Just seen this post on the creative review blog: The Design Museum's Dieter Rams exhibition, Less and More is on from now until march. Product design at it's finest - Train down to London anyone? Read all about it here.
I've been experimenting with glitched JPEG encoding in Flash and have created a version of Thibault Imbert's optimised JPEG encoder that gives control over various glitch parameters.
A simple test suite that lets you control parameters, experiment with the JPEGlitch class, and load/save images locally. This example uses the minimalcomps ui component library from bit-101.
I also made a rhythm for the HYPE framework using the JPEGlitch encoder.
This example is an audio visualiser based on a HYPE sound analyser example and plays 2 short tunes endlessly. The rhythm encodes and re-encodes a bitmap, adding the freshly rendered oscillator canvas on top each time.
This is also my entry to the HYPE 'Friday 13th' competition.
Feed your code-eyes 
Yes, it's close to that time of year again. So here comes the snow...
The example above (mouse-over to activate) is a Flash 9 example with 1000 blurry snow particles continually falling on random paths. There is also a slightly tweaked version targeting Flash Player 10 (no noticeable performance gains here I'm afraid, just replaced a few Arrays with strictly typed Vectors), and an AS2, Flash 8 version.
The AS2 version can't handle as much snowfall, but the 300 particle example in the source download gives (me) the same processor load as 1000 particles in the AS3 versions (~30% on an old 2GHz pentium, and ~2% on a 2.83GHz Core2Quad)
For speed, I've implemented a linked-list for the particles and there are no transformations on them in motion, except for x/y translation. I'm also pre-drawing and blurring each particle bitmap when the class initialises, then re-cycling them when they leave the snow bounds.
The compiled size of the Snow class is about 4KB for the AS3 versions, and 5KB for the AS2. I've embedded the winter trees image in the examples, so the end file sizes are about 36KB larger than they would be with just the snow.
Feel free to use the code as you want, any feedback or details of how and where you've used it would be great
MadeByPi® hits Forza Motorsport 3! Turn10's latest racer was released last week and you can now download a MadeByPi® logo from the in-game storefront.
There have been a fair few updates recently at Away3D - a real-time 3D engine for Flash.
Most recently, a lovely new collection of Pixel Bender shaders for the Flash Player 10 version of the engine - be sure to check out the demos on their site.
Not only that, but there's the scene design and export tool - PreFab, an Air app for "creating top quality 3D content in Away3D". A must try.
Then, not too long ago, Away3D lite was released, a streamlined version of Away3D (25K) for Flash Player 10. Perfect for high-performance, small footprint projects.
As you've probably worked out you, can find out more on the Away3D site.
