Adobe

Cool Flash Webcam Effects

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Sunday, April 4th, 2010
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There is a number of really cool Flash webcam effects emerging from different developers across the globe. I'm fascinated by this technology as it opens a greater potential for games and enhanced website interfaces.

This is a very short list of some of the coolest Flash webcam effects.

3D Glasses Enhanced Face Tracking
http://www.boffswana.com/news/wp-content/uploads/facetracking3D/main.html
This very cool flash effect tracks your face using the web cam, when you move your face you move the small room around. The effect is also enhanced if you are wearing 3D glasses.

Webcam Baseball Game
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I7jm-AsY0lU&feature=related
This webcam game brings your Baseball collector cards to life with mini games.

3D Animated Paper Tracking Effect
http://ge.ecomagination.com/smartgrid/#/augmented_reality
This demo is a paper tracking and sound enhanced Flash effect. Move a printed document in front of the webcam and a 3D animation of Wind Power will appear in front of the document. Blowing will also increase the spinning speed of the fans.

3D Monster Paper Tracking Effect
One of the earliest demonstration of the paper tracking webcam effects.

Papervision - Augmented Reality (extended) from Boffswana on Vimeo.

How to get Flash working within the Safari Browser on the iPhone

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Thursday, January 14th, 2010
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Tobias Schneider has built an open source Flash runtime written in pure JavaScript and HTML5, quite impressive. Hosted on GitHub for everyone to download and use.

Works well in the latest versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Safari (and, yes, iPhone Safari). Very useful for desktop users as well, if the user doesn't have Flash installed you can call Gordon to run the Flash files instead (great for users who do not have privileges to install Flash on their computer).

Quick and Easy Installation Instructions

  1. Download Gordon
  2. Insert a script tag in the head of your HTML file to the Gordon javascript file 
    <script type="text/javascript" src="../gordon.js"></script>
  3. Insert a div or span tag where you would like the Flash file to appear within the body of your HTML file 
     
<div id="stage"></div>
 
  4. Add a JavaScript onload event to insert the flash file within your div or span 
    <body onload="new Gordon.Movie('flash-file.swf',
{id: 'stage', width: 500, height: 400})">
  5. Enjoy !

The iPhone has no Flash capabilities but why?

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Sunday, October 5th, 2008
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At the moment, Adobe are making a Flash plugin for the Apple iPhone with their belief that if they make it good enough, Apple will publish it. Unfortunately for Adobe and the rest of the world, the likely hood of Flash being available on the iPhone will be very slim.

To begin with, the applications that are available to download through Apple's iPhone App Store are making millions of dollars for Apple and a little for the developers making the applications. If Flash was available on the iPhone, it would be able to avoid the whole App Store process and developers can sell their applications themselves and receive 100% of the sales.

There would be very little chance of the iPhone ever having Flash available unless there is another phone that is taking a substantial amount of the iPhone sales away, and of course this phone runs Flash. In my own point of view of the iPhone, the only 'wow' factor is the interface which has been replicated on Windows Mobile phones already.

The iPhone has a lot of restrictions and I believe it is only popular because of Apple's Marketing strategies, and the popularity they gain with younger audiences. I have an iMate JasJam which has more features then the iPhone and it's nearly 2 years old, so I'm expecting more features will be available in the latest models which puts the iPhone lower on the features list.

Flash 10 Beta Release Features and Enhancements

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Thursday, May 15th, 2008
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Adobe has gone one step further with Flash already in their beta release of version 10. There's a lot of integrations that have been inserted which make Flash a very impressive platform.

The is a huge battle between Microsoft (Silverlight), Adobe (AIR, Flex, and Flash), JavaScript, and Ruby on Rails for developers to choose as their platform. Adobe has definitely positioned itself back up on the podium with it's newest features.

Flash now has native support for 3D which enables developers to make 3D effects on 2D objects. The screenshot below shows 2D mobile phone images that have been placed in a circle, tilted and told to rotate.

There is also the features of the Pixel Bender which enables you to perform image processing effects and filters. Check out some of the photos in the Pixel Bender Gallery to see what Pixel Bender is capable of. It's like having Photoshop image effects right in Photoshop.

I encourage you to check out Adobe Labs about Flash 10 for further details on the next version of Flash 10.

Make Icon (.ico) files with Adobe Photoshop

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Thursday, January 3rd, 2008

I've normally had to install some type of free software until today when I decided to search for a plugin for Adobe Photoshop. I found this 100% working plugin from Telegraphics, simply download and copy the file(s) to the right location (instructions in readme file) and walla.

Now you can start making icon (.ico) files in Adobe Photoshop!

Adobe releases Flex 2 for free

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Monday, November 26th, 2007

to regional educational institutions, students and faculty only

Adobe Flex 2 Box

Adobe have made this effort to encourage the use of Web 2.0, a new version in the World Wide Web. However I'm sure they have also done this to get more people to use the software after their education.

Adobe Flex 2 is an integrated development environment (IDE), for designing and developing rich Internet applications (RIAs), and is available to download straight from the Adobe website for qualified education end-users.

The Web has revolutionized the way we access data and has transformed the way we interact with our networked environment. This has led to educational institutions, worldwide to academically promoting Internet-based information sharing and content creation, said Jacob Alex, Adobe Middle East's Channel Manager.

Easy Photoshop Editing

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Wednesday, November 7th, 2007

Photoshop - Before Photo
Before Photo

At Adobe Design Sessions today and gone through some of the new features of Photoshop, editing photos is soooo much easier, I feel lazy doing it. But this is a quick example.

Photoshop - After Photo
After Photo

If you're wondering what has happened between the before and after photos, I've removed dimples, pimples on her face and cleaned her skin to get a smoother texture.

For those who are having Adobe CS3 issues!

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Friday, August 24th, 2007

Adobe Creative Suite CS3
I've heard a lot of issues with the latest suite of applications from Adobe, whether it's the full master collection, design collection or web collection - I've only heard of one installation of Adobe CS3 that installed successfully on the first go (for the record, he was a Windows XP user). Others have had to install multiple times, changing Windows settings, safe mode and more. All from Windows XP and Vista users.

A twitter friend of mine Nick Hodge from Microsoft Australia linked me to his article with his experience of installing Adobe CS3 on his machine. At the end of it he comes to a successful result, you may or may not have the same issues as Nick experienced but he points out many ways to try and install Adobe CS3 for you to try.

Let me know how you went or if you have any further tips/hints by writing a comment below, and thanks Nick for dropping me your link.

By the way, I haven't heard of any issues with installing Adobe CS3 onto Macs, and it installed successfully first time on mine.

Adobe is entering the office market.

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Tuesday, August 14th, 2007

Adobe Office

Adobe definetely has a huge market in the Multimedia industry from their photo editing software, video production, web developing and more. Now they have their eyes set on the market that Microsoft dominates, the office applications market.

According to Adobe group manager for platform evangelism, Mike Downey, it wouldn't be outlandish to predict the company throws its hat into the ring soon.

Though we have not yet announced any intentions to move into the office-productivity software market. Considering we have built this platform that makes it easy to build rich applications that run on both the desktop and the browser, I certainly wouldn't rule anything like that out. Says Mike Downey

Adobe may make use of their AIR product (Adobe Integrated Runtime) or standalone software built for Windows and Mac. Their intentions haven't been made clear but the bets are on AIR as their platform.

More about Adobe's office announcement here.