Merry Christmas from Pixelfumes! I thought I’d share a little app that I was working on for the Pittsburgh Macromedia Flash Users Group Holiday Card Contest (Pittsburgh Submissions only please – you must be present to win). I had been wanting to try out some other uses for the new getPixel method of the BitmapData class. This movie is not using any hit tests or collision detection – it uses only the getPixel method to check where it is allowed to land (based on variables and conditions set in the code I wrote). This example also uses cacheAsBitmap to allow for the great performance. Granted things get a bit hairy if you continue to “Add Flakes” over and over with a high wind or fall rate. The snow blurs and sizes based on its speed, etc. Hope you like it!

UPDATE: As per request here is the source.

Mike Downey blogged about the new IKEA website so I checked it out. Given that it is in another language I was confused at first but I think I figured it out. Once the picture with the old man appears and you get the arrow icons appearing – click and drag right or left. “Wow” is right – I haven’t seen something this well done in a long time. Bravo to the development and creative team on this. Nice work.

http://www.ikea.com/ms/sv_SE/kampanj/fy06_dromkok/dromkok.html

Back in the day over at Quasimondo people were posting their matrix style effects. I found that Benjamin Herholz posted a Flash 8 version and I thought it was really well done. If you get a chance take a look.

Flash 8 Matrix Effect

Recently I added two posts to my blog. Flash 8 to C# to JPG and Flash 8 Red Eye Removal. This post will take those two ideas and add the new FileUpload Feature of Flash 8 to allow you to upload your own image (under 30k and 340 x 255 pixels – or it will stretch – resizie your image to 340 x 255 for best results prior to uploading) and remove the red eye. You can then save the image to a jpg. You will notice there are tolerance values below too. Tweak the numbers and you should see some different results. This isn’t perfect – I just wanted to demo some of the stuff I had been working on all mashed together. Hope you like it.

XBOX 360 Locator

Found this post over at digg (submitted by longofest) – “This is AWESOME! Uses Google Maps to locate how many XBox360’s your local Best Buy has (even breaks it down by premium vs. core model)..”

Not sure of the accuracy but it looks awesome. Sweet use of Google Maps… My buddy over at The Hardcore Gamer already got one – had to wait all last night and this morning…

I was working on a system at work today that I am not often on and I got the “There is a Flash Player Update Available” message. I realize this came out with Flash 7 but I hadn’t seen it yet on a machine so like the true geek that I am I took a screen shot and saved it. LOL. The machine had the Flash 7 player installed and it prompted me to go to 8. Very nice. Anyway – this is a nice addition that should make “clients” more at ease. It is nice to let them know that their “users” will be able to upgrade easily.

Most all of the examples I have seen have been using PHP so I thought I would attempt one using C# ASP.NET. Below you will see a T-shirt. Modify it (you can edit the text too) and click the Save button to get a JPG. You can alter the quality of the JPG as well. The loop to get the pixels of the T-Shirt itself is slow but the server side seems to rock. I think it may have something to do with the fact that I am using a code behind page so the processing is all happening in the .dll file. Hope you like it. If you make any cool shirts save them and post a link. FYI – Firefox will display the jpg but must not like the content headers I pass it – so you can’t actually save the image even though you can see it – thats an interesting concept too…. You’ll need the Flash 8 Player of course.

I was thinking about some of the cool things that can be done with Flash 8 now and I thought this would be a handy example of the new “wow” that is possible. I took a photo of myself (I’m all red in the face for two reasons – 1) I was skiing and 2) it helps in the example) and took it into a new FLA. Using the BitmapData class I was able to create a Red Eye Removal script. The script samples the pixels and if they are within a certain tolerance it will take the pixel and inject a percentage of black into it. The red in my face helps show that the tolerance will exclude most of the red in my skin and elsewhere. You will see the tolerances are not perfect but this does a pretty good job. You can test it our below. Just press and drag and the area that was covered will be processed. You can drag upper left to bottom right or any direction that creates a square. Obviously the below example requires the Flash 8 player.