Adobe Flash Catalyst

After a quite long silent period, Adobe releases on the 1st june 2oo9 the beta 1 version of its new software Flash Catalyst. To evaluate this new web tool, download from the Adobe Lab the beta version, you wil find above the different steps of the installation. Very easy! Just launch the installer.

 

Welcome tab

You have to choice the version you want to use. A temporary serial number is supplied by Adobe with the beta version of this software. Otherwise, you have to chose the 30 days evaluation version.

Licensing contract tab

The Flash Catalyst software may try to contact Adobe via Internet in order to active the license and validate use rights. IP adresses will be transmitted.
You are supposed to read the licensing contract.

Options tab

You can select your prefered language and modify the install directory path.

Progression tab

Software is installing. Just wait and enjoy a cup of coffee.

Registry tab

Yon can register yourself right now if you are connected or postpone it.

Finished tab

You did it! Now it’s time to play with Flash Catalyst.

Stay tuned, I will describe how to use this software in future posts.

I undoubtly recommend this Catalyst!

Annecy o9 – First day

Today begins the Annecy o9 International Animation Festival. Anybobody who is concerned, interested or passionnated by animated film should go to Annecy once in his life.

By default you can read current news on the official web site. You will discover :

¬ the official selection,
¬ the jurys members’ biography,
¬ the 2oo8 Prize winners and the previous Prize winners.

MIFA – Marché International du Film d’Animation

The MIFA is the meeting point for all professionals of the animation film business.

Atelier de cinéma d’animation

The Atelier de cinéma d’animation is a place dedicted to the promotion of the animation, especially by teaching to children and adults history and major actors of this art and by widespreading animation technics. This association is born under the sponsorship of Alexandre Alexeïeff and Claire Parker.

The place :: Annecy

I love Annecy, French medium town between lake and mountains, close to Geneva. Moreover Annecy will be the place for the Winter Olympic Game in 2o18. Yes you have time to plan your trip!

Les Gobelins

I can’t speak about animation without mentioning the well-known parisian arts school Les Gobelins where animation is taught by the most excellent technicians, professors and animators. Oktapodi is a very funny short film made by student from this school and won a prize during the last edition of the festival.

Watch more animation on web

NFB.ca is a Web site where you can watch films produced by the National Film Board of Canada. Watch the wonderful Ryan animation film. This Oscar®-winning animated short from Chris Landreth is based on the life of Ryan Larkin, a Canadian animator who, 30 years ago, produced some of the most influential animated films of his time. Simply genious! And others many animated films .

You may also read Animation Now! from Taschen

I fundamentally recommend animation.

Gostai robot touriste!

In a previous post I introduced you the Gostai Urbi technology through is visual programming tool, Gostai urbiLive from the Gostai Urbi Studio. Moreover you may find complementary information I’ve already centralized about the firm and the technology on this blog.

I recently received a mail from Gostai. The experience this company offers is simply funny and cool. Here is the mail, you will find enclosed all needed information. Nothing to say more, except that just try it! So cool!

***

Dear All,

It’s our pleasure to invite you to try our latest remote presence
application based on Urbi, which is taking place in Paris during 10
days, starting today until the 7th of June.

The idea is simple: you can visit in real time, right now, the “Cité des
Sciences” museum in Paris, through the eye of a robot and with a simple
web browser at this address:

http://fes.gostainet.com

It’s in French, but the interface is rather straightforward: just use
the controls or click on the map to move the robot, and click on the
yellow squares on the image to display information about the objects
you’ll see in the museum. There is a waiting queue if you are not the
first in line, so be patient and you’ll soon be moving freely in this
famous Paris museum in real time!

This is part of a bigger event organized in Paris at the moment, called
“Futur en Seine”, which is meant to be a modern type of “1900 Universal
Exhibit”, where science and technology are put in a social and cultural
context to imagine the city of the future:
http://www.futur-en-seine.fr/en

Let us know about your feedback!

Best Regards,
The Gostai Team

 ***

I robotly recommend Gostai technology.

Adobe BrowserLab

I love when Adobe innnovates like that. I was these last days almost impatient to discover new projects from Adobe Labs. Yesterday I experiment the new project called BrowserLab.
Adobe® BrowserLab is an online hosted service that lets any Adobe identified user test the pages of any web site across a variety of web browsers and operating systems. The service works by taking screen shots of the web pages in different browsers, and then displaying them in the BrowserLab application window.
The user may use this application in a standalone way or integrated with Dreamweaver (be careful, Extension Manager CS4 2.1 and 2 Adobe BrowserLab Extensions for Dreamweaver CS4 must be installed).
Here is a short overview of the main features of this service :

Define a set of browsers

According your team organisation, or according to the client target, or even according to technical constraints, you may define an appropriate set of browsers.

Visualize sites from differents browsers

The visualization is very interesting to compare rendering in different browser. You may visualize any find of web site, browser by browser, compare to browsers rendering or – and its a very good idea – thanks to the onion skin view which overlap different views using transparency.

Site loading

Site loaded

One-Two view

Onion view

 Usability

A list of Hot Keys are available for people who prefers use keyboard to mouse. This is a constant for Adobe to sensibilize to keys opportunity.

And as always with the Adobe products, documentation on the web is already present, clear and pertinent.

After its Adobe InContext Editing – an online service that allows designers to create, manage, and control editable web pages – Abode consolidate with BrowserLab the offer around its web development IDE Dreamweaver.

I simply recommend the BrowserLab experience.

Augmented reality

I miss time to update regularly this blog at the moment. I do my best. Nevertheless I can’t do without publishing this presentation concerning Augmented Reality and to refer to the Hebiflux’s post about augmented reality on mobile phone (in French). I found the above presentation on this post.
It was also for me an occasion to discover the link between WordPress and SlideShare!

Designing for an Augmented Reality world

View more OpenOffice presentations from thomas.purves.

I really recommend augmented reality!

Gary Stasiuk’s dimension

After André Michelle, I would like to speak about Gary Stasiuk. Gary Stasiuk is currently a Senior Flash Developer with Juxt Interactive, an advertising agency in Newport Beach. He is also a regular speaker in international exhibitions and conferences like at the FITC 2oo9 in Toronto (25-28 April 2oo9) during which he will speak about his work on the Adobe Brillant site and about the Papervision3D viewer tool Vizual3D he has begun to develop. Perhaps you will have also the chance to meet him during the Introduction to Flash Animation course at the Emily Carr university of art + design in Vancouver, Canada. 

VizualPV3D

VizualPV3D is a free Flash application that provides a GUI interface to create and manipulate objects in 3D scenes using Papervision3D. Even if the object manipulation in 3D space is not easy as with classic 3D tool, this beta version of Vizual PV3D is full of promises.

Before reading the Vizual PV3D User Guide in PDF format, watch Vizual PV3D from Juxt Interactive on Vimeo.

Liquid Journey

Liquid journey is the Gary Stasiuk’s personal web site. Logically awarded, the site is an open source experimental Flash web site integrating, digital animals animation, artificial intelligence concepts integration, complexe data visualization, digital auto-generative art. All animations are so precise, innovative and fluid. I’m so shameful to discover it only now… 

FITC Presentations

¬ Discovering Beautiful Data
Simply amazing! The Discovering Beautiful Data presentation covers several data representation like Fractals, Mandala, Spirals, Vortex, Swarm and so on. Here above are some examples I’ve done thanks to this presentation. So cool… And it seems so obvious…

¬ Behavior and simulating AI
The Behavior and simulating AI FITC presentation explains basics concepts in artificial intelligence and declines this concepts into graphical, animated and interactive examples.

 

¬ Digital creatures
It’s about motion, targets, constants, objects chain, wireframes, magnitude, polygon,  recursion, 3D, rotation, AI and behavior models. And progressively appears the digital creatures body structure, motion and behaviour. Truely fascinating!

I totally recommend this artist’s work!

André Michelle’s noise

André Michelle is german, innovative, experimental, music, game, actionscript developer (as I used to see through his work but I’m sure he has a lot other technical skills).

Experiments

I discover André Michelle 4 years ago now thanks his laboratory, in which he keeps on posting incredible experimentations in actionscript. Most of these experimentations were amazing, beautiful, astonishing and often supplied with the source code. One of the last one is a wonderful music tool called ToneMatrix. It’s beautiful, it’s musical, and it’s poetic! I love it.

Another one is called Tone Wheels. I love the simplicity of the aesthetics each time. It give a real poetic atmosphere to the experiment. I really appreciate this way of working. I try to be inspired by this philosophy.

Another interesting experiment is the 2D physics engine, call Revive.

By the way, André, thanks for sharing your experiments!

Hobnox

I saw once André Michelle at the 2oo8 Edition of the Flash Festival in the Parisian cultural center Beaubourg. He presented at this time, the new Hobnox tool, called AudioTool. Hobnox is the firm for which André Michelle is working (according to his blog).
This fantastic tool allow anybody to compose electronic music on the web. I simply recommend you to play with it! I recommend also to explore Hobnox platform and others tools like the LiveTool and the Hobnox libraries. Moreover I discover that Hobnox publishes their Hobnox Open Source. now developers may get access to core libraries that are used in projects like the Hobnox AudioTool.

Adobe, Make some noise!

I was astonished by the André Michelle’s campaign towards Adobe for making some noise. With Joa Ebert and Kai-Philipp Schöllmann (see also Alan Ross blog), he addresses the lack of dynamic sound manipulation in Flash. Now I really understand why. In the scope of audio tool, the site suggests to discover new projects in the same spirit than Hobnox AudioTool, like popforge, 8bitboy, Splicemusic, Aviary Roc, and Digimix.

Let’s the music play!

Similar projects appears mixing visual effects with music. The last ones which have been noticed by the digital communauty are Auditorium

and SuperFluidity developed by ElectronicShadow with Dassault 3DVIA Virtools. (Source : Hebiflux).

I highly recommend André Michelle’s actuality.

ARDUINO

I got it! I ordered the new ARDUINO board and recieved it yesterday by post mail. This summer I will enter in the world of electronics and robotics!
I’ve already downloaded software and plugin. I will install them soon. I’ve planned to read several books before this summer like :

Processing: Creative Coding and Computational Art (Foundation), by Ira Greenberg (Foreword by Keith Peters),

Visualizing Data, by Ben Fry and

Making Things Talk: Practical Methods for Connecting Physical Objects, by Tom Igoe.

Stay tuned by regurlarly watchy this blog’s Arduino page and more generally to the Digital Art page.

I electronicaly recommend ARDUINO!

LEGO Mindstorms NXT

I plan to buy the LEGO® MINDSTORMS®robot for this summer. So I try to collect all information I may find in order to centralize them in my pages about LEGO® and LEGO®Mindstorms® NXT.

LEGO ® MINDSTORMS®

 As defined in the wikipedia definition, « LEGO®MINDSTORMS® is a line of Lego sets combining programmable bricks with electric motors, sensors, Lego bricks, and Lego Technic pieces (such as gears, axles, and beams) ». In a simply word, MINDSTORMS® is the robot brand name.

NXT

As defined by the LEGO company, « the NXT is the brain of a MINDSTORMS® robot. It’s an intelligent, computer-controlled LEGO® brick that lets a MINDSTORMS® robot come alive and perform different operations ». The NXT is one of the component of the robot, one which interacts with and controls others components, called sensors. HiTechnic produces a set of sensors dedicated to the LEGO®MINDSTORMS®, CODATEX does it too!

	Touch Sensor The sense of touch is given to the robot thanks to this sensor. It detects when it is being pressed by something and when it is released again.
	Sound Sensor The Sound Sensor can detect both decibels [dB]  (sound that are too high or too low for the human ear to hearn) and adjusted decibel [dBA] (sound pressure adapted to human ear sensitivity).
	Light Sensor Robot vision capacities are given by the Light Sensor (with the Ultrasonic Sensor). The Light Sensor enables the robot to measure light intensity (light/dark).
	Ultrasonic Sensor Thanks to the Ultrasonic Sensor, the robot can see and detect objects. This sensor may be used to avoid obstacles, sense and measure distance, and detect movement.« The Ultrasonic Sensor measures distance in centimeters and in inches. It is able to measure distances from 0 to 255 centimeters with a precision of +/- 3 cm.The Ultrasonic Sensor uses the same scientific principle as bats: it measures distance by calculating the time it takes for a sound wave to hit an object and return – just like an echo. »
	Servo Motors & Rotation Sensor The robot has the ability to move thanks to the 3 Servo Motors. Each motor has a built-in Rotation Sensor, which measures motor rotations in degrees or full rotations.

 Photographies source: LOGO® MINDSTORMS®web site.

LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT software & NXT-G

To program the robot, the LEGO®MINDSTORMS® NXT software enables any programer to upload programs to the NXT via USB or Bluetooth connectivity. NXT-G is the graphical language of the LEGO® Mindstorms® NXT system. As the Microsoft Visual Programming Language (VPL), NXT-G is based on a graphical set of commands linked together in order to asssit code writing. I begin reading the LEGO® MINDSTORMS® NXT-G Programming Guide to understand more the NXT-G features.

NXT’REME

Moreover, the LEGO®MINDSTORMS® NXT software is not the only one programming environment. You may use also the National Instrument LabView Toolkit, the Microsoft Robotics Studio, the Gostai URBI for LEGO MINDSTORMS NXT or the NBC (Next Byte Codes).

Yesterday I finished reading the NXC Programmer’s Guide. Not eXactly C (NXC) is a high level language, similar to C, built on top of the NBC compiler. NXC is basically NQC for the NXT. To compile NXC programs you ahev to use the NBC compiler with source code files that have a .nxc file extension. The Next Byte Codes (NBC) is a simple language with an assembly language syntax that can be used to program LEGO’s NXT programmable brick. Well, it’s a good way for me to enter in the C world!

I highly recommend NXT!

Actionscript frameworks & libraries – Step III

Yesterday I finished to update the [AS3] Animation frameworks of this blog.

Moreover I added a new section about mathematical libraries. And I mention also the book written by the Flash and Math team, especially by Douglas Ensley and Barbara Kaskosz. Go the book’s site to visualize all exercises supplied with the book.

I really recommend mathematics!