To force myself to finish my tentacle experiment I am going to post what I have achieved so far. I have to give credit where credit is due though. I didn’t really do much of the hard work Grant Skinner, Keith Peters and Jelger Muylaert are to thank for that. I still want to add joint limits and elastics. Source code to come.

2 years seems to pass quickly doesn’t it? My life has changed a tremendous amount in that time. Lost a partner to cancer, had 2 kids, got married again, became a step dad to a daughter, ran a design program for a year, turned 30, bought a home, and currently 7 months into a one year sabbatical. Which I guess is the long way of saying I haven’t been doing much programming or tinkering lately but that is all starting to change. I have several projects in the embryonic stages that I hope to share soon. The usual suspects: Flash, Arduino, multi-touch and maybe a bit of mobile dev. Check back soon to see if I can actually follow though.

I have been working hard on creating some interesting stuff for the Flashduino talk I am giving at FITC this year. Below is the first video made using a prototype circuit and Flash code for time-lapse photography. By the time of the presentation this will be refined into an open source DIY Arduino shield. Who knows I might build a couple extra and give them away at the presentation.

Time-lapse created with Arduino and Flash from Brett Forsyth on Vimeo.

I have to admit that I have been shying away from Flex for a long time now. I think this has to do with a general hatred for making forms based applications. Now before people tell me Flex isn’t just about forms based applications, I know, I know. Flex is actually pretty cool but in general the types of work I see people using Flex for I don’t want a part of. I also know that I have been missing out on a better development IDE in Flex or FDT or FlashDevelop for that matter. And in the case of Popforge, a really cool set of libraries by Andre Michelle and Joa Ebert, Flex is a requirement for use.

Easy Popforge Setup
I will start by showing you what turns out to be an easy way to get started with the popforge library.
Step 1. Get a SVN Client. On the mac I suggest you check out Versions and on the PC there is the old faithful Tortoise.
Step 2. Check out the popforge source.
Step 3. Create a new AS Project in Flex (download here if you don’t have it yet). Click Next after entering a project name. In the source path window select add folder. Navigate to “pathToPopforge/flash/PopforgeLibrary/src” and click ok.
Step 4. Click finish.
Step 4. Rejoice because you are done!

I have recently changed the final student project in my OOP class to a multi-touch app. One of the briefs I gave to students was to do a non-destructive crop on the multi-touch. Two students, Jae-Ho Yoo and Morgan Roddick made a short video of it in action and I thought I would share. Check it out and give them some feedback, I am sure they would appreciate it.
A demo of a multi-touch photo app from Jae-Ho Yoo on Vimeo.