The people at Squidder have created this t-shirt that uses augmented reality to display your last Twitter post. Neat.

 More info on the squidder website

One of the most useful things ever is Sephiroth's Flash Tracer plugin for Firefox.
But one thing that you should file away in your brain somewhere is that it (at least the current version) won't show any traces while you have an Air app running.

This post is more a reminder to myself, as I always seem to forget and spend half an hour checking log files exist etc before I remember to close Twhirl.

www.prettyloaded.com

A collection of nifty progress 'bars'.  I hope one day they'll add an exhibit of 'skip intro' buttons to the museum.

I remember when Adobe bought out Macromedia, and then when they announced that Flash 9 would actually be Flash CS3 how excited I was imagining that all the crap parts of Flash would be replaced by their Illustrator and Photoshop equivalents.  And then Flash CS3 came out and I was completely underwhelmed.  I haven't been following the announcements for Flash 10 at all because upgrading is inevitable and if there are flaws,  I'll learn to live with them.  That said, here's a list of the things I can't wait to see the back of, feel free to add your own.

• the solid white background of the textfields when you edit/select text
• the default color pallete and swatches
• font families and weights being handled differently than Photoshop
• when you add a motion tween to a drawing object it automatically creates two symbols.  Why two, and why doesn't it give you the option to name them as they're created?
• the help window's random ordering of classes/topics, and the useless search field
• the pen tool.  this is the big one i expected in CS3.  let freehand rest in peace
• the AI/PSD importer's tiny, tiny thumbnails.  this might be useful if every layer of every psd and ai file was labelled every time, but this is the real world
• the AI/PSD importer's bitmap transparency artifacts.  this is redundant because the reason we need the asset to be transparent is 99% of time because we want to animate on a layer above different asset, and as soon as it is moved artifacts tend to shatter the illusion.
• that weird one when sometimes if you change the position of a shape numerically you get the old "Invalid size and position" alert, and then it freaks out and draws a stroke around the shape for no reason
• how when you cancel an export it takes at least the same amount of time to cancel as it does to complete and the progreses bar still progresses to the end
• shape tween
• the actionscript editor
  
• new library folder/symbols can't have the same names even though they are different things
• and my personal favourite, adding new frames at the end of an animation crashing the whole program

Apologies for the rant.

 

The people over at Papervision3D are holding a contest so start your engines. Yes that was a pun.   

http://blog.papervision3d.org/2008/07/02/paperking3d-the-papervision3d-contest/

http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/ 

Adobe have released a public beta of Flash Player 10 'Astro' with all the new bells and whistles including native 3d and inverse kinematics.  You can see some feature demos here http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/flashplayer10/demos/index.html 

 

A very cool class by Den Ivanov that generates a random 3D plant in Papervision 

http://www.cleoag.ru/2008/04/23/papervision-plant3d-class/

Keith Peters BIT-101 Blog has been running a couple of weekly AS maths challenges.  For those of you that are in to trigonometry there's a chance you could win a copy of Foundation ActionScript 3.0 Animation: Making Things Move!