Rare - the games studio responsible for Banjo Kazooie and Perfect Dark - have had a drastic new rebrand. The new flat colour logos are a striking and modern updates to the old 'golden R' design. Nice stuff. Full gallery inside...
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The London 2012 mascots have been announced, Wenlock and Mandeville are (aparently) two drips of steel come to life. You can see them in a short animated film on the official site. They're pretty odd, but not too bad I guess, the London taxi light on their heads is a nice touch. What do people think?
I posted this blend mode stuff a long time ago, but the interface was awful and it slipped most people by.
So, I've packaged all the code up into a handy SWC and made a better example application for you to play with.
Here's the test page, and here's the SWC. As well as clicking on the source images to load new ones, you can save your blended creations by clicking on the output window.
I've been sitting on a small collection of Pixel Bender filters for Flash for a while now... way too long really. The filters were made a long time ago and since then I've been playing with and improving the user interface in (rare) spare moments.
The UI will be familiar to you if you've played with my JPEGlitch experiments, if not most things have tool-tips to guide you... and if you see an icon, generally speaking, clicking it will do something 
At its core is a slightly modified version of the minimalcomps library from bit101, which has then been further extended to enable easy creation of parameter-based user interfaces (where a Parameter is an Observable object that has flexible value/range Mapping - inspired by the popforge library).
A handy new feature is parameter tweening - all the sliders can have animation turned on/off in their context menu (right-click). It's only a simple min-max tween that you can start and stop, but it's a quick way of seeing parameters in motion. Also, when not animating, double clicking on a slider will reset it to the default value.
I'll make the source (all the .as and .pbk) available soon. It needs a good tidy-up first, and a few comments probably wouldn't go amiss either. If there's sufficient interest I'll get around to putting it into a public source control of some sort (the Parameter/Snapshot UI framework would benefit most from this). Google code and github are the main contenders at the moment.
There are 4 effect and 6 colour-space filters available to fiddle with - there's a quick overview of the filters and UI below for those that need to know more. In the meantime, why not give them a go!
(249KB, no loader, Flash Player 10 required. For best performance, use the latest 10.1 release candidate)
