PhoneGap AIR Simulator is specifically made for testing PhoneGap projects, and go beyond Apple’s iPhone simulator as well as supporting Android application development and Blackberry. As this is an Adobe AIR application, it can run on Mac, Windows and Linux.
One of the key feature is the accelerometer console powered by Papervision. You can tilt/rotate a virtual iPhone in 3D space which passes simulated X/Y/Z accelerometer value to the navigator in phonegap.js. Above screenshot is a sample demo game that I made with HTML/javascript/CSS and PhoneGap which you can try out in the simulator demo below. Tilt The simulator also detects certain PhoneGap javascript methods such as “vibrate()” or “sound()” which gets translated into an action in AIR.
In the near future, we are adding:
- Geolocation console - uses Google Maps API to simulate GPS values
- Firebug Lite integration
These downloads are only to show work in progress and is not ready for actual testing of PhoneGap projects, but stay tuned fore more updates!
My website has been selected as 1 of 3 finalists for “Best Canadian Student Website” in People’s Choice Award. The final winner is chosen by you! See all the finalists and vote here. The submission closes on April 17th.
FITC has been hosting events 8 years involving Flash, Flex, AIR to motion design. They have also worked Adobe MAX conferences.
BeatSequencerAS3 is a multitrack sequencer made for Flash using ActionScript3. It supports BPM control, multitracks and volume control per track. Panning is currently unsupported. Each track has 4 sound sources and 16 steps with 8 notes (C1-C2) to choose from for each step.
This is a project that I worked on for previous Nitobi Hackday. Since then, I’ve added couple more features. The code is hosted under Google Code, and it is currently under GPL License.
For now, it takes XML data like above with linear data containing multiple attributes, and uses that as tags to make relationship between items, which in this case are artists, genre and associated artists. I’m planning on adding a functionality where clicking on a node (artist in this case) will show information such as artist description/biography.
For future implementation of this, I’m thinking about plugging this into Nitobi blogs, Last.fm etc. For something like blogs, it would show all of us, and radius of the circle would reflect how many posts that person has posted in a duration of time. Clicking on that person’s name will show recent posts by him, and clicking on the title of the post will take the viewer to the real blogpost either as a new window or inside of the app.
This sounds like a shameless self-promotion, but I’ve recently updated my portfolio site. I tried to keep it minimal and clean. I also wrote my own lightweight 3D engine/renderer to do the 3D text in the background. Please check it out and let me know what you guys think.
Today’s topic is Tweening library for ActionScript3. I did a comparison between Tweener (v1.31.71), TweenLite (v8.15) and gTween (Beta2). Correct me if I’m wrong, but as far as I know all of these 3 libraries share the same basic functionality such as easing, on complete function caller, delay, time, etc. I also tried to include GoASAP in this comparison, but decided to exclude it because this one is not meant to work right out of box. It has a lot of customizable properties, but just to get a simple tweening working I would have to write about 10 lines of code (as opposed to 1 or 2) with it’s own update function, which wouldn’t be a fair comparison with the rest. In another word, the performance of GoASAP strongly depends on how the user writes its code. Enough intro, let’s get into action.
I tested the performance by placing N numbers boxes and applying looped linear Tweening on coordinates (x, y) and scaling, simultaneously. Let’s start with file size compareson.
Here you can see that TweenLite and gTween are significantly smaller than Tweener. Next up is performance.
Average frames per second (500 boxes)
Tweener: 19.8fps (+0)
TweenLite: 25.35fps (+5.55fps)
gTween: 20.9fps (+1.1fps)
Average frames per second (1000 boxes)
Tweener: 8.6fps (+0)
TweenLite: 13.2fps (+4.6fps)
gTween: 10.5fps (+1.9fps)
Once again, TweenLite tops with average of +5fps compared to Tweener. Tweener used to be my favorite tweening library but now is the time is to switch over to TweenLite. gTween also came pretty close and is significantly better than Tweener. Mind you, it is still in beta2 stage so there is still a lot potential for improvements. You can view the test app I made below. Click on “switch” button at top left to switch through tweening libraries.
Warning: this may be memory/CPU intensive for some computers. It has a potential to crash your browser/computer on slower machines.
If you have any other libraries that you suggest for comparison, please let me know as a comment to this post.
var blur:BlurFilter = new BlurFilter(blurX, blurY, quality);
displayObject.filters = [blur];
Let’s start with the basics. When you create a new BlurFilter object, it has 3 properties. First one is horizontal blur strength, second is vertical blur strength, and the third is quality. Blur strength needs to be above 1 and quality above 0 for BlurFilter to take effect. The second line of code is used to actually apply the filter onto an existing object. Filters are not update itself, so whenever you make a change to the filter properties, you will need to reapply the filter on objects.
Strength VS Quality
Almost identical blur effect can be achieved by balancing the strength and quality. Lowering the quality is the key to better performance. As shown in above images, the difference in FPS is significant.
Area VS Quantity
These examples show the difference in FPS as a result of where you applied the effect. On the top image, it’s significant that applying the filter on individual object increases the FPS. However, this is only the case if you have low number of child objects. In the second example, applying the effect on the sprite containing all the child objects have slightly higher FPS.
I don’t know what this is going to turn into, but I created some cube visualizer with random grid texture. The pattern is random so it will look slightly different everytime. It’s not interactive at the moment, but I will see that this could turn into.
You can see the real thing here: http://www.yoheishimomae.com/demo/cubething
I spent couple of hours today creating paper flipping physics from scratch. It wasn’t as easy as I expected and the image above shows some of the battles that I had to go through. Below is an Actionscript 3 implementation of this equation. Good ol’ sohcatoa.
Yay, my first blog post. I’m Yohei and I’ve started working here at Nitobi couple months ago. I’m not much of a blogger, but I will try and share cool links like the followings once in a while.