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I have a bunch of upcoming speaking engagements which revolve heavily around Flash Player 10 and Pixel Bender, so I wanted to share the schedule with you in case you are interested in attending any of the presentations.

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

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

Full Sail University
Friday, July 18th, 2:00pm - 3:00pm

Graduation and Beyond

Life immediately after graduation is both exciting and frightening at the same time. Your first steps after graduation are important ones, so I will be starting off the presentation with a discussion about what has worked best for me - from the time that I first left Full Sail up until this very day. Following the opening discussion, the topic transitions to the modern Flash design and development workflows that are used by some of the top studios all over the world. An examination of one of the projects that is currently under development at Schematic will also take place. If time permits, a demonstration of some of the new features in Flash Player 10 will be included as well. Last, but not least, I am going to provide an overview of Schematic that includes our clients, latest projects, and our prestigious Flash group - the MPG. If you are a rockstar Flash designer or developer, stick around after the presentation for some possible recruiting.

Utah Flash Platform Developers’ Group
Tuesday, July 22nd, 7:00pm - 9:00pm

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.

Adobe MAX 2008 (San Francisco)
Monday, November 17th, 5:00pm - 6:00pm

Pixel Bender Unleashed

Venture into the world of Pixel Bender, Adobe’s powerful new pixel shader language. We’ll introduce the language and its core concepts, as well as the toolkit used for development (available in preview release on Adobe Labs). We will then present demonstrations of practical implementations in Flash Player in the form of filters, fills, and blend modes. We’ll close with the use of Pixel Bender kernels as generic number crunchers.

More info

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I’m especially excited about speaking at the Adobe MAX conference this year in San Francisco. Last year’s conference in Chicago was pretty darn good, and this year is shaping up to be equally amazing. I have a kick-ass presentation on Pixel Bender in the works, so I hope to see a lot of you there!

Adobe announced awhile back that they were implementing changes for enforcing stricter policy files. Phase 1 of these changes began in release 9,0,115 with the addition of some log warnings such as this:

Warning: Domain www.boostworthy.com does not specify a meta-policy. Applying default meta-policy 'all'. This configuration is deprecated.

Phase 1 included some minor, immediate restrictions, but was mainly focused on spreading the word that stricter rules would result in errors in later versions (aka Phase 2). Well, Phase 2 is here and it is Flash Player 10.

In my mind, one of the most important changes to understand is the new default meta-policy. In the past, the default meta-policy for a master cross-domain policy file (the one in the root of the server) was 'all'. This meant that any policy file in any directory on the server could be used. In Phase 2, the master cross-domain file's default meta-policy will be 'master-only'. A meta-policy of 'master-only' means that only the master cross-domain policy file can be used as a policy file. Here is what that would look like if you were to actually specify it as such:

If any of your clients have a CDN or some other separate server that hosts resources used by a Flash application, be sure to work with them and explicitly add a meta-policy of 'all' or 'by-content-type' to the master cross-domain policy file if they have multiple policy files deployed.

Be sure to read this article on meta-policies if you aren't already familiar with them.

Flash Player 10 DisplayObjects include some very basic 3D properties, such as 'z' and 'rotationZ'. These properties simply handle basic affine transformations behind the scenes for you; a collection of DisplayObjects aren't actually getting projected into a scene per say. What this means is that a DisplayObject's 'z' property does not affect it's depth inside of a DisplayObjectContainer. Let's say that you have two DisplayObjects, childA and childB respectively, and childA is at depth index 0 and childB is at index 1. Even if childB is further down the Z axis than childA, childA will still be rendered behind it.

Since plenty of developers will likely take advantage of this basic 3D support to create a variety of simple effects (such as carousels), I decided to make a 'ZBuffer' class for conveniently handling the depth issue. My implementation is very straightforward; you have two methods to choose from - 'ZBuffer.sort' and 'ZBuffer.recursiveSort'. The 'sort' method accepts a DisplayObjectContainer and will loop through it's children and sort their depths accordingly based on their locations along the Z axis. The 'recursiveSort' method does the exact same thing, except it will also recursively sort each child's children if the child is a DisplayObjectContainer as well.

Here is a brief example of the 'ZBuffer' class in use:

Included with the source files is an example which is similar to the example above, except the planes are animated to better demonstrate the sorting.

View the 'ZBuffer' example (Flash Player 10 required)

As usual, the class is licensed under the MIT license...so you can use it however you please.

Download 'boostworthy_zbuffer_src.zip'

Enjoy!

I meant to post about this a month ago when it officially went on sale. The Flex 3 Cookbook is out and has been receiving some pretty good reviews.

My contributions include:

21.7 - Install the Ant View in the Stand-Alone Version of Flex Builder
21.8 - Create an Ant Build File for Automating Common Tasks
21.9 - Compile A Flex Application by Using mxmlc and Ant
21.10 - Generate Documentation by Using ASDoc and Ant

Josh had also mentioned using some stuff from my color spectrums post, but I'm not sure if that ended up making it in or not. Anyway, Josh and Todd did a great job on this book and it is definitely worth picking up as a desk reference. You can purchase it on Amazon here.

The long awaited Versions subversion client for OS X has finally gone public beta. I spent the day taking it for a test spin at work and, though it is certainly shaping up to be the best Mac subversion client, it still suffers from some missing functionality that we are all so spoiled to have in tools such as TortoiseSVN.

My biggest beef with it at the moment is that you cannot simply select 'commit' and be presented with a list of everything that is modified, added, missing, or unversioned. ZigVersion actually supports this behavior, though its UI also leaves a lot to be desired when compared to Versions. Having to spend extra time sorting through trees and making sure that I get everything added/deleted, ect. before a commit is something that I consider a deal breaker for any SVN client. For that reason, I prefer developing large projects under Windows simply so I can use TortoiseSVN and get things done quickly and without issues. I have voiced my feedback to the Pico / Sofa team, so hopefully they will make these important changes and ultimately release an application that finally fills the missing void of a good OS X SVN client.

On a positive note, the ability to use svn+ssh connections without SSH key pairs is amazing - especially if you host with Media Temple. I also like the integration with issue tracking software. We use Mantis at Schematic and it ties in nicely with their system for mapping issue numbers to a corresponding URL.

If you do any development under OS X, be sure to give Versions a try and voice any feedback that you have to their team.

In most image editing applications, the use of an alpha matte for masking a layer or object is a common practice. Flash works a little differently; you can still create masks, but they simply perform a boolean AND (clipping) operation on the object. Flash 8 introduced the ability to take things a step further and include a mask's alpha in the masking process. Below is an example of this in action:

In the past, the shape of the gradient alone would mask the container. Notice in the example that runtime bitmap caching ('cacheAsBitmap') is enabled for both objects - this is what allows the additional alpha processing to be done.

Flash 8 also introduced blend modes and they presented another option for performing more complex masking effects. By creating a container object and then setting its blend mode to 'LAYER', you are forcing the creation of a transparency group for that object. You can then create foreground and background display objects inside of the container and set the foreground's blend mode to 'ALPHA'. This will result in the background image inheriting the alpha values of each pixel from the foreground layer. As a result, the background layer will be masked by the foreground layer. Here is an example:

That brings us to modern day Flash 10 development. Since we now have Pixel Bender at our disposal, we can create our own tools for compositing. Something that I have been wanting in Flash for many years is the ability to mask an image using an alpha matte, as you would in Photoshop or After Effects. For those of you who aren't familiar with what I am describing - an alpha matte is a grayscale image in which a pixel that is completely white represents 100% alpha, a pixel that is completely black represents 0% alpha, and everything in between represents smooth steps from 0% to 100%. Technically, you could accomplish this in the past by operating on BitmapData objects, but that can be costly and undesirable in many situations.

My solution was to create a simple Pixel Bender kernel for handling alpha matte compositing. It accepts two inputs; one for the source image and one for the alpha matte. The output is the resulting masked version of the source image. The inputs are both typed as image4 for maximum compatibility with Flash (for instance, using a shader as a blend mode requires two image4 inputs).

Here is the source:

You can use this kernel in Flash as a fill, filter, or blend mode. In my previous posts, I have demonstrated the use of shaders as fills and filters, so this time around I will use one as a blend mode. Building off of the examples earlier in this post, I modified the previous example to use a shader representing the 'AlphaMattaComposite' byte code as it's blend mode. The one gotcha in this example is that you must enable runtime bitmap caching for the container object (the one that contains the background and foreground objects). Failure to do so will result in the background object's color values being pre-multiplied; as a result, the pixels will be black rather than transparent.

Here is an example of a source image, alpha matte, and the resulting composite.

Background:

Source image:

Alpha matte:

Final composite:

Also available on Adobe Labs.

Sometimes it is useful to adjust colors in the HSL (hue, saturation, lightness) color space rather than RGB color space. There is no convenient way to do this in Flash using ActionScript, though a handful of people including myself have created a ColorMatrix class in the past for handling this task. A Pixel Bender kernel is ideal for this type of manipulation, so I went ahead and created a filter specifically for performing HSL transformations.

The process is as follows:

1.) Sample a pixel's color value and convert it from RGB space to HSL space.
2.) Adjust the HSL values by the amount specified by the hue, saturation, and lightness parameters.
3.) Convert the HSL color back to RGB space.
4.) Apply the resulting RGB color value to the pixel.

As I mentioned in my DisplacementMapFilter post, you can apply this filter in Flash as a shader fill or shader filter; the ideal way being to create a HSLFilter class for interfacing with the shader. I'll probably update this post in the near future with an example of what I am talking about.

Here is the HSLFilter source: