Looks like the wait is finally over and Flex 3.0 and AIR 1.0 are just a few more days away.

From time to time - expecially after asking google - you stumble upon gems like this one. If you ever wanted to generate lookup-tables for static methods without the need to check if they’re already full of tasty values then static initializers in AS3 are for you:

package
{
	// static initializer
	{
		fillLookupTable();
	}

	internal function fillLookupTable():void
	{
		// do some math, array pushing etc. here :]
	}
}

Via barneyb

If you are used to the behaviour of the remoting classes in Flex where each remote call in a service can have it’s own listeners and you’re working on a pure AS3 project, then this small package is for you: SSR, written by Aaron Smith (his blog).

We had to wait for this for a very long time, but Seraf / Jerome Birembaut has done it and developed a 3D physics engine for the Flash Platform in AS3 named WOW Engine. Have a look at the demos, download the source and start playing around with it :). On a sidenote: there’s a more powerful solution (described here) for media installations used in the Majority Desk, which depends on the C phyics engine ODE and a python wrapper, but as i mentioned - this doesn’t make sense in anything else than installations.

John Grden posted previews on some of the new features that are going to be in version 2 and they look fantastic! See for yourself in his post here.

Ein weiterer Schritt zu einer komplett digitalisierten Welt. Die Frage die sich aufdrängt, ist wie lange sie dafür brauchen werden jede Strasse jeder Stadt mit dem Auto abzufahren…

Der Link zum Video und zur Site von Earthmine.

(Verzeiht die schlechte Qualität der Bilder - es sind Grabs aus einem (LowRes-)Video)

Found this song from the Shiny Toy Guns in a best of kind of video about Papervision3D - and it rocks! Listen to it in it’s full glory on their myspace site.

My tutor in Creative Coding sent me this link to a multitouch project with rough material costs of only 2 Dollars - if you don’t count the glass, table and MacBook Pro that is The software’s written in Objective-C under OSX and runs veeeeery smooth!

Well it seems like Adobe pushes even more (2D-)hardware rendering into the Flash Platform. Not yet the 3D hardware acceleration everybody is holding their breath for - but seems like it’s just a question of time until they’ll add it. Macromedia had it already in place in Shockwave/Director years ago but sadly that platform never gained much ground in the web.

The most exciting new features of the update:

• Faster rendering of vector graphics on multi-core CPUs
• Hardware-scaling in fullscreen mode for improved video performance and quality in scaling

Release notes in Adobe’s labs here.

Update:
An even more detailed list about the new features can be found in a blog post by Tinic Uro here. Looks like the video decoding runs in a seperated thread too if the machine hosts 2 or more cores. Damn, now that’s pretty nice!

Auf Sevenload findet sich inzwischen einiges an Bild- und Videomaterial zur diesjährigen Next. Im offiziellen Blog findet man das Ganze dann in schöner Zusammenfassung mit gelayerten Flashplayern auf einer Seite. Nur der Werbeclip vor jedem Video (im Next Blog) stört das Vergnügen - ein Cookie hätte hier Wunder gewirkt.