I have been away in Ruby on rails land for the past few weeks so last night I decided to jump back into flex for a play. Man I love playing in AS3. So I was looking at WonderTouch's Particle Illusion and thought that would be cool! So I whipped up a quick particle engine and made some smoke. 

The result was ok, but the engine needs tome more work/optimisiations. And unfortunately AS3 just isnt fast enough to animate it that well. I have the smoke rising at a frame rate of about 5fps. What does it look like?

I always hate releasing something that isn't finished, but that being said I hardly find the time to finish stuff when doing little play things like this. Anyway it will look alot better after I implement a few changes I came up with and then I will post the flex movie in all its CPU cooking glory. Expect eternal beta release soon!

UPDATE – I figure I might wait for Apollo (its gotta be real soon now) so I can make a flex rip off of disco Smoke and all! Muh hwa huh hahaha

Gotta love a term like that. Picked it up from Ryan Stewarts blog on ZDNet [LINK]. Its a sign of the times I guess. The big question is can M$ find the doctor to heal the problem or will they stick a band aid over the gapping wound.

I wonder how many people are updating to Vista too. I hear the sales have been half of what XP did in the same time frame. Im afriad to update and loose a few curcial applications and get flakey video drivers for playing Battlefield.  If I started lookin like a n00b I'd never live it down.

Man the Adobe boys and girls better get a wriggle on. Its popping up all over the web as other companies have already been in developement of thier own peer to peer distrabution systems of media. First Joost came on the scene and today Veoh. 

With Veoh apparently

 "Pro users can charge viewers to rent or own DVD quality videos downloaded through the P2P Veoh player.  Pro users can have their videos automatically cross-posted to YouTube, Google Video and MySpace Video and automatically transcoded to QuickTime for iPod viewing." [ VIA Techcrunch]

Now I bet Adobe wont be offering that sort of cross combatability in there P2P media solution, but in saying that I know its not a hard road to add it to most systems, with the right libraries and SDKs. Adobe is a solution provider where these two examples are service providers so its kinda a diferent ball game, but the fact that these guys have gone out and made thier own systems is really a pointer of what is about to explode. IPTV! And adobe really wants to be part of that -

"the goal is to make it easy for any thinking person to publish rich interactions, to anyone, anytime, any kind of device." – John Dowdell [Via Ryan Stewart]

This is all pretty cool, and I cant wait to see what Apollo can bring into the mix (and were nearly in march so keep an eye on the adobe labs cause the beta release HAS to be soon now) 

It seems fitting that im sitting in a tent out the back of a Vodafone stand at X-Air in wellington working a system that I made called Videmo that brings Customer Pxt, Txt and mobile video to the big screen at the event, and the news I have seen it that Vodafone are going to launch a you tube for the mobile [Via: I2Fly.com]. COOL!!!

I thought I might be of interest to people that the current creators of the flash video codec On2 have are working on playback of flash video on handsets. From all accounts it looks like a realtime encoder from FLV to 3GP. More good news for VIDEMO.

"Flash video for Mobile: A ubiquitous Flash video experience will be demonstrated with Flash video playback on mobile handsets and embedded processors for set top boxes and other portable and mobile devices. Flash video based on On2's VP6 compression schemes licensed by Adobe for Flash Player 8 and later, is the predominant format for Internet video." [LINK]

As a side note this points to some sort of Set top box IPTV offering in the future from Adobe! Me being a Film student in the Tech sector can only see good things happening with this. I have seen a few mentionings about this out in the blogosphere and Message boards but Adobe seems to be clamping down on any information leaks ( I supose they are going to be competing with the big boys so all that effort is needed to get a good launch.

Ok some photos: First up videmo loaded with thousands of txts:

Me about to reply to a group of them:

The setup out front:

The boys here have just finished dancing.

Tomorow is our first event for Videmo. We are running it Vodafones XAir competition in wellington, New Zealand. If your around come down and say hi! I will be taking some pics and posting from there seeing it will be my job for the two days to be online (whats diferent really).

Videmo for those new to my blog is a whole system for showing pictures texts and videos sent in by people at events. These messages are then vetted through an interface (to check for the dodgy one ) and shown on screen.

The web interface for checking messages is made in flex and uses WebOrb's Flex data Service to transport faster amf packets round. It was really nice to develop against.

I tried to keep this interface as simple as possible as one day average Joe will have access to it. Simple flow from left to right, big what I like to call telly tubby style buttons… and rember its stil version 0.x so more to come with that.

See really simple. There is also a Flex display which runs and displays the messages on the big screen. This is wrapped in a .net wrapper for now, until Apollo comes out, arent we all waiting? – then I can ditch the .net client and go fully cross platform.

The display buffers the media to show and just queues each message, showing a little advertising in between x messages if wanted. This is just run from a laptop providing the feed to the big screen. 

On the server side there are several apis to receive messages, which then get processed but the .net server I made, responded to if appropriate, and then video is converted to flv and inserted into the database.

Next up is improve the video quality by buying On2s sdk and encode to FLash 8 video and to make the mobile portal so customers can log in from pdas and mobiles, view the messages sitting in the inbox, and accept or reject them from anywhere.

Very cool. – more about the flash video on phones in the next post