Touchlib svn updates

Lots of updates going on to the flash apps. I'm currently working on finishing up a multitouch app loader (the 'operating system' for your touchscreen). Cerupcat was nice enough to add a couple of his musical applications and c.moore has also checked in a tangram game and some other utility apps, not to mention helping to keep the flash stuff organized.

Once I finish up the app launcher, I'll finish up Tank and maybe do one more app. I am also going to be spending some time to make sure the touchlib software is working as well as it can be.

If anyone else has anything they'd like to submit to the project, please let me know!

Touchlib updates

I checked in a few changes that really speeded up the existing apps - OSC.exe is now down to about 12% cpu on my machine (from 25-30%). Smoke was also down from 75% to 50%. Most of the slowdown with touchlib was due to multithreading issues (blocking and waiting). I think there still may be some improvements to be had by changing the way we acquire images. Right now the touchlib processing thread blocks until it aquires an image. If we could have it surrender execution until an image is available, it would be mean that the cpu is tied up for less time.

Flash: Most annoying combination of keys to accidently press

Control-Shift-W. It locks your workspace to the current movie size (meaning you can't scroll outside the bounds of the movie). This usually causes your workspace scrollbars to disappear as well. I've had to close what I was working on once because I couldn't figure out what I had pressed to get into this mode. This keyboard shortcut also seems to be missing from most 'Flash shortcut' guides and it's fairly hidden on the menu bar as well. Hopefully this blog post will save others from a similar fate.

Flash 10 Astro comments

This is old news by now, but for those that don't know Adobe has demoed some new features that will make it into Flash 10 at Adobe's MAX conference. The highlights:

• Support for really basic 3d transforms of 2d display objects. Basically you can rotate on X,Y and Z axises. I'm not too excited about this since it's still not hardware accelerated which is where adobe really needs to be focusing their efforts (even if it will mean re-writing all their rendering code). Maybe this feature will help speed up Papervision3D though.
• A new stream processing language for writing bitmap shaders that run as fast as macromedia's bitmap filters. These *may* be able to be offloaded to graphics cards. This is kinda cool and could allow for more advanced 2D effects which will be nice for games. Also it should be easy for people to share filter code.
• New, advanced Text box - supports multi column. This has been needed for some time and is a welcome addition. What would be nice is if they expanded their HTMLText rendering to include more tags now or take the HTML component from AIR...

As for me, I am still using Flash 8 for everything at work. Flash 9 penetration is pretty good, but some things are still easier to whip out in Actionscript 2.0, and not everyone here knows AS3 or has CS3 installed.

Touchlib svn updates

I checked a new flash app into the SVN called 'tank' which is a simple tank game. I plan on adding a few more things but the basic stuff is in there and playable. I'll be adding better graphics, destroyable walls, and up to 4 players. I haven't tested it on my table (just using the mouse). I'm interested to hear if anyone gets it working.

A small hop onto the linux bus

I installed the latest Ubuntu release on one of my machines last week. Aside from not detecting my newer ZoneT Wireless card everything went pretty much automatically. I couldn't quite get the ZoneT working properly using some directions I found online so I swapped it out for a linksys card I had and that worked immediately. Initial impressions are very nice - I like the app installer and package manager. Firefox runs great.

Anyway, my goal is to start trying to get some of my applications running in Linux (Touchlib and Genome) so I can get some more linux experience under my belt.

Genome Work Log

• added more module view commands (group connect, disconnect, delete, etc)
• Ability to save presets, open from library
• library search
• started creating gui .xml's for existing modules