You don’t see them very often these days ( or at least i’m missing them ) but my colleague Wim Vanhenden released his personal website this week and to be honest: it is a little bit experimental. Hmm, let me rephrase that last sentence: it is totally experimental. Take a look around at wimvanhenden.be and let this Belgian internet artist know who your favourite band is and what you are thinking to let him take you on a journey. I know Wim put a lot of effort in this website and I really like the result. It has been a long time since I came across a personal portfolio that was focussing more on art and experience than on content only.

Playr is a Flash Actionscript 3 class built to take the heavy lifting off your hands when building any kind of music player appliction in Flash, Flex or AIR. Yesterday Ronny released an update on his blog and it all looks very promising! Ronny has put up a dedicated site for Playr where all of the information, code examples, downloads are gathered. Almost a year ago, I started playing with the first version of Playr. I was working on a RIA project for school called ”Interlude”.

The main goal of Interlude was to provide an flex/air based mp3 player which offered you a user friendly music management tool. For the beta version, I was planning to implement  a smart playlist generator,  using the last.fm api and a cool personal mood feature. Via last.fm Interlude looked for similar artists and generated a playlist filled with matches from your own music collection. The mood feature allows users to create their own personal moods. This can go from ”music@work”, ”workout music” to ‘’sex music” and allows them to tag their mp3 files. Whenever they feel like creating a playlist based on what mood they are in, this feature allows them to quickly generate an optimized playlist.

This all sounds very cool but I never had the chance to finish it. I just did not had the time to work out the first beta version, and as some of you might know, in the beginning of the second semester I started my internship @ Boulevart and from that point things went very fast. Any way, the good news is that my colleague Maarten (flex developer) fell immediately in love when I showcased Interlude at the office. He decided to bring it back to life so we will be announcing the first beta version of Interlude soon. Here are already a few screenshots from the first designs.

There still is a lot of work to do, and I think Maarten will kick my ass if he sees the standard components, but hey its a start no? :) We will be using Ronny’s Playr class in this project as well. If you want to stay tuned on Interlude and if you are interested in beta testing send me an email at thomas.joos[at]boulevart.be

Last week Andy Jacobs, a former multimedia classmate / Boulevart colleague / friend of mine, started with a very cool initiative for actionscript developers who are interested in iphone development. On his new blog Andy will discuss some iphone SDK topics seen through the eye of an Actionscript developer. Andy will take real live examples (e.g.: Array Sorting, loading XML, drawing,..) and provide you with the actionscript version and convert it to objective C / iphone SDK. A perfect guideline for actionscript developers who are interested getting started with cocoa touch! If you are one of them this is the place to go: Cocoa touch for actionscript developers.

A while ago, Maarten Cox ( Flex developer at Boulevart ) released his first version of CrazyCam. A flex/air application bringing photobooth features for windows users. Being donwloaded over a 1000 times at the Adobe Market Place it was quite a succes. Maarten worked hard on an update and here it is. Some of the biggest improvement are a new interface design and the ability to not only take pictures but shoot video’s as well! CrazyCam V2.1 also offers an implemented gallery where you can watch your pictures and video’s inside the application itself.

The new version can be downloaded from the Adobe MarketPlace. You can find more info on Maarten’s blog or at labs.boulevart.

A while ago, Maarten Cox, a colleague of mine at Boulevart, released a cool AIR Application called CrazyCam. As a windows-user, you were never able to show off like mac users when they are using photo booth. From now on, you can make crazy funny pictures like every mac user out there. Ofcourse, mac-users can also use this application, as it has some other effects then photobooth.

CrazyCam offers 33 effects like mirror-effects, fire, water, snow, rgb, ascii and many more (which were created by Paul Neave ). Just choose an effect on the left side, do a crazy face and make a snapshot!

You can find more info on Maarten’s blog or at labs.boulevart.

I finally found the time to update my ResizeImage Class. It gives you the opportunity to resize your images proportional. The most important change is that I made it static so you can use the resize function everywhere without making instances first.

For those who don’t know, it’s an as3 class I wrote and you can use it for any type of project. If it’s a commercial one then it would be appreciated if you send me an email or give me a credit.

Go and have fun, you can download the class HERE.

If you want some more info you can check my previous post. You will find some more explanation about the code.

Thomas

Today I accepted a job offer from Boulevart. I will be working along with the flash team together with Wim Vanhenden and other experts. I am also going to start developing mobile projects and try to build up a mobile team. I am very excited about it and I hope the mobile business will run smoothly. I guess now I will finally discover if its the future or not :)

I am also going to work together with some old mct-friends, it’s cool that we end up together! Dietlev, Andy & Roel => let’s get it on!

I am also proud to announce that I will develop the upcoming Multi-Mania mobile conference guide. Koen De Weggheleire just confirmed that they would like to provide one to the attendees this year. We are also going to test out some delivering concepts at the event itself. Using bluetooth to get the application on the devices seems like the most efficient way to handle this. If you have any suggestions please feel free to send me an email or give me a comment!

I will attend Multi-Mania, the 23th of may, so if you are attending as well we can always have a drink or a talk! See you there.

Thomas

Lee Brimelow has uploaded a new tutorial to gotoAndLearn() that shows you how to use Papervision3D 2.0 to create an interactive cube with different textures on each part of the cube. This example is using the GreatWhite branch of Papervision3D. We all know pv3d has changed the way people and developers experience the interactive web! Take a quick look if you are interested because it really kicks some serious ass.

And if you want to take ik to the next level… the guys from Boulevart also released a cool pv3d cube tutorial. It explains how you can rotate a cube using a registration or pivot point. Definately worth checking I guess!

Today Ronny Welter released his Playr Class.
Playr is a Flash Actionscript 3 class which makes it very easy to create a music player in flex/flash or AIR in about 10lines of code. You can use this engine for a loop, a single song or an entire playlist. I’ve already been using a beta version of his class in my FLEX/AIR project ”Interlude” and the new additions really come in handy. Ronny has implementend a “shuffle mode” and a “Track Progress”. I have wrote some extensions on this cool engine as well and I will release them soon.. If Ronny let’s me :)

check it out at www.nocreativity.com/blog

Today andy jacobs released the AS3 Secure zip extension he wrote a while ago. It is an extension on David Chang’s Zip API with the RC4 encryption method made by Metal Hurlant. Andy made a nice extension which also supports encryption. In a nutshell: This api makes it possible to encrypt any external data (in as3) and encrypts it so you can not open it on a local computer or mac or… You can only load it in flash and in that way (re)use your assets, compressed into one file.

Go and check it out here!