Petit Labs on Sandy 3.0 Friday 2007-10-19
As we are traveling towards the next release candidate of Sandy, the humbly numbered RC1, I have been busy bringing my tutorial “Using Sandy 3.0 Flash Library” forward.
Already the Sandy 3.0 is a big leap in usability and performance, and it is still under development. The naming policy may be questioned. What I mean is that what we have is stable in a way and very usable, so we could have had a release instead of a candidate.
I guess the reason for this humbleness is that Thomas want to present something extra, and he continues to develop heavily, with the risk being, that the API will still break at some point.
So we will settle for a RC1 release fairly soon.
In the meantime, come visit the Sandy wiki and forum and of course my tutorial, directed at beginners as well as pros 
Sandy 3D and AS3 Saturday 2007-09-22
Finally, after a long development period, the first release of Sandy for AS3 and the flash 9 Player is here.
It’s faster and slimmer, as it should. It is released as RC0, which is a bit shy. I would say it is at an RC1 state.
The engine is new, even if the transformation matrices are the same as always. The engine is faster, maybe mostly due to the faster Flash engine. Transformations are simpler and and the camera is now part of the node graph, a great improvement. It makes it possible to give the camera complex movements.
What was called skins in the 1.x versions is now called appearances and materials, and has undergone some good rework.
I want to congratulate Thomas and all users of the Sandy library. Hopefully we will see a flood of interesting applications in the near future.
Here is the release statement. Go there, download and take it for a ride - if you are so inclined
The Virtual Sweden Saturday 2007-06-16
Hello my eventual readers. Thanks for reading me! I must say I have been a bit absent lately.
And it doesn’t add anything to my credibility, that I’m not sober at all at this time, when I feel obliged to bring to you my first real experience of the unreal world of Second Life. I know it is truly amazing, but this went far behind my imagination. Really amazing things do
I heard on teve, that Sweden made some serious efforts to join the modern world of 3D cyberspace, by building a Sweden Second House, sort of a Swedish embassy in Second Life. The TV news said that the Swedish foreign minister Carl Bildt was there to open it.
I thought: Wow! You are free to think that’s stupid, but that’s what I thought. Honestly 
Not only was the minister there to cut something, but there was a selected few to join in on the ceremony, just like art any other important opening. Amazing and maybe even good. I heard of this fact a little late, and had no opportunity to join in or disturb the ceremony. I do applaud the initiative though. It shows that our government takes the cyber matters seriously, which I regard as mandatory if we want to survive as a state of of honor and prosperity.
Being late, I decided to visit the “embassy” later the same day, and I was astonished by the the events going on, as well as by the architecture and the environment. I’ll show you images in just a while.
Let me give you a first impression!
The architecture is blondish northern and very light and open. It brings into mind the “Northern light” exhibition that toured the world a little more than a decade ago. Apart form the lack of furniture and ( really ) use of the beautiful rooms, I felt really at home. This will be something.
I also took some time strolling around outside the “Second House of Sweden”, and what I saw added to my admiration. It is a really good job they have done. The creators of this “Swedish Pavilion” if you will. The nature is the really blond and lovable nature of southern Sweden at its very best. I feel at home, and visitors from other countries will certainly get to know the woods and sees of Sweden. You have done a great job guys!
[ Images here soon ]
Next Sandy 3D Beta Monday 2007-02-12
Deeply involved as I am for the time being, I had the pleasure tonight to release the next and seemingly greater version of the Sandy 3D library. I have done nothing to improve the library, the version being Sandy 1.2 beta 2 for AS2, credits go fully to the smart and knowledgeable developers of Sandy - you know who you are, and I bow to thee
It’s only in the power of my time zone and my working schedule, that I was delegated the launch of this version.
Hopefully it will be faster and more consistent and hopefully we will get comments and bug reports to be able to release the final stable 1.2.
The brain trust is already working hard to get an AS3 version out, and I know they find it well overdue to do so. As the the head dev and owner himself put it the other day:”The future is already here”, and indeed it is. The flash 9 Player and the Flex framework is pushed forward, and the OOP developers shakes by eager anticipation of all the good things the Flash 9 engine will bring.
At the Sandy camp we always look ahead of everything and everyone else, so we are impatient to hear from Adobe, that the Flash rendering engine will support/rely on Open GL and/or DirectX. We can do that, as we are not responsible for the implementation and throw the whole responsibility on the Adobe Macromedians. It’s just a simple demand, and if they meet that, we don’t have to optimize so heavy.
For now, get the Sandy 1.2 beta for AS2 from the Sandy forum.
Using Sandy in Italian Wednesday 2007-01-31
Fabulous indeed! It really never happened to me before. My tutorial on using the Sandy 3D Actionscript library, has been translated to Italian, and is beginning to roll out as a guide on HTML.IT. The hard working and patient Davide Beltrame took on the work of translating, or rather transposing, the tutorial so it will appeal to an Italian public. Much more than is published at this time is already translated, and I believe I have some more parts to write.
Thanks Davide! You’re gold
Yet Another Sandy Celebration Monday 2006-12-04
Yes, it’s celebration season. Not only because it is December. Here in Sweden it’s hard to believe, by the way. The temperature is well above zero, that’s centigrade or Celsius, as we use to say The grass is green and my mothers roses are still developing flowers.
The long awaited 1.2 version of the Sandy 3D library was launched as a public beta today ( oh, it’s late, it was already yesterday ). Lots of enhancements and bug fixes from 1.1. exciting stuff if you’re into 3D Flash programming.
You can get it here at the Sandy Forum, and don’t forget to fetch the examples too.
Sandy Tutorial Celebration Friday 2006-12-01
I’m quite happy to announce the 7:th Part Celebration of the “Using Sandy…” tutorial.
Hey, you might say, what’s so good about seven? You’re right, it may be premature. Maybe I should wait for the tenth part. On the other hand why not seven. It may seem odd, and mathematically it is.
On the other hand, seven is a magic number and deserves a little celebration. Another good reason is that I don’t know what next to write about. It may be how to use the free MTASC SWF ActionScript compiler or maybe how to use light and filters in Sandy.
Another cause for celebration is that Davide Beltrame ( whom I don’t link to yet, because his site is under construction ) has translated, or rather transposed, the tutorial into the Italian language and mode. Soon to be published. This is exciting indeed, and I’m just a little bit proud.
More on the proceedings later, and kÅ·dos to Thomas, the author of the library and Davide, my hard working translator! You know it takes a lot more words to say something in Italian, and I am wordy to start with.
You can visit my tutorial here.
Edit Your Photos Online Monday 2006-11-13
One of the characteristics of the Web 2.0 era, is the fast emergence of net top applications. Making good on the old SUN slogan, “The Net it the computer”, these applications run on some server anywhere on the globe, and only its user interface shows up on the client machine. No need for installation and immediate access from any personal computer or workstation.
One of the more nifty net top applications I’ve run across lately is the pixer.us On Line Photo editor.
It works like this: You upload an image to the server through their client GUI, and when it shows up, you can start editing away to your hearts content. You may crop and resize your image, and you can adjust its color balance, contrast and lightness. You can make it B&W if you like, and you can apply some artistic filtering to make it look like marble or an oil painting.
You can undo your last change or revert to the original, if you do mistakes. Once you are satisfied with your changes, you click the Save button and download the resulting image. You can choose the image format by clicking a button for JPEG, GIF, PNG or BMP.
The application GUI is beautiful and very intuitive, so the learning is shot to none. Before you join pixer.us, you can work with a test image. Go ahead and test the pixar.us Online Photo Editor. I had great fun testing the application. From the test image I cropped out one of the girls, saturated the colors a bit and applied the oil painting filter.
The original photo
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!
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.
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