HSLFilter

Pixel Bender AlphaMatteComposite

ZBuffer Class For Sorting Depths

Big thanks to PV3D master John Lindquist for inviting me to present to the uFlash group; it was an honor and a privilege to do so!

Awhile ago I wrote an article about the use of Ant for handling common Flash-related development tasks. Unfortunately there has always been a problem with launching a SWF file into the standalone Flash Player on a Mac due to the fact that '.app' files are actually folders. Fortunately, you can get around this using the 'open' command as seen below:

Where '${flashPlayer}' is a property pointing towards a standalone version of Flash Player, for instance:

With more and more Flash applications being tied into the browser for deep-linking, etc. it has become a more common need to launch the application inside of a HTML page; however I wanted to share this because I do feel as if it still has some value.

This is bad. I have so much work to get done, yet I just wasted a bunch of precious time in Photoshop releasing some creative energy. Sometimes I just need a break from the book writing; a little personal design time often helps me refresh.

In this case, I decided to do something with one of my current favorite fonts, Avenir 95 Black. I was talking fonts with John Ferguson the other day at work, and our conversation left me wanting to do something with type. Here is the end result:

Nothing fancy, just simple geometry and color. I had just finished doing my daily review of the FWA site, so I decided to use that as the subject of my type. Felt good to get that out of my system. Now back to work!

Thanks again to all that attended my AFPUG presentation last evening; there was a pretty decent turnout. I haven't had a chance to gather source files from the presentation yet, however I did export my keynote to PDF:

Download 'rtaylor_afpug_fp10_presentation.pdf'

You can also find more information on some of the topics and example files that I demonstrated in the following blog posts:

FP10 Setup, Pixel Bender, and Shaders

A Note About Pixel Bender And Procedural Shaders

The ‘drawTriangles’ Method

Generic Number Crunching Via Pixel Bender And ShaderJob

Regarding The Pixel Bender / Flash Limitations

Pixel Bender DisplacementMapFilter

Pixel Bender HSLFilter

Pixel Bender AlphaMatteComposite

ZBuffer Class For Sorting Depths

If you especially enjoyed the segment on Pixel Bender, be sure to make it out to the Adobe MAX conference this November for my presentation 'Pixel Bender Unleashed'. To make things interesting - if the presentation isn't one of your top three favorites at MAX 2008, free beers on me. Hold me to it!

Also - I finally got around to creating a meetup profile and joining the Atlanta Flash Group, so feel free to greet me on there or add me as a contact.

Just a quick reminder that I will be speaking at AFPUG this evening. The details are below:

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Adobe Flash Platform User Group of Atlanta
Tuesday, July 8th, 7:00pm - 9:00pm
Roundbox Global, Directions

Intro To Flash Player 10 and Pixel Bender

Flash Player 10 is upon us and with it comes an exciting array of powerful new features. The presentation will kick off with a walkthrough of how you can get started developing for Flash Player 10 using a recent build of the Flex SDK. From there, explorations of some of the core new features will take place, including the new Vector type, drawing API, and foundational 3D support. The night will end with an introduction to Pixel Bender, Adobe’s powerful new pixel shader language. Demonstrations of Pixel Bender kernels as Shaders for fills, filters, blend modes, and generic number crunchers in Flash will take place.

More info

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Hope to see you there!

Big news in the the Flash Player 10 beta 2 refresh! It previously looked as if Adobe wasn't going to be able to resolve the major garbage collection issues that had us all very concerned. Fortunately, they have pulled through and added a new method that directly addresses this:

unloadAndStop — This new ActionScript 3.0 API adds unload functionality similar to the unload behavior in ActionScript 2.0. After calling unloadAndStop on loaded content it will be immediately removed stopping all audio, removing eventListeners, and becoming inaccessible through ActionScript.

Big props to the Adobe engineers for getting this added into version 10. From what I've heard, it wasn't easy! They also snuck in limited fullscreen keyboard access for games and video controls:

Limited Fullscreen Keyboard Access — In Flash Player 10, key events are supported for non-printing keys such as arrows, shift, enter, tab, space, etc. Limited access to the keyboard will allow fullScreen games and video controls with keyboard access in a secure way.

Good stuff!