In my "Here be Pixels" talk one of the things I showed was how to use a combination of noise and the displacementMap filter to encrypt and decrypt images or data with Flash. In case you didn't see it, here's the principle...

Via todays post on nodename about Perlin Clouds and Frocessing I came across Ron Valstar’s AS3 version of Ken Perlin's Improved Noise reference implementation which I must have missed last year. As Ron mentions the AS3 code runs way slower than the...

NOTICE: you will find the latest version of ColorMatrix in the Quasimondo Libs repository on Google code. Okay - after I just received the nth email of someone who offered to convert my AS2 ColorMatrix class to AS3 I finally have to...

As you might know by now the Nintendo Wii is now able to run Flash 7 files. Unfortunately the Flash player that comes with the current beta is a somewhat stripped down version - and especially one very important feature is missing...

If you've seen the movie Minority Report you probably remember the impressing gesture based computer interface that Tom Cruise uses there. Well, my latest experiment is far from the sophistication of that tool, but for it being made with Flash it's quite...

While ActionScript 3.0 comes with the TextLineMetrics Class that allows you to get all kinds of information about a text selection, with Flash 8 and below you have to go all the way on your feet if you want to know the...

My previous experiment with the selective color transforms made me think a bit more about creating masks from colors and its applications. I wondered if it is possible to use a similiar technique to calculate green screen or blue screen masks in...

I was asked if my ColorMatrix Class can be used to change only a certain range of colors within a bitmap. Well, that's mathematically not possible, but nevertheless there is a way to make this work with Flash - it just needs...

Islands Of Consciousness is the latest addition to my portfolio of experiments, sketches and artistic works Incubator. It emerged from a collaboration with the Ukrainian musician and composer Oleg Marakov alias Corpuscul. When he showed me Islands his musical piece for 4...

Yesterday I was asked if the blotting paper algorithm could also be used to create the look of paper with scorched edges. Well, as this is something a seasoned webdesigner needs on a daily basis I gave it a quick try. And...

Here is an astonishingly simple method to get something like a diffusion effect of wet ink on blotting paper. This can be used to get organic looking edges or to give photos a painterly effect: 1. draw the object you want to...

My mate and ex-colleague Jan Peiro who is a master of "manual" Flash animation has given me an inspirational spark for a little glowing light trails eyecandy. I cannot stop praising the wonders and speed of the new draw() command - check...

As two commenters on my recent ColorMatrix class update correctly noticed, the new colorize() method does not tint images the way Photoshop does it. It's more the Blue Note Album Cover type of tint it does. Of course I have tried immediately...

Oh well. I've just made another widget for Flickr only to discover that someone else has already built something very similar more than half a year ago. I better mention this before anyone thinks that I've borrowed the idea - I really...

Whilst waiting for this year to end I have build another little Flash widget that uses the Flickr API: Clockr is a clock that displays the current time by using images from Flickr that show single digits. If you want to contribute...

I finally had some time to play around with the Flickr API and created Flickeur. This piece retrieves random images from Flickr.com and creates a stream-of-consciousness type of video clip out of them. By adding image layer upon image layer it creates...

Two updates in one day? Well, whilst playing around with the class today I just had a few more ideas how to make it more useful, so I quickly implemented them: I've added a blend() method which allows to blend between two...

I have added a colorize( rgb, amount ) method to my ColorMatrix class - it allows you to tint bitmaps similar to the "colorize" method of Photoshop. Correct me if I'm wrong here, but to my knowledge this kind of colorizing is...

Lavalamp meets camouflage. A little Flash sketch which creates random textures that morph and move. Did someone say "Perlin Noise"? Klick the area once and then press any key to create different patterns and color schemes (some of which are really ugly...

I always wondered when I would find a use for MovieClip.transform.concatenatedMatrix - finally I've found one. It becomes very useful when you try to detect if you've hit a BitmapData object under your mouse pointer - especially if that bitmap is nested...

As you probably know by now Flash 8 allows us to dynamically load transparent PNGs and GIFs. That's great in theory - in pratice you might run into the same issue as I did: size. Transparent images of photographic content, like people...

Just a little kaleidoscope eyecandy using beginBitmapFill() and the allmighty draw() command. I like the speed of it and also the looks if you zoom down to the pixel level. The image used is "Autumn Leaves" by J.H. Lynch. There are quite...

Why stop at a rectangle when the same method can be used to draw animated lines in any angle? So here is a Marching Ants Path class - I don't know if it's of any use - maybe for a lasso tool...

Here is a demo for something that I hope may prove useful for some people. I have written a BitmapExporter class which allows to save PNGs or JPEGs out of swf files. There have been some Flash 8 demos already that show...

Marching ants rectangles are probably not priority #1 in an application, but they are a nice visual clue to the user that she is currently opening a selection rect. So if you are still looking for a nice "pimp up your app"...

A litte eyecandy to start the week. This tiny flash file creates a realtime kaleidoscope from your webcam image. Moving the mouse around allows for some additional rotation and scaling effects. It's amazing how easy it is to build this kind of...

I have uploaded the presentation files of my Schöne neue Pixelwelt session in Düsseldorf so you can have another look at the presentation. As an extra, you can download the source files for the draw() demo [FLA], the displacementMapFilter() demo [FLA] and...

Today I've got something not very spectacular but nevertheless quite useful: a demo of my ColorMatrix class. The new ColorMatrixFilter is a very versatile tool that allows for many color manipulations, many more than the good old ColorTransform was capable of. The...

An attempt to simulate an out-of-focus depth of field effect based on a depth map, plus a demonstration for the possibility to create blurs with smoothly increasing radius in Flash. A depth map is a greyscale image which shows the distance of...

I always wanted to do blobs (or metaballs as they are also called) in flash - the problem is that while it's easy to calculate them in a pixel based program it's quite difficult to build them with vectors. Well, now that...

Here's my first go at a Flash 8 glass effect. In general I'm not the biggest fan of the Bevel effect, but in this case I just used it as a helper for the displacement map and voilá - doesn't look too...

A rollercoaster for light rays is probably the easiest explanation for Raycoaster my latest work made with Processing. The more complicated explanation you can find on my Incubator page. I want to thank André for giving me the spark of inspiration for...

Time for a new study: I finally managed to improve the performance of my algorithm for rendering antialiased cubic beziers so that I could take my recent Plankton piece a step further: Ornamism uses curves instead of lines for its skeleton and...

I just stumbled over an older experiment of mine that I somehow forgot to publish: it's a tiny component that allows to render fully justified dynamic textfields. Here is a demo that shows how it behaves - you can drag the lower...

I'm happy to be invited again this year as a speaker at the flashconference in Stuttgart, which will be again part of the fmx/05 and is scheduled on April 29th and 30th. This time I will be hitting the stage twice: I'm...

Just added a recreational after-work experiment to the Incubator. It's the animated version of a Photoshop Plugin I wrote many years ago: Cassini...

I'm not sure if my obsession to find the perfect antialiasing is becoming pathologic, but I must confess that I spend half this day with programming my own line drawing function. I'm not that mental yet to start completely from scratch, no,...

After a (too) long pause here's my latest piece of generative art in my Incubator: Beziers Ballet - ambient music for the eyes. Thank you Pierre Bezier for your wonderful curves....

Did you have the problem before that you wanted to load some file formats into your Flash site but loadMovie does not accept them? Something like PNGs, GIFs or progressive JPEGs? Do you want to load images or SWFs from a different...

Did you ever wonder why, if you add a listener to a TextField you only receive the onChanged and the onScroller events, but not the onSetFocus and onKillFocus events? The problem is, that as the TextField is a listener itself, it cannot...

A question in the macromedia.general.germany newsgroup about number systems brought to my attention that it's not as easy as it sounds to find a practical number system converter online. Sure, there are thousands of converters out there, but most of them are...

Is it the "RIA-flavour" or the only so-so performance aspect? Maybe it's simply because there are no more white "Here Be Dragons" spots on the swf-map. Anyway: in my personal TOP-2 list for "best visual experimentation platform" Flash only finishes second place....

Fortunately/unfortunately I was so extraordinary busy during the last weeks that I completely blew my personal deadline to show off the latest developments in Flash driven candle technology. So at least two weeks late here is the Candle Of Truth. A quantum...

On November 21st I will be speaking at shockwards 2003 in Stuttgart. I'm very happy that they invited me again especially as my topic this year will be "Candle-Dripping - Inspirational Coding by Nature". Yes, I will be deconstructing my upcoming candle...

As the owner of a dedicated root server I had no other choice but to get used to talking to my machine via the TELNET console and of course to get accustomed to LINUX. Well - making the mistake once to install...

I know - I'm starting to get on your nerves with my Eolas posts - this will be the last for today - promised. But whilst writing the former text I had the idea of testing a proxy solution that would allow...

For all of you that are too lazy to read all the following introduction, jump right ahead to EOLATOR my automatical HTML page transformer that does all the ugly activeX to javascript work that lies ahead for you. By now we all...

I have built this little "Floater" class which allows you to have text in Flash flow around circles and rectangles. Here's a quick demo - just drag around the circle or resize the elements. The nice thing about is that its performance...

Sometimes I browse through Robert Sedgewick's "Algorithms In C" for inspiration. Recently I checked out the Graph Algorithms - more for the beauty of the adjacent graphics than because of their usefulness. Reading the code for Boruvka's Minimum Spanning Tree algorithm I...

I'm still in the process of making a Hebrew version of one of our client's sites. As I cannot wait for the next version of Flash to hopefully solve all my right-to-left problems I've written some workaround tools for myself. Tool number...

I'm delighted to hear that Grant Skinner found my drop shadow prototype worthy enough to be included in the next version of his site. As big shadows can become quite a performance issue he added a quality parameter which allows to reduce...

Thanks a lot for all the nice comments for my AS Shape Decoder. I made a few updates and bugfixes: Claus Wahlers asked for SVG support and as you will see I tried to implement it. It doesn't do the colors yet...

If you know Peter Hall's blog or have visited Helen Triolos site recently you'll have noticed that they have created some classes and experiments based on the new export functions that Burak's Actionscript Viewer offers: the ability to export shapes from within...

I bet that in the Flash MX development team there is no one who speaks Hebrew. How do I come to this conclusion? Well, I'm currently trying create a Hebrew version of a site and you know what - I'm going through...

When it comes to XML I must admit that I was not what you would call an "early adopter". The reason is that XML is so bloated. If you look at its data-to-structure ratio XML is not really the most efficient way...

You might have noticed that my Flash links in the sidebar follow a new sorting system. What you see now is a ranking as Alexa sees it. I wrote a little PHP script that spiders over to Alexa and checks the sites'...

I recently enjoyed the pleasures and pains of making a multilingual Flash site work. Not really unknown territory for me - I've been through this before, but that was in good old Flash 5 times. Back then it was an almost hopless...

Once again a question on Flashcoders gave me another idea for a modification of my Drop Shadow script. You need soft edges around a picture or movie clip? Here you go. This is version 1.0 which does not use any masking....

After a request by Eric I sat down and checked if my Soft Shadow prototype could be modified to support just any shape. Here's the result. It's not a real shadow like you could get with gaussian blur, but as far as...

Somehow I managed to ignore alexa.com until a few days ago when I suddenly ran into it. And I must say it's pretty amazing what kind of information they have collected about almost any site around. This for example is the current...

I've just created a little prototype for a project that I want to share with you: it's a blurred rect drawing method which might come in useful if you want to draw soft shadows or glows. I think the peformance should be...

There might be times where you want to redirect all incoming visitors of your site to a certain page. Perhaps you only want to have that redirection active during a certain timespan. But perhaps this timespan is exactly during the weekend and...

Here we go with the first release of my LocalConnectionManager component short LOCOMA. The version might say 1.1 but that's only because the extension manager doesn't like to step back. I'd rather call it an almost finished beta. But I throw it...

I have almost finished work on a little component called LOCOMA which is short for Local Connection Manager. Eric Dolecki somewhat inspired me by his post on Flashcoders where he asked if it possible to use localConnection between more that just two...

Uh uh - I just checked back and must discover that more than two months have passed since I announced that we would release WACK our "Window Application Control Kit" component "very soon". Okay somehow there was so much other work in...

Cosy atmosphere is presented by Quasimondo in cooperation with coma2. No living candles were harmed in the making of this movieclip. Any similiarities to candles living or ceased are purely coincidental. This is provided for entertainment purposes only. 100% actionscript, no artifical...

As tomorrow is St. Nicholas Day here is the completely chaotic and undocumented source code for my scripted page turn demo. Please do not expect me to explain how it works. But if you find out yourself and are able to improve...

Some weeks ago websites with pageturn effects have been all over the place. All of the sites had one thing in common: the pageturns were keyframe animated. So I started to experiment a little and came up with this. Unfortunately I didn't...

I don't know how this little experiment will behave on your browser, probably it will not work at all in anything but Explorer 6 on Windows. If it works right there should be a very primitive looking ball with eyes chasing your...

The reason that I was quite silent during the last days is called WACK. It is something that my colleague Manfred Weber and me here at coma2 are working on. We think that it might be quite useful. WACK means "Window Application...

Their CI might not be as beautiful as the one of FlashForward, but at least it is one of the few Flash related conferences here in Germany: shockwards 2002 (german version here). It'll take place on Friday, November 8th, at the "Hochschule...

Recently on Flashcoders the question came up if it is possible to mask JPEGs based on a color value, similar to GIFs where one color can be reserved for transparency. Well, I created a little application based on my image-to-pixelinfo script that...

I searched Google a bit and did not find a trace of anyone doing a Flash implementation of Voronoi Diagrams. This is a pity as they do create some real nice patterns and they might even be useful for games or interfaces....

Now this is what happens if you don't do open source: you miss the credits. After a thread on Flashcoders Branden Hall put up a PHP script called Mozaic for download. It allows you to convert a JPEG into a data stream...

As I mentioned before I was not really productive during my vacation, so there are no great Flash projects I could pull out of the hat right now. And believe it or not - there is a huge pile of work lurking...

It's update time again for my Amazon Explorer. Finally you get to see a little bit more information about the books and the other stuff. Wow - I'm amazed how fast the text and scrollbar adjust if you drag the little divider...

Finally I had time for a few updates on my Amazon Explorer. So what's new? - Finally you can also get rid of items. Pressing the Delete or Backspace key will remove all selected items - It is now possible to select...

Of course this HTML implementation of the Amazon.com search kit is much faster than my flash version will ever be, but that's not the idea behind this experiment. I don't expect to design a better amazon, it's more playing with the possibilities....

I'm making some progress on my Amazon Explorer. I just added a function which visualizes the "People who bought this book also bought that...". Next step will of course be all the text info, which is already parsed and ready, I just...

Here is a little sneak peek into my Flash based Amazon.com search engine. This is all in a very early stage, but at least all the backend stuff seems to work....

After Matt Rice and Jeremy Larkin swfnews.com have released the alpha of their multi-threading class, there has been some discussion about the usefulness of such a class or some nasty remarks about its "novelty factor" ("huuuh?!?! this is simply an emulation using...

Well, it looks like the self-resizing flash object (the combo box in the sidebar) is not 100% compatible with all browsers/os. So far it looks like it works fine on all my Windows IEs, on my Mac Explorer the flash file simply...

There is one thing where HTML is superior to Flash - and especially with the new combobox component this becomes obvious: HTML dropdown boxes can cover the rest of the content while they are open - flash boxes can't. This problem nagged...

You might have discovered the new "experimental search" area in my sidebar. This is part of my current localConnection experiment. What it actually does is to send special queries to all my little google API widgets on this page as soon as...

As you can see I integrated my little flash banner that utilizes the Google API on my index page. This version is slightly improved over the last one as it caches the queries for 24 hours. Like this I will probably will...

This is a little tool I just hacked together. It uses the google api to search for a certain phrase and then present the results. I think this could be quite useful inside a weblog, because you can dynamically add the query...

It looks like including the polygon matrix (see step 2) really adds more speed to the whole execution. But the test-scene is more of a joke regargding complexity. As soon as I add more obstacles and vehicles the thing slows down again...

Here is part 2 of my current exploration into the world of flocking, evading and colliding. After getting rid of all the "getters" and "setters" I already felt a little improvement in speed. But rewriting the whole render engine and improving the...

As I wrote before I'm currently trying to implement so called "Steering Behaviors" in Flash. Well, I made some progress, but.... hmmm..... I'm not really there yet. I took the open source Java code from Thomas Feilkas and Christian Schnellhammer and tried...

A while ago someone posted a message on Flashcoders about the works of Craig Reynolds regarding the "Steering Behaviors For Autonomous Characters". There is a site where the basic ideas are explained and the concept sounds very interesting. Basically it is about...