Tim Wang's eLearning Blog

UBC Student Services launched a virtual campus tour this month. The virtual tour is created using Adobe Flash. It highlights the students life on UBC campus. The presentation was well put together and delivers an interesting perspective about UBC. It covers topics like the beautiful UBC campus, student spaces, the city Vancouver, places to learn, life on campus, student residences, Athletics and much more. Check it out if you care to learn more about the university I am working for...

Actually, the title isn't really accurate, this is not 2.5D any more, it's really 2.8D in my opinion. One of the current project my team is working on is to use Papervision 3D (an amazing Flash Actionscript based 3D engine) to create online simulation environment for the Residential School project. Along the way, we came across with Andy Zupko's "Dynamic 3D Rendering Effect".

This is a truly interesting application where 2D video clips are re-rendered per frame into m x n pixels and then using pixel brightness level and color scales to determine the z (height/depth) value. It's a truly smart implementation, check it out yourself! Make sure you click and hold on the re-rendered pixel image to the left and move your mouse!

Turning this:

to this, frame by frame:

There is an official wiki page for Flash Player 10, code name Astro at Adobe Labs. The page has some detailed description and screen shots on the new features of the up coming Flash player. Some categories on the page: Advanced Text Layout of Flash 10, 3D Effects of Flash 10, Custom Filters, Blend Modes and Effects of Flash 10. Expecting more information being published here.

This is an impressive open source 3D library written in Actionscript 2 and 3! Check out their demo page. it takes a few minutes to download the flash file. But compare to the 50mb+ commercial 3D platforms, this one is quite tiny and fast! I give great hopes to browser based, high quality, true 3D applications written for future Flash players. Way to go guys!

Now you can use the popular wii remote controller to navigate through your favorite flash applications or flash games! How cool is that?! Thanks to Joa Ebert and Thibault Imbert, the application WiiFlash was released recently. The application consists of two main parts: WiiFlash Server and WiiFlash ActionScript API. The idea is pretty straight forward and the product is quite exciting. Watch the video for a quick preview of the application.

Check out this cool visual effect created using an open source Flash 3D engine programmed in Actionscript 3.0. You will need Flash player 9 to view it correctly. With all this hype about co-developed 3D environment, wouldn't it be cool if one day it can be accompanied by simply media platforms like your web browser? The other way of looking at it, it would be amazing if one day the "Internet browser" can handle Open GL applications. Oh wait, why do we need browser in the first place?

Flash 3D Effect built upon open source 3D engine in actionscript 3.0

cnet has a article on the new Flash project which is targeting for a free program that can runs Flash presentations on the client side.

Apollo is designed to give developers a way to create applications that can render Flash animations as well as HTML and Acrobat files (PDF).

Am I understanding it right? Adobe is proposing to create a browser like application that focus on Flash and Web content delivery? It seems that the application also has some "advanced" offline features like you can use it to interact with the web services while you are offline, and as soon as your computer / handheld connects to the net, your requests get sent automatically. I don't think this idea is new, and matter of fact, one can use many other technologies to achieve this goal. However, it's good to know that Adobe has high interests on Flash based applications.

Google Finance uses both Flash and AJAX to generate their dynamic pages and stock charts. Google Finance uses a Flash based live ticker which allows users to zoom on the chart dynamically. It is a little slow to manipulate though. What I like Google Finance the most is the Blog section at the bottom where you can find the newest blog postings on the symbol you are looking at. Soon or later, I think Google is going to reveal their gigantic blue-print which include all of the smart services they have been beta testing.

Adobe has released a new update to Flash Player 8.0.24.0. Adobe recommends all users of Flash player to update due to a vulnerability has been found that attached to SWF files which may lead to take control of a user's system. So goto the Flash Player download center and update your systems.

Came across with this blog: http://www.gilbertlugo.net/, compelete done in Flash and PHP, but fully supported by the standard RSS aggregators like blogline and SharpReader... Bravo! Too bad it is in Spanish, which is a language I don't understand.

Now you can apply a flash interface over the existing Google Map and yet preserves all functionalities of Google Map!

This demo is built based on VGMap. VGMap is a new library created by Eyebeam that allows designers, developers, and mapping geeks to overlay data on top of Google Maps in a richer way than is possible using their standard system. Flash provides for vector drawing, as well as a interactive and animation functionality. This VGMap library is simply the glue between GMap and Flash, as well as a handful of Flash ActionScript libraries and sample code to simplify the process of drawing over the map correctly.

This new technology simply opens a new dimension to the future Google GPS development. Will give it a try to see how this works...

Pachyderm 1.0 was constructed based on Flash 5 technology and html tags were not well supported back then. Over the last few years, Macromedia has made many improvements over this issue. HTML tags can now be freely and safely parsed to any dynamic text fields. Upon the delivery of Pachyderm 2.0 re-coded templates, we are now "turning on" the HTML tag support switches for the text fields in all Pachyderm 2.0 implementation.

One challenge we have had is that Pachyderm uses XML files to store all dynamic data. When the author includes standard HTML tags in the text information, the tag "" is first converted into "&#60b&#62", then stored into the XML file for the data constancy. We have constructed a "field switch" to allow the dynamic text fields to parse the correct HTML tags. So far this method is working great. The result is quite impressive. However Larry Johnson noticed that the "" tag does not change the font into standard navy blue color with the underline. However, he has figured a work around by using html code to convert the link text into blue and underlined. The result? Makes you want to click on it!

I have been planning to migrate some of our learning tools and Pachyderm templates onto mobile devices over the last few months. But Flash Lite 1.0 is just not powerful enough. Flash Lite 2.0 is coming in 2006 according to the web speculations. There has been information indicating this player is being built based on the Flash 7 engine. This means it should support ActionScript 2.0. I am expecting it should support object targeting, audio/video support, external file fetching (images, media files), and most importantly, XML parsing. In the meanwhile, I believe Flash Lite 2.0 will have a higher adoptions over the mobile phone industry.

Macromedia today announced Flex 2, at a reasonable price. Flex 2 includes Flash Player 8.5, Flex Framework 2, Flex Builder 2, and Flex Enterprise Services 2. The alpha version of Flex 2 will be released this month and the final product will be released in the beginning of next year.

pachyderm.org is now the official site for the Pachyderm project. For more information, goto the site and check it out.

video.google is using Flash for the video previews. Very slick and fast. Great quality. Macromedia uses Sorenson Compression to handle all the video compressions in Flash. All you need is an up-to-date Flash Player to view Flash video. It is a more popular standard compare to Real Media, Quick Time or Microsoft ASF. Flash does have a limitation on maximum number of frames in one SWF file - 16000 frames. This is some what limiting video presentations when the file is exceeding the limit. However, Macromedia has introduced a new file time - *.flv which is fully supported by standard Flash players and dedicated for video delivery. Flash 8 has built-in FLV player component makes the authoring experience as easy as drag and drop.

Microsoft announced the "new weapon" in dot net based application creation - Sparkle. It is a Microsoft product for building Avalon user interfaces. It is aimed towards non-programmers using this tool to design media rich web or OS (Microsoft Windows series of course) based applications. Or looking at it from another angle, it can be used by "geeky" programmers to easily create applications with "cool" interfaces. Although this philosophy was first introduced by Macromedia products - Director and Flash, Sparkle still has many unique strength to compete (if they will compete) with the existing products. After watching the hourly long video on Sparkle, my first impression is it is still too early to compare Sparkle to Flash. However, what's worth to mention about Sparkle is it's easy data-binding and round trip XAML makes the final product more "searchable" by standard search engine. Flash contents not being indexable is the long known "fatal" problem and Sparkle may have a solution to this. However, in the short run (2-3) years, good luck to the Sparkle team to market this product. I simple can't see those hard core Flash developers will easily convert to this new application and not to mention, many of them are hard core Mac users too!

You can download the 30 days trial version at Macromedia's Flash product site. It is stated as: "Macromedia's biggest Flash release to date." Once again, the flash designers need to push the even more powerful tool into it's new edge!

Everyone is sick at work, including myself. A mixed flu and spring allergy (since Vancouver is having some warm weather recently).

Had some interesting challenges while experimenting with Flash mix with video / audio data. This is related to an international project (Pachyderm) me and my co-worker is involved in. The project requires the flash interface to be able to load and control different types of media files on the fly. The media files vary from swf to mpeg video data, mp3 to wav and aiff sound files. Due to the nature of Flash has different ways of loading different file types: loadMovie() and loadSound(), importing video files and “squeeze” them in Sorenson compression or linking to them externally, video objects and audio objects etc… The trick lies in there must be a “Player Selector” component to be in place to first identify the file type based on the XML attributes and then determine the right loading functions and control components. Anyway, it was a good day in Flash development, looking forward to test some new features in Flash 8.