Friday, January 19, 2007

flashy sites

Some 'flashy' sites I have found/ seen recently..

http://roxik.com
- checkout pictaps, digital toys 1 ( really amazing stuff)

http://www.wddg.com/

http://www.gringo.nu/v2/
- mac GUI ??

API's to powerfull to be free

Discussing the dapper API ( see my previous post) with some colleague's at work we are wondering if we can use this in real live commercial projects, even if we can use any API in real live projects. This question became even more clear when GOOGLE changed it’s API ‘s from SOAP to Ajax.

When you don’t have to pay for an API or it is from a small company, the life-span can be insecure. Can you build you own commercial service on that kind of base, I think not. So in this light I would rather buy an API from a well-established company then from a small startup. API’s are to power full to be free.

That's why I like Mashery . Their service is designed to provide an out-the-box hosted solution provisioning and managing API's. This includes a lot of the often under-appreciated details that make providing an API actually deliver results such as developer community tools — forums, dev blog and news, wikis, documentation, etc — as well as infrastructure tools for API metering, developer key management, and metrics.

http://blog.programmableweb.com/2006/11/08/api-outsourcing-via-mashery/

DAPPER API ,create any datasource from any HTML page

Dapper is a company that’s either glorifying screen scraping or leading the charge towards data portability, depending on your perspective. I like it a lot. While the interface is a little bit clunky, the idea of overlaying HTML pages and grabbing data is fairly powerful ...

http://www.dappit.com/

dapper - amsterdam news

Wednesday, January 17, 2007

JOOST, from the founders of KAZAA and SKYPE

Joost™ is a new way of watching TV on the internet, which uses new and established technologies to provide the best of both the internet and TV worlds. We're in the process of making it as TV-like as we can, with programmes, channels and adverts. You can also see some things that we think will enhance the TV experience: searching for programmes and channels, for example, as well as social features like chat. There are many more new features to come!

http://www.joost.com

Tuesday, January 16, 2007

State Designpattern in games, what else do we have for games ..

So I have come over this great post at http://www.bigroom.co.uk/blog/finite-state-machines-for-ai-in-actionscript/ about states in games. I did know the state pattern from the GOF book and an Adobe tutorial ( http://www.adobe.com/devnet/flashmediaserver/articles/video_state_machine_as3.html )
But have never used it in real live world stuff I am working on.. And design patterns come flying by a lot .. Also never thought of implementing it in video games, thinking of the great OS libraries which are surfacing know along with these kind of patterns, building a video game in flash is getting more in my reach ,Yeah, I like building with existing blocks to form new stuff :> . So what building blocks do we have, and how am i going to fill my weekend..

3D
Sandy AS2 http://www.flashsandy.org/
Papervision AS3 http://www.osflash.org/papervision3d

physix engines
AS2
http://www.cove.org/flade/
AS3
http://www.fisixengine.com/
http://www.cove.org/ape/

Library for Scrolling games..
http://www.osflash.org/gamescroll

Very good/ long tutorial over tile based games
http://www.tonypa.pri.ee/tbw/

Anybody know more good resources or even better games libraries for flash please share them :>

Monday, January 15, 2007

The Multi-Touch Interface for iPhone pioneerred bij Jeff Han

When I saw the Quicktime demo's of the iPhone on the Apple website it reminded me of a demo I saw from Jeff Kan about 'Multi-Touch Interaction Research. '

http://cs.nyu.edu/~jhan/ftirtouch/index.html
http://www.ted.com/tedtalks/tedtalksplayer.cfm?key=j_han

The demo really blowed me away and it is a really cool thing seeing that new ways of interacting with machines :> are emerging in commercial products. (Wii, iPhone )

I am really curious about other commercial examples.. So if you got them, please leave them

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Sandy 3D fly through application

This is the first try-out of building a 3D fly through application.... You can set up a bezier-path in a 2D space, add some blocks and fly through it in 3D space.

For now you just can add bezier curves and blocks, the goal is to draw any camera path you want , let the camera rotate while moving over the path, add planes with pictures on it.. and fly through your 3D slideshow :>

http://www.dekeizer.net/nyls/3d/

ATT: a little bug you have to drag the grey points to see the camera path