Google's Docs Offline

I definitely will be trying this out. I think it is important for me to have as much data and tools online and not on my drive. It makes me feel secure to know that if my computer crashes, I can easily get to my data and not worry that it is lost. My fiancee and I share lots of documents, and to have Google's docs locally and online, makes it easier to edit updates at any point in time (online/offline).

Erik Natzke's Processing Art

I'm really digging Processing. I bought my self a how-to book today from Amazon. Check out Erik Natzke's ill designs using Processing.




Processing is an open source programming language and environment for people who want to program images, animation, and interactions. It is used by students, artists, designers, researchers, and hobbyists for learning, prototyping, and production. It is created to teach fundamentals of computer programming within a visual context and to serve as a software sketchbook and professional production tool. Processing is developed by artists and designers as an alternative to proprietary software tools in the same domain.

Dr Romanelli and his dope Converse kicks

Really dope kicks by Dr. Romanelli. The sales of its partners' ( (PRODUCT) RED ) products has generated over $50 million so far for the Global Fund. The details of this sneaker is just amazing. All leather, with bandaid embossing. The tongue has one of my favorite colors, chocolate brown. The inside has a diagram of a humans head, as well as the bottom has a clear gel and a graphic of a humans skull.

Workaholics need coffee breaks

Spice up your colleagues' day with our Newton Virus, the first virus to introduce gravity to your laptop, causing the desktop icons to fall down as if subject to the gravitational pull from the real world.

Newton Virus comes on a USB key for manual infection. Simply plug the key into a computer and the virus will automatically copy itself on the hard drive.

How to calculate the closest distant object

I am not a huge math geek, but I do like to come up with solutions. I feel as though I am moving closer to the programming world and less on the Graphic Design realm. Which is fine by me, I can focus my creativity to illustrations and paintings on my spare time. Understand, that I am no means a programmer at his pureness. I am learning every step of the way.

What I do like about blogging, is the journal entry aspect. This is where I can write things up that I have discovered. I am most happy to share what I learn with anyone else who chooses to have interest.

Now, with that disclaimer out there. If I had a focused object and many other objects surrounding that focused object; How could I find the closest object to that focused object? So I was proposed this question a couple of weeks ago.

I immediately thought of the Pathagreom Theorem (a(Square) + b(square) = c(square)). I said to my self, I understand of the problem. If I were to get the distance of all the objects x and y positions and subject them by the x and y position of the focused object, I could get the distances of each one to the focus object. I could than get the distance between an object and a main object by simply using ActionScripts Math.sqrt() function by passing in the distances x and y positions.

Okay, so if I am able to get the distances between each object and the focused object; I would than have to store the coordinates some where for checking, later. I stored each result distance into an array. After I stored all my distances, I then sorted the array valued numbers in numeric order by using the sort() function built-in ActionScript. If I were to trace out the distances array on it’s first array, I would get the closest number to the main object. This is really cool and all, but how can I really utilize this, one would say.

var distances:Array = [];

var objRef:Array = [];



for ( var i:int = 0; i < number =" this[" number =" this[" number =" Math.round(Math.sqrt(">





I looked further into this, and asked myself a question. How can I find the nearest object to the main object. So added a few more lines of code. I first added a new array, this is so I can keep track of my distance and object references. Than in my original for loop I stored my objects references into the new array. Each object reference is placed into a datatype Object. This is all done for reference checking later.



Now, after I have my numeric values sorted in order; I now create another for loop. This simple loop will go through each object reference and check if the closest distance matches the object referenced distance. If this is correct, we can now do what ever we please with that object.




var distances:Array = [];

var objRef:Array = [];

var num:int = 3;



for ( var i:int = 0; i < number =" this[" number =" this[" number =" Math.round(Math.sqrt(" int =" 0;">

Photoshop Express

After a year in the making, Finally Photoshop has an online tool. I'm so excited to dig and play with this. Photoshop Express was entirely built with Flex - How exciting is that!?

Homer is human

A colleage sent me this. It was designed by an anonymous blogger. I tried looking up the designer but he has a very vague description on who he is. I guess, if he really didn't want attention, he wouldn't leave water marks. The dude also has an animated image of how he did it.

Battlestar Galactica Propaganda Posters

I just bought myself Battlestar Galactica Propaganda Posters. I love Battlestar Galactica, and can't wait for the new series coming this spring.

You can purchase your posters at thinkgeek.com

Steve Jobs Collage

Collage of Apple products comes to one an creates Steve - Pretty neat.

Plaid

I'm about plaid these days. Check out LVHRD's photo gallery.

The biology of religion

Okay, I'm not into discussing "religion talk" with anyone; But Dan Dennet brings an interesting perspective. Philosopher Dan Dennett thinks of religion as a natural phenomenon, a human feature that has evolved over millennia to meet each society's changing needs. From this, he makes a brilliant case for studying religion -- all religion -- as rigorously as we do science. Dennett, who followed Rick Warren on stage at TED2006, then takes a few minutes to analyze Warren's The Purpose-Driven Life and dispute several of its claims -- among them a belief that in order to be moral, one must deny evolution.

The Cool Hunter.com Archecture section

I'm feeling Coolhunter archecture blog. Great stuff in review.

Flex Camp Wall Street

Looks as though we have a Flex Camp Seminar soon, here in New York, Friday, April 18, 2008. Seats are limited.

FMS3 Response Error

I have finally purchased my Flash Media Server 3 Space at Influxis. They have awesome rates. Much better than purchasing a $5,000 License. I ran into a bit of a snag connecting my camera to the server. I received this error:

ReferenceError: Error #1069: Property onBWDone not found on flash.net.NetConnection and there is no default value.

(Sorry for the snapshot, I haven't installed the code snippet yet).

It so happens there is a nice fix for this. Check out what I've done. Notice the 'client' property. I place this object into it and create a public method called onBWDone. Try it out for yourself, satisfaction guaranteed.

The World's easiest database

Blist is the world's easiest database. It's a database for us normal people that don't really have care for getting into the nitty gritty of SQL. It is an easy, visual intuitive tool. Visit Blist.com for more info.

Adobe Developing iPhone Flash Player

It seems promising, Adobe thinks they can develop the flash player for iphone. I'm not sure what they can do with Apple's current sdk, but their seems to be some talk of possibly getting some proprietary code from Apple to help accomplish this. If Apple, does agree to this, we can all be rest assured. Although, if Apple does not give a helping hand, we will be stuck with a iphone native Flash Player app. Let me put it out there, the sdk comes with many limitations. Which will really suck. Read the full article at gizmodo.com

2008 Conference line up

Looks as though I'll be visiting San Francisco quite a few times this year. Luckily I have much affinity for San Fran. Here is the conference line up for 2008.

FlexManiacs
May 19-23, 2008
Washington DC

FlashBelt
June 10-13, 2008
Minneapolis, MN.

Flash Forward
August 20th - 22nd 2008
San Francisco

Adobe Max 2008 (link not available yet)
November 16-19, 2008
San Francisco

Big Dog by Boston Dynamics

I have to say this is one of the most freakiest looking animatrontics I've seen. The robot has very good balance while walking over rough terrains.

Desiging Flex 3 applications using CS3

Designers, have the chance to skin & style Flex Apps, by using your Creative Suite 3 products. Adobe (in association with Narciso Jaramillo) released an article on Designing Flex 3 skins & styles using Creative Suite 3 and Flex 3. If you're a designer that is looking for new platforms to create on, go to Adobe Developer Connection and read on the subject. You can use minimal CSS, and focus on using products like Photoshop.

Also, ScaleNine has recently posted tips for using the Flex Skin Design extensions.

ActinoScript reference for RIA

Adobe, released a reference for rich internet applications. It provides information on the native ActionScript API for all the runtime applications; such as: Flex 3, AIR and the Flash Player. Go, download the pdf and give it a look.

Disney's Adobe AIR Application

Frog Design created a pretty slick looking AIR App for Disney and Disney's Brokers. Check out Josh's Bloom interview by Lee Brimelow. They give us a nice demo of the Travel Agent Desktop Application. The fore front was done with using AIR, the components were created using Flex's framework and animations were created using Flash. Now this is how you can utilize ActionScript in it's diversified form.

Swf Object 2.0 Released

If you're not using swfObject to embed your swf files, you my friend are missing out on a great tool. People that use IE experience the displeasure of the ActiveX securites. For example: You go to a flash site and see a non-interactive swf object, it is outlined by some meshed border; You then have to click that box in order to view the flash object- well swfObject fixes this issue. SwfObject also makes communication from the HTML page to the Flash Object accessible. Download the new 2.0 version, and forget about the old school embed object tag.

Design and the Elastic Mind at the MoMa

I spent this weekend hanging with friends. Morning, went to the MoMA with two great friends; After noon, rested and watched August Rush with my other half; Evening, had dinner at Rare with two new friends from L.A.; Night-time, party at my friends place in Harlem(He throws the best "loft" parties and he is also off the hook with the music).

The highlight of my weekend was a trip to the MoMA. Admiringly, I love museums and the fact that the Museum of Modern Art is only ten minutes away from home, it had only been my second time visiting. I checked out their new exhibit: Design and the Elastic Mind. Overall I thought it was okay, but their was one digital display I thought was extremely fun, and heavily interactive. You basically walk in front of this projection, You are then displayed in a silhouette form against the wall. Every motion you make creates a random animation and sound. It was absolutely amazing, I would love to look through that developer's code. I wish I caught the name of the display. Here is a snapshot of my boy Stephen and I playing with this gigamagig.


Another pretty neat thing (not as cool as the one I mentioned above), was this one piece done using ActionScript and Python in collaboration. Cabspotting - Uses GPS technology, cabspotting investigates the complexities of the Bay Region in the context of the Pacific Rim. The application created is called Stamen, it explores visualizations of GPS data generated by Yellow Cab taxis in San Francisco. In this animated map of located cabs in the Bay Area, the city pulses and creates a vivid fast forward of the cabbies moving time line to it's day to day destination.


If you so happen to be in NYC, I definitely recommend checking out the new exhibit on display at the MoMA. Their are displays worth seeing in person. I could go into a couple of others I enjoyed, but I don't want to spoil it for you. The exhibit ends May 12, 2008.

Sweeties & Gangsters - Portfolio by Anthony Cintron

For the past 3 weeks, I have been working diligently on my portfolio site. I've decided to create the site entirely using the Flex Framework. I am merely doing this for experimentation purposes. I would like to see how successful a site can function by developing solely utilizing Flex/ActionScript 3.0. Obviously, Flex is truly tailored to RIA. I would like to see if, us, Flash Developers can bring Flex into our work flow, and reap the benefits of the component framework. This experimentation comes from my lack of wanting to convert my old component libraries to AS3.

Check out my coming soon splash screen. It shows a simplistic way of using the Papervision 3d engine. The PV3D library had a Stars class already, so all I did was implement it into my AS Project and controled the camera view based on mouse positioning.

It Begins!

It all begins now. I have given up, and decided to create my own blog. The purpose of my blog will be to have a place to exploit my fascination for ActionScript and the Digital/Creative world we live in. Content here will be random, and none of it should be taken seriously unless other-wise noted. I'm excited to reach out to further distances by connecting with other Art & Design heads like myself.