My first week on the Mac turned out to be a trying one… on top of leaning the new UI and finding good applications (thanks to everyone who sent me links to good apps btw!) - I had the terrible misfortune of trying to figure out why my system went into complete lockdown anytime I tried debugging a large project in Flex Builder 3.0 (and a few other times in Flash). After days of installing/re-installing, reading the console logs, and calling tech support, I swapped out my Mac for a brand new one.

The consensus? Bad Hardware.

After getting home with my brand new shiney Mac Book Pro, watching another multi-lingual “welcome” video, installing all my required software again, and getting my projects set back up properly - I ran it again - and it locked up again. After crying in my pillow for a few hours, I hit the web again to find out if ANYONE else had run into this problem. Fortunately I found this 1 liner at http://guides.macrumors.com: “You will need to reinstall the Flash Debugger to get it to work.” I had already tried that, but decided to give it another go around, but THIS time I ran the Flash Player Uninstaller first.

No more crashes.

So, thats the answer. If you are running 10.5.2, after you install Flex Builder, you need to completely uninstall the Flash Debug Player, and then reinstall it. It didn’t crash all my projects when running debug, but it did whenever there was any amount of processing required.

You can find the Flash Player Uninstaller and the Flash Debug Players here.

Hope that helps!

Today marked the first day of my new career at Infrared5 - a rock-star software consulting company based in Boston. It is an awesome team, both in personality and ability - and I’m looking forward to doing some great projects with the guys there.

Sadly, it means my days at Mckinney, an Ad agency in North Carolina have come to an end. But, that means there is a brand new shiny position open to some ambitious Flasher out there. Check out their site at www.mckinney.com and apply. I swear on my life they have the greatest offices I’ve seen - and North Carolina is awesome too. A position for Technology Director is also available, if anyone is interested in that… just tell them I sent you :). I had a great time working there and it was hard to leave, but hopefully it will work out the best for everyone.

Something else major to note, is that I am now the owner and operator of a brand new Mac Book Pro:

It arrived last Friday and I’ve been struggling to get my head around the UI. Overall, everything has gone smoothly - there are only a few major gripes:

1. Dual Monitor support sucks… sure - it works, but having the menu bar for your app limited to one screen is a huge pain, as is having everything held in the Dock which is also limited to one screen. OSX needs something similar to Ultramon or Multimon. Dejamenu is okay, but I will never use it since its not constantly visible.
2. Doesn’t work well with my routers. Yes, it worked about 10% of the time on my older D-link router (although working is a relative term). When it was “working” it took about 5 minutes to load anything unless it was cached. I played with every setting I could find online for both the router and the OS. It took me a while to figure out the router was the problem since it worked perfect on every PC I have owned. SO, I went ahead and upgraded my router to an awesome new Netgear (with 8 antennas!). This time browsing only took 10 minutes to get working, and only about an hour to get my chat client/socket apps working. PC worked perfect the second it was plugged in…
3. VLC crashes whenever I try to open something…
4. An application opening with no windows. It was fun trying to explain this logic to my wife on why nothing happens when she “opened” Firefox. The fun part not having anything to do with my wife (who is computer savvy), but trying to explain why a menu bar in the top left corner is actually the application, and windows don’t really have to exist for the app to have focus… I think having an application self-contained is much more intuitive.. but that could just be me. This also solves problem #1.

Other than that, things have gone great. Quicksilver and Spotlight are AWESOME. Networking, once it started working for some unknown reason, is doing great now. Quicklook is rock-star, and the mutli-touch pad is pretty slick. It is also really nice to have the computer wake up in about 5 seconds, as opposed to the 30 second wakeup on my old Dell.

So, overall, it has been a fun experience learning this new setup. If anyone knows some awesome apps I shouldn’t be without on the new Mac, let me know! I want to streamline my workflow as much as possible

Getting text to be clear is an obvious problem for people when using Papervision, as it pops up on the list in a new thread every week or so. I’ve had this demo for a while now, but between work, writing, and trying to find a life outside my computer, I haven’t taken the the time to post the source or explain how you can easily clear up your text.

View the demo

In this demo, I take a couple parameters into account, to see how they affect text clarity:

• Smoothing : If the material uses smoothing or not
• Transparency : If the material is transparent
• Anti-Aliasing : Normal or Advanced aliasing on the text field.
• Bitmap Caching : Set the cacheAsBitmap property or not
• Size : How large the text field (and parent movieclip) is

Taking these things into account, you can see in the demo above what really makes the difference. The most obvious: SIZE. Use bigger textfields! This will get you the clearest text no matter what. The difference is quite obvious between the 100 and 300 pixel textfields. I personally can’t see much change from 300 to 500, but I might be overlooking something. Remember that size is a trade off with papervision: the larger your movieclip, the longer it takes to render. Try to find the perfect balance of size (quality) and speed for your application.

Smoothing makes a significant difference. If you want to clean up your text, turn on smoothing. The sister parameter to smoothing should always be tiled, to prevent any lockups at high angles.

Transparency helps remove artifacts from the textfield. I’m not sure what actually causes the faces to show through with dynamic text, but transparency removes them. For better performance however, set cacheAsBitmap to true - as this will also remove the artifacts, but not add additional overhead during rendering. An interesting observation: these artifacts also disappear if you add any other content to the stage - I imagine things are cached to deal with other display objects. So a possible workaround for both transparency and cacheAsBitmap is to simply add a little invisible clip onto the stage.

Anti-Aliasing seemed to do absolutely nothing. Set it to advanced if you feel like it, but unless I’m blind I don’t see any advantage to having it on.

And thats about it! Hope it helps some of you with your text field woes.

Get the Source

This is a simple demo of my portal experimentation in Papervision3D.  Its not perfect yet, but a good start I hope.  The next steps (before really releasing anything) will be handling UV perspective distortion on the portal, so it will *really* feel like a window.

View the demo 

One thing shaders currently don't take into account is distance - so this is a quick shader I wrote which is entirely based on distance. Keep in mind it would be very easy to integrate with other shaders - and I will probably do that sometime down the road.

View the demo

DepthShader takes 5 parameters:

• light:LightObject3D - your light
• lightColor:Number - color your want your light
• ambientColor:Number - color your want your shadows
• minDist:Number - the minimum distance you want the shading applied too. Everything closer than this distance will have full light color.
• maxDist:Number - the maximum distance you want shading applied too. Everything beyond this distance will be fully shaded.

So, to put this into use, you simply use it like you would any other shader:

And thats it!

Get the Source