I am currently on a speaking and press tour in Asia talking about some of the new stuff we are doing in Flex 4. One of the things that people seem to be really excited about is FXG and Thermo, and the improved designer / developer workflow that they promise. However, I have received a couple of questions about why we didnt just choose to use SVG instead of creating a new format.

Here are the links I mentioned during the SparkProject.org meeting tonight in Tokyo:

Pixel Bender on Labs
Creating ActionScript libraries of Pixel Bender Filters
Tinic Uro’s Post on Pixel Bender in the Flash Player
Flash Player 10 Drawing API overview
Mysql ActioScript 3 Library

Lee Brimelow has put together a video demonstrating some of the new features of Flash CS4. My favorites thus far include the new UI, inverse kinematics (really cool when applied to shapes), new animation tools and features, and Flex created SWCs working in CS4.

You can view the entire video here.

You can find more information on Flash CS4 here.

In my original post on the new Flash Player 10 Vector class, I did a simple example that showed Vectors being slightly faster than Array when just populating and looping through collections.

Below is another example that shows a more significant performance increase when using Vectors. In this example, I populate an Array and Vector with 5 million random numbers, and then loop through them and average all of the numbers.

As you have surely already read, we announced Adobe Flash CS4 today. I am not going to go into all of the details about what is in this release as you can find that on the website. However, I haven’t really used the authoring tool in some time (I barely picked up CS3), but I have really been enjoying CS4. It just feels like the Flash team nailed it this time around (Keith Peters has similar sentiments).

Here is a sneak peak of the new AIR t-shirts (with a shout out to Flex and Flash). These were created by eBoy, who also created the AIR 1.0 launch t-shirts.

Right now, the only way to get these is to attend one of the developer events on Ryan’s and my tour through Asia. We will be printing more after that though and its a good bet that we will have some at Max.

Below is another simple Pixel Bender filter that I created last night. This one basically, converts an image to gray scale, using the ITU-R Recommendation BT.709 algorithm described here.

Here is the filter:

<languageVersion : 1.0;>

kernel GrayScale
<   namespace : "mesh";
    vendor : "Mike Chambers";
    version : 1;
    description : "Gray scale filter";
>
{
    input image4 src;
    output pixel4 dst;

    void
    evaluatePixel()
    {
        dst = sampleNearest(src,outCoord());

        //algorithm from ITU-R Recommendation BT.709
        //http://local.wasp.uwa.edu.au/~pbourke/texture_colour/imageprocess/
        float avg = 0.2125 * dst.r + 0.7154 * dst.g + 0.0721 * dst.b;
        dst = float4(avg, avg, avg, dst.a);

    }
}

Again, its pretty simple, but I am trying to learn both Pixel Bender and image processing in general. The biggest thing I learned for this example is how to work with different vector sizes (which can be a little confusing). Im still wrapping my head around it, but once I get it down, Ill make a post on vectors in Pixel Bender.

Last week I wrote a number of blog posts showing how to work with Pixel Bender filters in Flash, Flex and ActionScript. In particular, I wrote about how to embed pixel bender filters within a SWF and how to encapsulate custom Pixel Bender filters in an ActionScript 3 class. For this post, I am going to take the next step, and show how to create re-distributable SWC libraries of custom Pixel Bender filters that can be used in Flash Player 10 based projects (including Flex Builder, MXMLC and Flash Professional).

After seeing all of the cool stuff people have been doing with Pixel Bender, I finally decided to spend a little time and start learning how to build them myself.

The learning curve isn’t too difficult, although you do have to learn some new concepts, and deal with some limitations (at least when creating filters for Flash). The most difficult part for me thus far, is just understanding color and pixel math and manipulation (something I need to read up on more).

ActionScriptHero.org has just posted an interview that they did with me. This is part of a series of interviews that they are doing with members of the Flash community.

Make sure to check out some of the other interviews, which include chats with Keith Peters, Mario Klingemann, Andre Michelle, Branden Hall, Grant Skinner and Ralph Hauwert (and more).

You can read the entire interview here.