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.

I was alerted to KitchenSync, a AS3 tweening library by Mims Wright, on the Adobe blog feed a week or so ago. I was a bit skeptical at first of another tweening library for Flash but I have been searching for a true AS3 replacement to FUSE (I never started working with GOASAP but should probably check it out to). Tweener was ok but as a teacher I prefer libraries with good documentation as it makes a students life easier, which really makes my life easier. Anyway, I had to teach an AS animation class yesterday, which I normally do with Tweener, but decided to give KS 30 minutes to blow my mind. Within 5 minutes I knew I was going to be teaching KS. Good documentation, animation sequencing/paralleling, filter tweening, a dev roadmap and fast response to questions by Mims all told me KS was worth investing some time in and worth teaching to students. I hope to contribute some documentation over time and maybe a student project or two as a showcase. You should at least give it 5 minutes yourself.

I finally found the time to check out what my good friends at Rouxbe have been up to with their newly launched cooking school. There is lots of great content already, can’t wait to do the pasta lessons, and lots more to come. Thinking I was a knife smarty pants I took the “Handling a Chefs Knife” quiz and got a 76% (and learned a few things). Overall I wish I had checked this out earlier as I am really impressed by the content. I am going to be making some time to do all the material. You can try a free lesson on wheat and gluten and/or sign up for a free membership to check out all of Rouxbe’s great video recipes. As always I am super impressed by the quality of all the videos. Keep up the great work Rouxbe team.

As a full disclosure I was the original Flash developer responsible for creating all of the flash players for the Rouxbe site. They did not however ask me to write this and I am not currently working for them.