Using Sandy 3D Flash Library Thursday 2006-09-21
I was always very excited about 3D images, and the possibility of creating my own. I’ve been involved in holography in the physics lab at the University of Linköping, and written small C programs to present rotating 3D objects. When the Internet and the web hit me in the mid 90’s, I started to hand code or draw WRML worlds with a plethora of authoring tools, from Notepad to Caligari True Space, presenting them using the Cosmo Player and different Java Applets.
Since it all started, lots of things have happened and yet we are seemingly always back to square one. Great projects fail to really catch on and new attempts at creating standardized file formats pops up all the time. Proprietary file formats and expensive authoring tools hampers the swift expansion of 3D on the web. In later years, the Flash player has been the target of 3D development, and we have tools for creating 3D scenes for Flash. From a programmers perspective, Macromedia has step by step developed Actionscript, the ECMA derivative, into a full blown programming language, object oriented and with a good event handling system.
When I was involved with Sean in the development of the Flickr Spinner, I hoovered the Net for true 3D libraries written in Actionscript, and I found quite a few. One that immediately caught my attention, was the Sandy 3D API by Thomas Pfeiffer, an object oriented Actionscript library, for writing and manipulating 3D worlds. As most other modern description of 3D worlds, it has a DOM or tree model, where all geometric objects, transformations and materials are grouped into nodes. It has a global coordinate system and sports a camera within the world, that can be translated and rotated relative to global coordinates or to its own local coordinate system. the user sees the world through this camera. The camera can be manipulated as any real world camera and may be animated through functions in the library.
To learn how all this works, and to introduce Sandy to others who fancy 3D programming, I have started a tutorial series called “Using Sandy 3D Flash Library“.
Take part, experiment and enjoy!
Truth in Blogging Friday 2006-09-15
And of course an good way of getting links, and promoting sponsors 
The moving Flickr API Thursday 2006-09-14
I like free services like the Flickr image sharing service, and I’m not alone. Not only is it a easy way of sharing your photos with anyone connected to the Internet. You can choose who has access to your images or some of them, you can get them commented on if you are so inclined. And new ways for presenting your images pops up quite often. It’s a popular service and developers come up with innovative applications for selecting and presenting images all the time.
The applications rest on public API:s for authentication, and request for images in different sizes and other criteria, as how they are tagged, how popular they are, who owns the image, and so forth.
There is a problem with this, if the service endpoint, i.e. the URL of the service, is hard coded into the application. For my own flickr badge, called petikr I noticed a whilde ago, that it ceased to show any images. I thought the service was temporarily down, or bogged down. I am ashamed to admit, I didn’t discover until today, that the damage was permanent.
Sorry if you have problems with it! It is fixed now.
I googled for “flash flickr stopped working”, to see if someone had the same problem. Oh, yes. And some of them knew why and had the solution, like Doug Marttila at “Forest and Trees“, author of findr. Flickr changed its service endpoint just slightly.
I wrote a tutorial on how to build your own Flickr Flash Display, in quite a few steps, each having its own demo. all of them was compiled using Kelvin Lucks Flashr wrapper for the API. The API endpoints needed by the application is hard coded into the Flicks class of the library.
I did a lot of experimenting with Flashr at the time, and now I had to find all the correct versions of the example in my tutorial, and recompile them using the same version of the flashr library, updated with the new service endpoint.
That is hard work, and although it is nice not to have external setup files, I think maybe one should. Flash can easily read in data from a text file, XML based or not. It is good for volatile data such as developing protocols or moving web services.
Akismet Jubilee Monday 2006-09-11
Hurrah!!
My Akismet has just cought it’s 500:th spam, and not one slipped through.
Time to celebrate.
Have You Upgraded to web 2.0? Tuesday 2006-09-05
I had a really good laugh, reading Lincoln Spector’s article in BYTE. At first I selfishly felt that I wanted to keep it to myself. But then Web 2.0 is all about social networking and syndication, and you are my readers, so I finally decided that I couldn’t withhold this important information.
Lincoln writes about web 2.0 and especially on the 0 in 2.0. Before I send you away, I cannot help but give you some citations, so you get a feeling for what it’s all about.
He writes about upgrading to version 2.0:
The questions are many. Is there a smooth upgrade, or do you have to uninstall Web 1.0 before installing the new version? What about backward compatibility? Should you wait for the bugs to be out in Web 2.1?
To give you some examples of the bright new world, he reviews some of the more significant new sites. On Oddcast, a site aimed at syndicating podcasts, he writes:
Oddcast is one of many sites that provides links to podcasts from all over the world, but this site distinguishes itself by sticking to one very important and unique criteria: It will not link to anything that might exhibit taste or talent. You need never worry about visiting Oddcast and hearing an intelligent argument with which you might disagree, as you will find no intelligent arguments.
Enough now! Go get the real stuff in “The 0 in 2.0” and prolong your mouth and your life 
Promote Your WordPress Plugins
A new and promising site, for presenting and getting WordPress plugins, has just been launched. Sean Hickey, aka Headzoo, author of such efficient WordPress plugins as aLinks, Edit N Place and Create N Place, has just launched WP Plugins, a friendly place for plugin authors and bloggers to meet.
WordPress plugins abound. Due to the relative ease, with which you can create plugins for the popular blogging tool, and the flexible framework WordPress offers, a lot of functionality can be added through plugins.
There are plugins that make the administration easier, or present all kinds of statistical information. And there are plugins to include any imaginable Multimedia, and plugins to build social networks, to include other bloggers’ feeds or to earn a buck on ads.
You name it, and there is a plugin. And if there isn’t, you can write one, or just wait a while, and someone else will.
The mere amount of plugins spread out on their authors sites, makes it difficult to find that very gadget, that gives you the functionality you dream of. There are a few repositories for plugins, as Lorelle on WordPress mentions in her latest excellent article on plugins.
Sean’s idea seems to be, that they lack some functionality, be peer reviews, a voting system or the possibility to search by tag. Or maybe just too dull. I don’t know, but this new repository has all this features, a friendly look and easy navigation.
So if you are a plugins author, head over and present your plugin at WP Plugins. You’ll be on the front page immediately. It’s very simple, you just register for an account, log in and fill in a form with a description of your plugin, and a link to the install package on your site.
That’s all there is to it.
If you are a blogger in pursuit of the ultimate plugin for your needs, you may already find what you want. The site is new however, so it will take a while to get the great variety, we all want to find in the grocery
Graffiti for the Web
Among all wonderful things, that pops up on the web, as a result of new standards and standards compliance, my latest stumble find is amazing. Virtual Street Art - Graffiti for the Web presented by Draw Here, is an application, that allows you to draw images on top of any web page and save it in the Draw Here repository. Anyone can go to the Draw Here site to look at the graffiti comments of others. Look at my first attempt to draw on my own site, to get an idea of how it looks.[Edit: Someone killed my image :/]
The application, using javascript and the canvas has all you need to make beautiful graffiti. You can vary the pen size and chose and tune colors from a palette, and set color transparency. You can create and draw on stacked layer and even set the overall transparency of any layer. To easily work on one layer at a time, you can hide and show any layer.
You launch the Draw Here application directly from their site or using a bookmarklet sitting on bookmarks toolbar. You can even include a launch button on you web page, to let visitors draw on any page you want.
If you want to save your work at the Draw Here web site and get it rated, you have to sign up for an account. They have the fastest sign up form I’ve seen. Just type in the user name and password you want in a slick little login form. If accepted, you are already logged in and ready to paint and save your first graffiti comment on any web page on the Net. Ajaxian wise, the page doesn’t even reload.
Sign up/log in and paint my world!
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