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The Papervision3D guys are running a nice little contest for the title of “PaperKing3D”. I thought this would be good chance to show an example of some of the recent stuff I’ve been working on. Here’s the demo, and here’s the source code.

Read on for more detail about the code and some of the inspiration.
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There was a lively panel discussion at TypeCon 2008 on the issue of embedded fonts on the web [an overview can be found here]. A pretty controversial subject because there are 2 problems that need to be solved — the web designer’s desire to use typography, and the type designer’s desire to be paid for their work. However these are not technical problems, like every other content provider coming to grips with modern computing the questions are not “how can we do it”, but have rather become “how do we prevent the piracy of our work.”
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The main page has been updated — click around, break things, and please send me any errors you find.

There has been a “temporary” page up for the past week in a mad rush to have something done by TypeCon2008. It was functional and highlighted some of the skills I’m trying to showcase. But now that I’ve had another week I’ve reworked the design and interactive code which I think makes it a bit more interesting. It’s definitely a bit hard on the ole’ cpu but I’ve tried to optimize where possible, and really it’s not a site that’s designed to be accessible to everyone on every browser.

I’m going to be adding new stuff to the “portfolio” as I get I can. It’s mostly photography and motion videos at this point but more Flash stuff is in the works. Questions, comments, work? Holla.

Randy Pausch died today. He’s known more widely as the professor who gave the “Last Lecture”, but I highly recommend his “Time Management” talk — it really has changed the way I look at my own work and practical advice for how to get things done.

Though more importantly to me has been his work at Carnegie-Mellon with human-computer interaction and Building Virtual Worlds. His openness with his work and early embracement of academic publishing on the web is a true help to someone like me. Thanks for your work.

Using an Actionscript class within a Flex component can be a little tricky. The first error I ran into was:

Error #1009: Cannot access a property or method
of a null object reference.

This was a result of using a stage reference within the class to set up boundaries. Since I no longer had access to the stage properties I created two variables within the class to pass the Flex canvas size on instantiation.
The second error I encountered was:

Error #1034: Type Coercion failed: cannot
convert classes::Sprite@8b69259 to mx.core.IUIComponent.

This is because the Flex component will only accept a UIComponent as a child. Since our Actionscript class extends a Sprite we’ll need to place it within one first:

var bouncingBall:UIComponent = new UIComponent();
bouncingBall.addChild(new BouncingBall(myCanvas.width,
                                       myCanvas.height));
myCanvas.addChild(bouncingBall);

This creates a reference UIComponent that we will place our BouncingBall class into which we can now add to our canvas.
An alternative method is to use the rawChildren of the canvas and add the sprite directly to it’s display list. While this works fine, it does seem a bit obscure/ugly. But whatever floats your boat:

var bouncingBall:BouncingBall = new BouncingBall(myCanvas.width,
                                                 myCanvas.height);
myCanvas.rawChildren.addChild(bouncingBall);

The MXML is rather straightforward, though you’ll want to include a clipping rectangle on the canvas otherwise the ball will be dragged all over the screen.
The source code for the above example is available here.