Oscar Trelles

While taking a quick review to the sites I have listed here on the left, I got something unexpected when clicking on OnRelease, this message: “’nuff, take down your links”. Did Aral get hacked? Excuse my ignorance, but can anybody tell what the heck does “’nuff” mean?

OpenEXR is a somewhat new image file format developed by Industrial Light and Magic, a division of Lucas Digital. The company recently released the source code of its proprietary format, providing the open source community with a possible standard for 16-bit floating point color images.

Related Reading:
LinuxPlanet: OpenEXR Graphics File Format Turns Up The Contrast
MacWorld: Lucas effects house ILM offers OpenEXR, works on OS X
Savannah: Project Info – OpenEXR (Source files)

[via Computer Graphics World]

Although the story can be a little too dark for some audiences, the experience offered by Broken Saints is as engaging as it is original. Anime-style graphics, sound effects and music have been put altogether in quite slim Flash movies, light enough to be played in any computer (beware of too slow processors though). Part of this achievement has to do with the fact that the creators are using cartoon-like text balloons to show characters words and thoughts, avoiding extra kbytes in voice sound files… and some extra bucks too.

The award-winning animated novel features 24 episodes, each one an average 15 minutes long. I have only seen the latest one last night, but it was enough to make feel like downloading the 190Mb of previous episodes. The series finale for Broken Saints, a special 1 hour feature, is due by June. After that, the creators plan to package the whole thing with extras into a 4 disk DVD set.

In a previous note, I was ranting about how unuseful was to me the discount coupon sent by Macromedia very recently. Fortunately for me, and other people in the same situation, Macromedia extended the offering to other products, and new coupons were sent out by Al Ramadan yesterday. Thanks a lot.

In a project I’m currently working on, I needed to emulate the behavior of a button being pressed…. The onPress event doesn’t help too much here, since it triggers just once, before the button is released. So, I came out with this little workaround:

// onPress initializes the process
myButton.onPress = function(){
myButtonInterval = setInterval(myButton, "whilePressed", 10);
}

// define the process
myButton.whilePressed = function(){
...
}

This is being used with the arrows of a scrolling bar, it needed to be very smooth, that’s why I’m using ’10′ when setting the interval.

I know there’s a bunch of people working on similar projects, but this is the first one I actually see in action, and it works very nicely. Kadazuro has this emoticons component beta version in trial, but it isn’t available for download just yet.

I found this in my referers list, and the first (last) news item is what totally grabs my attention: fresh numbers from the web servers war! So, everybody knows that Apache’s presence in the web server market is constant, and superior to any other web server software that ever existed, and a 2+/1 proportion with Microsoft’s IIS. Ok, but in the graphic’s legend you see that both IIS and Apache have negative growth percentage indexes… so, who grew?

Click here for the complete article

This afternoon, I was surprised when receiving a letter from Al Ramadan (Macromedia’s VP of Marketing); it was to thank me for all the help I provided (when evaluating the site’s performance in a couple of surveys), to make Macromedia.com a better place for everybody. It got better when I realized that the letter also included a discount coupon for $50! I instantly thought about a copy of the DRK3, but then the string pulled out: it is only valid for purchases of Flash MX or Studio MX, and I already own my copy

Well, if at all possible, I would like to give the coupon away to somebody that can use it. I’m not sure if I remember correctly, but I think I was asked in the surveys for the MM products I own… I don’t know.

Thank you Al, anyway.

[via eMedia]

Finally, the time has come. According to the Video Software Dealers Association (VSDA), DVD rentals generated more revenue than VHS for the first time, during the week ending on March 16th.

Does anybody remember Betamax?

I did have time to browse through the aggregators, and found some interesting developments related to Central.

John Dowdell and Jonathan Duran write this week about negative and positive reactions generated by Central since its introduction, particularly in the Flash community. After reading both articles, I’m left with the feeling that the first beta testing is already running. They promise that nobody will be left behind though, and that eventually everybody will have a taste. John specifies 2 stages in the beta testing, while Jonathan mentions a series of progressive releases, for wider groups of developers each time each time.

Not being part of the first series of the SDK, perhaps reserved for more seasoned developers, doesn’t prevent us from start developing ideas for Central applications, just keep mind a couple of things:

“The key thing to remember is that your app will be loaded inside another Flash SWF so any references to _root, _global, etc. will break. So the first thing is to code the app with this in mind (also don’t try to resize the stage, again your SWF will be running inside another). Also, don’t assume the user is connected to a network or the internet at all times, Central being an online/offline environment (there are some events you will be able to use that are triggered by the user indicating connectivity). Other than that, you should be able to develop pretty much like you would other Flash apps.”

That was the answer that Michael Gunn got from Jonathan at the new Macromedia Central Forum, so be sure to check it out for the latest developments.