Just a quick note. The old theme (iNove) was creating extra history entries for some reason when you came to unfocus.com. I have no idea why, but that theme is now history. This new theme (iCandy 1.4 by Nischal Maniar) fixes the problem and looks nicer anyway. 
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Update Theme
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3D Gaming is Awesome!
After I watched Avatar in 3D, I became curious about PC gaming in 3D. So I did some research on the subject. There are three kinds of home 3D solutions on the market today (and a few more in theaters); active shutter glasses, and polarized LCD monitors are the two full color technologies. Each have their advantages and drawbacks, which I may blog about in more detail in the future (if you want more info, I suggest reading the xbit labs reviews of the various technologies).
I wanted to try to find a solution that did not require the layout of hundreds of dollars just to test out how well (or not) the 3D of these systems actually worked, so I wondered if there was a way to test these out, with minimal cost – sure enough, both available 3D graphics drivers support anaglyph mode to preview the tech. The third option anaglyph – you may remember this trick from super bowl half time commercials, and cereal box addins. First up is nVidia’s solution is slightly
For nVidia 3D Vision Discover, you’ll need to make sure you have a beefy enough nVidia video card – ATi users are out of luck. As luck would have it, I have a supported card, an 8800GT (the lowest end card supported!). To turn it on, follow the instructions on nVidia’s 3D Vision Setup page. Make sure you have both the correct version of display drivers, and the 3D Vision drivers.
If you don’t have the correct glasses colors (as I didn’t – I used magenta/green glasses backwards from Monster’s Vs. Aliens DVD – eventually I replaced one lense with a red one from a children’s spy kit I got from Friendly’s) it may be a little tricky to enable the affect in nVidida’s drivers if you don’t have the correct colored glasses, since they don’t actually let you turn it on without testing you first. Just guess at what the answers are and press back if you get it wrong – there are not that many combinations of answers, and you’ll eventually get it right. Once you do that, you’ll have an option to turn this all on in the Stereoscopic 3D section of your NVIDIA Control Panel (right click desktop to get there), or use the CTRL + T shortcut to turn it on.
The nVidia drivers work amazingly well on Valve Source engine based games – like Left 4 Dead and Team Fortress 2. In some parts of Left 4 Dead 2, such as the sugar cane fields on the return trip level of Heavy Rain, it may even give you a bit of an advantage, since you can see the depth of the plants – it’s much easier to see where you are going. They did less well in older UT3 engine based games, like Bioshock, where you can see noticeable gaps around some objects where the fog effects just don’t line up correctly in both eyes (it’s shifted to the right or left, for each eye respectively), and certain shadows are lost. Newer UT3 games, like Batman .. Arkham Asylum, which claims out of the box support for nVidia 3D Vision, and Avatar, which has 3D support that must be enabled in game, look phenomenal. (For Avatar you need to set nVidia stereoscopic view on in the driver first and then the game to get it to work). Other Ubisoft games like Assassin’s Creed and Prince of Persia also look great.
Another option is to use the iZ3D 3D drivers – which work with any 3D card, including ATi Radeon. iZ3D sells a line of specialized monitors that actually polarize two images (similar to how many 3D movie screens work), and use passive glasses to filter out each image from the correct eye, thus presenting two different images to each eye. You don’t need a 3D monitor to use the drivers though, as they have a free anaglyph mode built in (among other modes). These drivers seem to incur a greater performance hit than the nVidia glasses – but despite many posts (seemingly little more than assumptions) I’ve found on forums and blog posts, I actually found them more compatible than nVidia’s drivers, especially in Bioshock, which is downright amazing in 3D (despite missing many shadows). These drivers don’t start out with the modest 3D settings as the nVidia’s more out of the box settings, but once you tweak these (there are more options for tweaking, and each game starts out with a tweaking guide overlay to help you out), you should be up and running.
The best part of the iZ3D drivers is that you can actually change the color settings of the anaglyph mode (apparently you used to be able to do that for nVidia, but they removed that ability). This is fantastic, because it means you can get all the colors, with less ghosting that you’d miss if you don’t use the correct glasses with the nVidia drivers. Most anaglyphs actually separate 3 colors, not just two – one channel (red) to one eye and the other two channels (green + blue = cyan) to the other. In my case, I am using green and magenta (blue + red). The fact that blue is being split to the wrong eye is why you get ghosting with the nvidia drivers and the Monsters Vs. Aliens (or Coraline) glasses.
Here’s a quick guide to change the anaglyph colors for iZ3D drivers. First find the correct config file – for me (Windows 7) it was:
C:UsersAll UsersiZ3D Driver
I can’t confirm these two, but they helped me find the location in Windows 7 - from the iZ3D forums:
XP: “Documents and SettingsAll UsersApplication DataiZ3D DriverLanguage”
Vista: “ProgramDataiZ3D DriverLanguage”
Once you have opened the Config.xml file in one of those folders, you can edit the following items to make it green/magenta:
<anaglyphoutput>
<customleftmatrix m00="0" m01="0" m02="0"
m10="0" m11="1" m12="0"
m20="0" m21="0" m22="0"/>
<customrightmatrix m00="1" m01="0" m02="0"
m10="0" m11="0" m12="0"
m20="0" m21="0" m22="1"/>
</anaglyphoutput>In case you are interested, here is a quick key for what these values actually mean – or at least 3 of them – it’s matrix math which is hard
:m00=”R” m01=”0″ m02=”0″
m10=”0″ m11=”G” m12=”0″
m20=”0″ m21=”0″ m22=”B“There are bugs and drawbacks with each solution – most games were not made with 3D in mind, so this can be a bit of a hack. Some games are missing shadows or have misaligned affects (like Bioshock), and I couldn’t get OpenGL games to work at all with either driver (despite settings for it in iZ3D). Other games seem to perform flawlessly (like Left 4 Dead, Batman or Avatar). Another big drawback of these systems is the cost – full color 3D setups can be pretty expensive $300-$400 for the monitor, and another $200 for the glasses (and an additional $150 for each pair you want to add for group movie watching). The iZ3D solution (and Zalman makes a compatible monitor) are getting cheaper, but are still quite pricey at around $300 for the monitor and cheaper passive glasses (with no other special requirements/costs, except some kind of reasonably strong video card).
The affect is pretty convincing for me though, and since I already have a nice 120Hz monitor, and a decent enough graphics card, I’ll be adding nVidia Shutter glasses to my birthday list.
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Stop All Child MovieClips in Flash with Actionscript 3.0
While trying to come up with a way to get two different movies loaded at the same time, to play at different frame rates, I came up with a method to recursively stop all child movies of an as3 MovieClip. I didn’t end up using it, but I thought it might be useful for someone, so here it is:
import flash.display.DisplayObjectContainer;
import flash.display.MovieClip;
function stopAll(content:DisplayObjectContainer):void
{
if (content is MovieClip)
(content as MovieClip).stop();
if (content.numChildren)
{
var child:DisplayObjectContainer;
for (var i:int, n:int = content.numChildren; i < n; ++i)
{
if (content.getChildAt(i) is DisplayObjectContainer)
{
child = content.getChildAt(i) as DisplayObjectContainer;
if (child.numChildren)
stopAll(child);
else if (child is MovieClip)
(child as MovieClip).stop();
}
}
}
}The plan was to use that to stop playing movies, every other frame, and restart them on the alternative frames, but there is apparently no way to tell if a MovieClip is currently playing or not, to know which ones to restart.
I did end up hacking Tweener to add support for a Timer based update method. That way I can adjust the stage FPS to match the older timeline content (at 12fps) and have my Tweener based interactions work at a silky smooth 60 FPS.
I’ll post more on that later.
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Trace Actionscript in a Browser
Testing Flash apps in a browser can be cumbersome, but it needs to be done for some browser only functionality, such as deep linking and back button functionality – as well as checking other things that might change once you are out of the Flash “test movie” sandbox, and into the browser – things like file path issues. The convenient trace window is not available in the browser, but there are alternatives.
Flash Content Debugger and “Allow Debugging”
While it’s not essential for tracing, the first thing you should do, is make sure you are running a content debugger version of the Flash Player. You need both the Active X version for IE, and the Plugin version for everyone else (Firefox, Chrome, Opera, Safari, etc.). Both plugin types have their quirks with regards to JavaScript (and other platform differences), and really require specific testing in each, so make sure you grab both versions. Once you have those, you’ll be able to see uncaught exceptions in AS3 swfs right in the browser. You can even use the Flash Content Debugger from the browser, though I haven’t found a smooth way to do that yet. For many thing, a simple trace is all you need.
A quick tip that took me a while to notice – the “Allow Debugging” checkbox in Flash’s Publishing Settings dialog, actually causes the Flash compiler to add debugging symbols to the compiled swf, symbols that give you useful information like the actual line number of an error, in addition to the stack trace. The “Allow Debugging” verbiage, is most definately not enough to communicate that difference – I thought it was more of a locking mechanism. Hopefully you haven’t stumbled around for too long with that, like I did when I first switched to AS3..
Tracing
The easiest way to trace from Flash is to use Firefox with the FlashTracer extension from sephiroth.it. With FlashTracer, you can use the regular old built in trace method without any extra work on your part. Make sure you download the one from sephiroth.it (2.3.1), since the one from addons.mozilla.org (2.2.0) doesn’t work in Firefox 3.5. For many things that’ll be all you need. But sometimes, you’ll need information in other browsers, and will want to trace to the browsers JavaScript console. In addition to simple trace messages, you can also call a number of other methods that will out put your messages in different formats and colors, making it easier to spot what you might be looking for.
Check out the Firebug Console API for more information.
Enabling the JavaScript console
If you are already familiar with the various JavaScript consoles, please feel free to skip to this part.
Each of the major browser vendors has a JavaScript console implementation, and thankfully, the API is mostly compatible with one another. The GUI is a bit different in each (except Safari and Chrome – both are based on WebKit), so here’s a quick rundown on how to access the JavaScript console for each:
You should get to know and love Firebug. It is currently the best developer tool available on any platform – so good the others all copied it, even if they won’t admit it (*cough*Microsoft*cough*). Firefox is oddly enough, the only browser that doesn’t ship with a JavaScript console, and requires you to install an extension. While running Firefox, you can find and install that extension at www.getfirebug.com.
Once Firebug is installed, you will notice a little bug (insect) icon in the bottom right hand corner of the browser window, on the status bar. Click that to open and enable Firebug for the page you are currently viewing. Firebug will only turn itself on, on a site by site basis, and only after you click on that bug icon. Once it has popped open, you will see some tabs, with many goodies like the fabulous “Net” tab (very useful to make sure swfs are being loaded in the browser), and the “HTML” tab, which contains a live, nested version of your html code, which can be edited in real time - it’s hard to describe how much better life is in the Web Development since Firebug. Anyway, the tab we are interested in, is the “Console” tab – click that. On the actual tab, there will be a little down arrow – click that to open a menu, then click “Enabled” to turn the console on (the onscreen instructions are a little odd, their picture is of the “Script” tab – the arrow you want is on the “Console” tab, not the “Script” tab).
You’ll need to upgrade to IE8. If you are stuck on IE6, I’m sorry for you. You will not be able to easily debug Flash apps – that browser is simply difficult to work with, and you’ll probably need to output to either a text field within flash, or to a div element using JavaScript. Go and download IE8 now, if you don’t already have it. Once you have IE8 installed, you can find the “Developer Tools” under “Tools” menu. You can also press F12 to bring them up. The dev tools in IE8 are docked to the main window, along the bottom of the screen, very much like Firebug. You will notice 4 tabs in a blue bar, below a row of link buttons – click the “Script” tab to open the script tools. You will have two panes at that point – in the left is a debugger, and in the right pane, you should see a button for the Console.
You’ll need to enable the developer tool first, before you can turn on the JavaScript console. Click on the gears icon on the main toolbar, and choose “Preferences”, then click the “Advanced” tab (the one with the gear icon). On that page, there is a checkbox labeled “Show develop menu in menu bar”. Check that, and close the window. Now under the Page icon menu, you’ll see a sub menu called “Develop”. In that sub-menu, choose “Show Error Console”. This will open the “Web Inspector” window. You can dock the window along the bottom of the main window by clicking the dock button in the bottom left of the Web Inspector window. To the right of that button, there is another button with a greater than sign, and three lines. That button will toggle the JavaScript console.
Click the page drop down icon on the right of the main toolbar to open the main menu, then go to Developer, then JavaScript console. This will open the “Developer Tools” window, which contains the many things, including the JavaScript console. You can dock window inside of the main window by pressing the dock button on the bottom left of the popup window. To the right of that button, there is another button with a greater than sign, and three lines. That button will toggle the JavaScript console for Chrome.
Under the Tools menu, choose the “Advanced” submenu, then choose “Developer Tools”. This will open a panel along the bottom of the main window (sensing a trend here?). In that panel, click on the “Error Console” tab. If you’d like to only see JavaScript errors, you can click the bottom JavaScirpt tab (under the white output area of the Error Console). Note: Their is an alternative “Error Console” under Tools -> Advanced -> Error Console. Try them both, and use the one you prefer.
Tracing to the Console
Once you have familiarized yourself with the JavaScript console, you can start to trace to it. The JavaScript command is simple enough:
window.console.log("your message").From Actionscript you’ll need something like this:
import flash.external.ExternalInterface;
ExternalInterface.call("console.log", "your message");Since we are using ExternalInterface, you’ll need to make sure you have the allowScriptAccess object param, or embed attribute set to an appropriate value – either “always” or “sameDomain” (sameDomain is the default, so as long as you have your html/javascript/swf all on the same domain, you should be good to go).
You should now be able to trace (or something like it) in the browser. Next time I’ll cover some more advanced uses, as well as some more specific snafus with deep linking and browser back button functionality.
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jQuery.historyKeeper
unFocus History Keeper is a JavaScript based library for managing browser history (back button) and providing support for deep linking for Flash and Ajax applications.
What I’m proposing is taking History Keeper and making a jQuery plugin, and also a WordPress plugin to include the History Keeper library for use in WordPress. I am primarily interested in this for the process of it: to learn more about making plugins.
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Testing the WordPress iPhone app
Just testing the iPhone app. Seems pretty spiffy. Can’t manage plugins and whatnot but that’s ok. This is pretty good for posting on the go. It supports landscape typing too.
For fun (and for testing I attached some pics of some cool clouds that rolled right accross the road on the way into work one day). It was fun watching that.
No rich text editor. That’s a significant shortcoming.
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The forums are back!
I got a suggestion that unfocus.com needs forums (well, forum). So just for fun, I thought I’d dig up the old archive, and see if I could get it to work. And it did! Pretty easily too. You will have to register to post, since I can’t get the anonymous plugin to work yet – seems I’ll have to wait for an update on that. So please have at that forum!!
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MIT License for unFocus.History Keeper
I have decided that LGPL is overkill for a tiny project like unFocus.HistoryKeeper (and friends) – so I changed it to MIT. LGPL would have been a pain for anyone selling or using a commercial product with history keeper, and I really don’t think the code is substantial enough to be such a headache. But now that’s not a problem! MIT is a better fit I think.
The change has already been reflected on the Google Code page, and in the newest release archive.
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End of Life for IE6
Internet Explorer 6 is approaching its end of life! I did a quick Google search and found an “End of Life” movement calling for developers to abandon support on December 31, 2009 or January 1, 2010, but according to the Internet Explorer’s “Lifecycle Supported Service Packs” , it looks like support officially expires on July 13, 2010. Notwithstanding the 7 1/2 month difference, I’m simply happy the the end is in sight! And then I read that IE6 is covered under XP SP3 and therefor supported until 2014…
The only way to kill Internet Explorer, is to simply stop supporting it as developers. I feel we owe it to the web in general to support the latest standard (official or defacto) and the latest browsers.
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unFocus.History Keeper 2.0 (and SwfHTML) Beta 4 – Out Now!
A brand spanking new Beta 4 of unFocus.History Keeper is out, and ready for download! Download it from Google Code. (If you are wondering what happened to Beta 3 – I actually rolled that update about half way, and had it sitting in SVN for a while, but I never made the archive, or release notification.)
Sloppy change log:
- Fixed Flash Player 10 PlugIn detection.
- Changed license to MIT
- Quick and dirty temp IE8 support (makes IE8 use the timer method).
- removed ObjectPatentMagic
- added Packed library files for Beta 4 (says RC1 in SVN, but I changed my mind, there’s more I’d like to add).
- Added svn:keywords to most files.
- Updated tests for EventManager, FlashPlayerInfo, HistoryKeeper, SwfHTML and SwfShim.
- removed WebTV code, since the entire FlashPlayerInfo script doesn’t work in WebTV anyway.
- Fixed Issue 5. Added methods for major, minor and bugfix versions, to reflect changes to the convention in Flash Player 10 – Also cleaned up issues releated to the changes in IE.
- Added getUpdateVersion for the special case Flash Player 9 updates.
- Quick fix for shimMode on SwfShim.
- Fixes IE support.
- Adds shimMode property (it’s off by default).
- Fixed typo in call to get initial hash value (deep link), which broke it.
- Updates to the HistoryKeeper Actionscript 3.0 files. These changes are generally significant.
- Added asdocs comments (to AS3 files).
- Added support for Opera’s history.navigationMode.
- Made IE8 Hack detection more robust, and IE detectin simpler.
- Initial commit of Actionscript HistoryKeeper and AS3->JS communication framework (really just an easier replacement for fscommand). All of this is pretty rough – vomit draft material.
- Some smaller code comment and formatting cleanups.
- removed problematic _createAnchor functionality. (Issue 6)
- updated IE version detect to be compatible with multi-digit versions.
- Reworked Error messages so that they make sense in FireBug and other Javascript consoles. Fixes Issue #3
- Added direct and gpu WMode values.
- Made value checking case insensitive.
- Added SVN keywords Revision and Date, and added text/javascript mime-type.
- Fixed SwfShim.Enjoy!
Tags
3d 3d vision Actionscript Actionscript 3.0 as3 asp.net charset encoding deep linking EOT Flash Flash Player 10 FlashPlayerInfo forum HistoryKeeper IE6 IIS 7 Internet Explorer iPhone WordPress iZ3D Javascript jQuery Mac OS X Microsoft Mosso MouseWheel nVidia OpenType SVG SwfHTML Tetris Twitter user ip address Video Games web.config webfonts wordpress pluginRecent Tweets
- DirectWrite makes text look better on Windows (in Firefox 3.7 and IE9). It makes me wonder, does Flash utilize DirectWrite for system text? [#]
- It's true. I'm a metastasizing malignancy on America's colon. [#]
- Dooooood! Final Fantasy XIII is awesome!! [#]
- @meinaart I remember a similar problem in the depths of memory, clear stage.fullScreenSourceRect before or after leaving fullscreen. [#]
- @B_Kind Flash has it's bugs, as does Firefox, etc. Nothing compares to the pain, horror and expense of Internet Explorer 6. [#]
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