TKM9 is an inline digital agency based in Melbourne where I work. TKM9 were engaged by Schweppes Australia to produce an interactive experiential installation to promote how easy mixing cocktails are.

Our campaign would begin when without explanation overnight we dropped a massive crate in the middle of one of Melbourne’s busiest train stations.  All passers-by could see was a peep hole on one of the sides revealing a hologram of a cocktail glass.  When the speculation was almost too much, after three days we opened the crate to reveal an interactive bar.  Complete with an interactive table on which anyone can place a single fruit and a Schweppes mixer, the table would then recognise the two ingredients and suggest a cocktail.

The Crate While it was closed

My role as technical lead on the project was to ensure the project was technically feasible within budget and time.  The result needed to be simple, beautiful and intuitive.

The Front of the installation

I had investigated a few different approaches and technologies but with the recent advances of GPU, accelerated Flash was now an appealing option.  I come from a Flash developer background so I was able to use my existing knowledge to create a desktop application using Adobe AIR. We used C++ and optics to track different fruit and bottles where it would send raw data through to my AIR Application to interpret.

In the past, I’ve always struggled trying to use Flash for full HD resolution installations because of speed, however using the Starling Framework and Flash Player 11 I was able to quickly use my existing knowledge of Flash and get it accelerate onto the GPU.  I created a particle system that would sprout out underneath the fruit , I was able to pump the particle count really high without worrying about frame rate, something that I couldn’t do before this latest release of Flash.  Additionally, I was able to load all the images into memory and never dropped 60 frames per second and ran like a workhorse for the entire campain.

The Fruit Detection in Action

Here are some additional other Blogs Posts about the project.

http://jeroxie.com/addiction/schweppes-cocktail-revolution-at-southern-cross
http://www.ladymelbourne.com.au/2011/10/cocktail-revolution-station-domination-at-southern-cross/
http://theinspirationroom.com/daily/2011/schweppes-cocktail-revolution/

Charles here to serve you

One of my main bread and butter rolls of my job is to send  and retrieve data from Flash to a data service that’s normally PHP.  I was introduced to a great program called “Charles” which labels itself as a “Web debugging proxy”.  In this article, I will outline some of the ways Charles has made my life much easier as a Flash Developer.  Charles comes in OSX, Windows 32/64, and ‘nix flavours and is free to try.

Debugging AMF

There are many ways to connect Flash up to a database. One of my personal preferred method is to connect to a mySQL database through AMFPHP, both MySQL and PHP are free to use and thus quiet popular combination.

AMF stands for Action Message Format and has been around for quiet a while , and it’s an efficient way to retrieve data from data source, there’s not as much overhead when comparing to formats such as XML, the downside is it is a non readable format meaning you can’t go to a URL and read it like you can with XML.

It sounds all great, but if you happen to have a problem  somewhere in the process of retrieving or sending data, Flash will throw a very generic ( and unhelpful) error like this.

Error #2044: Unhandled NetStatusEvent:. level=error, code=NetConnection.Call.BadVersion

Which doesn’t really help you at all.

Using Charles, you’re able to snoop out the data being sent and retrieved from your computer to the server, Charles is able to display the error in more detail.  In the example below, there was a ‘=’ missing out of my script, using Charles I’m able to get more valuable information such as a line number of where my script went wrong.

Click to Enlarge

Test Server Scripts

Charles allows you to test your scripts without having to fire them off within flash, this is a great way to isolate just the sever stuff outside of flash and resend PHP with edited parameters.  This also allows me to make sure nothing malicious can be done to my stuff using external calls.

Test your local files online

This is probably my favorite feature! It’s called “Map to local”.  When working on projects I generally have a few web services that the SWF relies on to function, and to properly test the file, it needs to be tested on the server with in a browser so it can communication to external services. Like below.

This becomes very problematic when more then one developer is working on the same project as some one developers changes might break / undo someone elses changes. You can’t have both developers compiling and uploading files onto the server, and a code merge can bring in new conflicts and eat up time.

This is where Map to Local comes into effect, you can tell Charles to map file on the server to a file onto your computer.  In turn, when you test within your browser, the browser thinks its retrieving a SWF from the server, but in fact, Charles is redirecting that call to a file onto your local computer.  It’s hard to explain so look below!

Other useful stuff

• Force your browser to not cache anything
• Simulate slower connection for testing on lower speeds
• Finding out all requests that your browser is getting from the net

Conclusion

I hoped you found the article useful. If you have any questions, comment below or swing me something on twitter.

One thing I’ve grown found of are micro frameworks. For me a micro framework is enough to get your boiler plate code out of the way without getting into your way and making your coheir to strict coding frameworks (Joomla comes to mind)  So the first thing I did was to find a good PHP framework.  I’ve came across one called ‘codeIgnitor’ a few times and it was recommended to me so I decided to go with that. It actually really reminds me of Robotlegs but for PHP so it’s great stuff.

More Information here http://codeigniter.com/

If my JS and HTML wasn’t so rubbish I’d actually wouldn’t mind trying it out on my next mobile project

I recently was given a task that was non-AS3 oriented. My task was to do some cool creative stuff using the OpenFrameworks which is C++. Having absolutely no C background what so ever I was very overwhelmed at first, I have had to never had to worry about things such as manual garbage collection and such scope restrictions (compared to AS). Not saying it’s a bad thing, I could see from the start the power , possibilities and control doing it manually.

At my first sign of struggle a instant light-bulb popped into my head considering how much easier it would be for me to do the project in Adobe AIR (which I could have, the libraries were there for this certain project) . Then I thought, was I being lazy? I’m not going to be a sole ActionScript developer for every, no technology lasts forever and being pigeon holed and bound to one technology will not help me in the long term. I know the point of Adobe AIR is writing something once and deploying it many places, but in turn, it can’t be the best for much when it’s being deployed on so many platforms. In this instance, using the C++ method yielded such better performance even with my low level of understanding.

Anyway, that was a bit of a ramble, i still love ActionScript and the flash platform and will try to keep it my main bean income as long as I can, but it has really open my mind again to other languages other then web programming languages once again.

Adobe Max just finished up about a week ago and the main thing that caught my eye is the new GPU accelerated Flash Player that comes to the table. Code name ‘molehill’ will finally bring GPU accelerated goodness to the Flash Player which in terms means alot of indy game developers who have moved towards other platforms (such as Unity3D) as of late.

At first I was thinking, what is going to happen to all the guys who are making 3D Engines for flash? Such as Papervision, Away3D , Sandy etc. I think the guys would be loving it as the new 3D API is very low level, so the 3D guys will be able to write their engines on top of the Low level API’s to create 3D engines that work brilliantly with the new GPU support.

The effects to Unity3D
Do I see a threat to the Unity3D user base? I don’t think so as they have quiet a following now, and Unity wasn’t always just about the Unity Player but the actual game making IDE which flash will never touch. What would be awesome if Unity rollout their own Flash Player exporter, but what are the chances of that happening?

This is the sort of reason I love being a Flash Developer, things move so quickly and it forces me to keep active in my job so not fall behing the curve! ( This could be a curse to some people though )