Heaven and hell

It’s been quite some time since I did a photography experiment/project/thingy… So here goes my first in <insert timespan here>.

I went out for a shoot at the well known bridge-spot in Kortrijk and by accident I made 2 great color-discoveries. A mighty blue shot and a horrifying red one… I love ‘m both.
I wanted to do some post-editing but after some feedback it turns out I shouldn’t tamper with the originals after all. I also recorded 2 timelapse shots, featuring the same awesome colors. Yesterday was an amazing day.

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More particle awesomeness

A few weeks ago, I toyed around with particles. I used perlin noise maps to send the particles in the right directions. However the particles were randomly positioned and just a boring flat color… Kris Temmerman addressed that in his latest experiment. As he’s a decent man, he’s always sharing his code, so I just took his render engine, threw in some AIR magic and got myself a PNG sequence generator (for those who don’t speak Ronny: I made an AIR app that generates these image particles explosions and in the meantime saves every step as a PNG file. That way you can create a video based on these frames )

As it turns out I happen to have no life at all, so I went for insanity when I decided trying to get enough images for a 60 seconds sequence (Generating those images took a whole afternoon… I ended up having ±15GB of HQ PNG files).

Anyway, long story short: I’ve got this video I wanted to show you.

You know: Afterwards I realized this could probably be done using After Effects right away… (I wouldn’t know to be honest). But in the end, it’s proven again: Sometimes not knowing how crazy something is, is actually a good thing.

PS: I would share the AIR app, but right now it’s buggy as hell and somehow memory seems to be an issue. Will need to address those first. I promise I will release it sometime soon

What does Marsellus Wallace look like?

You have probably already seen this version of the famous ‘What does Marsellus Wallace look like?‘-part of the cult movie Pulp Fiction… But did you know about this one?

That’s the number one reason to have a Google Wave account, right there.

How to distribute your Flash CS5 iPhone apps via Cydia

Ever since Apple announced that they won’t allow any Flash CS5 compiled iPhone apps into the App Store, creative Flash developers lost their one chance to deploy their existing knowledge to the iPhone.

However: since Adobe released Flash CS5 with the iPhone packager anyway, we can actually deploy iPhone apps created in Flash CS5. The only thing we can’t do is to submit these apps to the Apple App Store (in fact we can, but they will reject them anyway, so why bother?)

However: We can distribute our apps using Cydia! Okay, it’s not the same, but you’ve got to start somewhere!

Setting up a Cydia repository is actually pretty easy. There’s a great tutorial right here!

There’s a little problem though: Flash CS5 creates an .ipa file. In step 3 of that tutorial you’ll need to put your application in the Applications folder. That application is actually an .app file, not an .ipa file. (I’ve tried it using the .ipa file; it doesn’t work )
Getting the .app file is pretty easy:

1. Rename your .ipa file to .zip
2. Unzip the archive
3. Your .app file is in the extracted Payload folder

That’s it! You can now create your own Cydia repository and distribute your rejected iPhone apps to the (jailbroken) masses using Cydia.

Have fun!

Interactive freerunning game on Youtube

You’ve probably seen those interactive Youtube games but I kinda love this one (because it let’s me be that cool guy that does those crazy moves without breaking all of his bones!)
Check it out!

Flash CS5 Error: Invalid Input SWF

I ran into this and since I didn’t find anything about this on Google, I thought I might share this with you guys.
If you have Flash CS5 installed you must have played around with the iPhone possibilities. If however you’re unlucky, you might see this a couple of seconds after starting to compile your iPhone app:

That error isn’t saying much, so if you have no idea what is going on, this might take a while to figure out… (took me about 2 weeks…).

A few months ago, I was having trouble with a JAVA applet not working correctly in my browser so I changed a few settings in the JAVA preferences. Apparently that was a bad idea. When I set everything back the way it was, the error was gone

This is how the settings look now (in case anyone was wondering).

Flash CS5 + iPhone + Red5 = Cool shit

A few days ago I ran into trouble using Flash CS5 to publish an iPhone application to an IPA file. I got some help from Peter and Erwin but it didn’t help in the end for an unexplicable reason…

However an hour ago I figured out what was wrong: About 4 months ago I had some problems with Java on my Mac, so I fiddled a bit with the settings… Turns out: Flash CS5 didn’t like that… After fixing that, I was back in business.

I got started right away, trying what I wanted to try for several weeks: testing if iPhone apps would be able to connect to a Red5 server… It works right out of the box. I’m in love with this!

Check it out!

Note: To be able to publish/run Flash Apps on your iPhone you need to an official iPhone Developer. If you have an iPhone but you have no Apple iPhone Developer subscribtion, you won’t be able to test this.

It makes you kinda wonder…

This whole Adobe vs. Apple debacle is starting to make me doubt if I want to stay a web developer at all. The companies, that provide me with tools I use and love, are acting like 8-year old kids, saying the other one is lying.

This (web dev) was supposed to be fun and at some point enable me to make a living… Not an endless amount of arrogant crap coming from a few guys who tend to forget people are actually watching them.

In the past 2 years I’ve growing more towards video and photography anyway… I might just start thinking about a career change if this keeps on going.

Jarvis, are you there? At your service, sir.

Did you see the first Iron Man movie? Well you should have. It’s freaking great! But I’m not going to make this a write-up about that movie. I do hope you did see the trailer for the second one? If you haven’t: enlighten yourself!

But this isn’t about the next movie… Well, not directly. Marvel put up a pretty cool interactive demo of the Jarvis HUD and the Iron Man mask, in order to give you a taste of the second part of awesomeness! If you like geeky Flash stuff, you just HAVE to check this one out.

Note: Loading, installing (it requires an additional plugin) and configuration is pretty slow (and kinda buggy) but it’s really worth the effort. It’s very reactive and it just looks great! It’s a great example of augmented reality and using cool graphics. I love it! Go and check it out!

For those about to rock, we salute you

Cool title, huh? While I was writing this post I was listening to some AC/DC which reminded me of this very quote which was actually an album title. I thought it was pretty applicable for this post.

For the longest time I haven’t talked about this. I felt that it wasn’t my place to say it, but as I went on with my life I figured this is something I just have to get out of my system.

When I was 14, some grown-up told me that creativity was something reserved for the talented. Not just for everybody. Not only was this the biggest piece of bullshit a human being ever told me. It was the worst thing that ever happened to me.
At that point I was a dreamer: I wanted to discover the world and show everybody something they’d never seen before. Like any one of us probably did back then. However when that specific person said those words. I felt like somebody took away my dream. And I actually gave up.

Only years later, I realized how untrue all of that was. I started realizing that creativity is not a noun. Creativity is a verb (don’t you dare to correct my English horror show or I’ll come down there and spank your hairy little ass!)

Creativity is something that evolves  (and teaches you) as you do it. It isn’t so much of a coincidence that creativity contains create. The only way to be creative is to downright just create stuff. Most people tend to think that creativity starts in your head. I beg to differ.

Creativity starts with making mistakes.
Making those mistakes allows you to discover new stuff, which you hadn’t though of before. That is how the coolest ideas come to life: By just trying. Simply creating. Experimenting and discovering. Not just thinking. Leave your educated personality out of the equation and let your subconscious mind be your guide. (It works even better if you actually throw away your sanity. Who needs that anyway?)

There’s this great quote I first read on DeviantART and up to date I just can’t stop thinking of it:

Creativity is allowing yourself to make mistakes.
Art is knowing which ones to keep.

And with that, I salute you.