While in Mexico I shot several pictures so I could test out the Photomerge feature in Photoshop CS4.

I had to do a little work on the first one removing power lines and such but I think it turned out the best.

The second one was by far the best merge but in my opinion not as interesting as the other three.

Lastly I tried to do a shot of the coastline while moving in a para-sail.  I think it would have turned out much better if I had shot the pictures in order.  Since I shot the photos out of order you can tell there is a lot of geometric distortion and some sections of the final product became blurry as well.

Flash CS5 now supports two different modes of Multi-touch, gestures or touch.  Gestures are managed by the devices operating system which then fires events that flash listens for.  Touch mode or raw touch is more complex.

In order to utilize Multi-touch in flash you have to import the library or else flash will not listen for it.

import flash.ui.Multitouch;
import flash.ui.MultitouchInputMode;

To set the mode:

multitouch.inputMode = MultitouchInputMode.Gesture

or to use the raw touch mode

multitouch.inputMode – MultitouchInputMode.TOUCH_POINT

Depending on the device there are various gesture that are default in many operating systems.

Gestures List:

• GESTURE_ZOOM
• GESTURE_ROTATE
• GESTURE_TWO_FINGER_TAP
• GESTURE_PRESS_AND_TAP
• GESTURE_PAN
• GESTURE_SWIPE

For certain applications it will be necessary to check what the operating system supports.  Gesture support checking allows developers to deploy a work around when the system does not support the amount of touch point that the software is designed to utilize.

• Multitouch.maxTouchPoints
• Multitouch.supportedGestures
• Multitouch.supportGestureEvents
• Multitouch.supportsTouchEvents

The touch API is only utilized on systems where necessary and available if it is not available the touch events will just generate a mouse event.  It is also important to remember that some OS’s don’t support multiple events.

Touch events can work in a similar way to mouse events.  However, the Flash CS5 library has a laundry list of other touch movements it can listen for.

You can see a quick demo of gestures in action here.

Check out this video from Lee Brimelow’s blog about building Multi-Touch gesture applications.

Photoshops Pixel Bender Plug-in now works with Flash.

Check out this video for some demos from Adobe TV.

Flash CS5

Of the important things that they mentioned one of the most interesting was that most  CS5 Master Collection products now integrate with Flash.  I personally think this important given the recent media backlash against Flash due to Apple’s (particularly the iPhone) decision to not support the player.  Anything that Adobe does to further strengthen the Flash platform is a good idea and tying more of the suite to Flash is doing just that.  Flash Player 10.1 is also now optimized for Mac’s and supports OpenGL, despite the lack of support form Apple.

Due to the internal push to make Flash work seamlessly for iPhone development there were a lot of improvements made, even though those improvements no longer apply to the iPhone they still apply to the rest of the mobile world.   The Flash player is now Smartphone enabled with things like the multi-touch accelerometer.  Adobe also mentioned the Open Screen Project (industry wide initiative bring consistent Flash player across devices) which will affect the other big players in the mobile industry such as Blackberry, Android, and Google all of whom are supporting the project.

Android development is now supported.  When building apps for phones that utilize an accelerometer, for example, Device Central now has a pseudo-accelerometer that you can use to test.  Download AIR for Android pre-released which, if connected to a device, can package and launch the app on the device. This greatly improves the work-flow for development to Android App, they are working on getting this work-flow setup for other devices.

The Flash Player

Battery power issues are now being managed better in 10.1 so it uses less CPU and power.  They have also reduced the amount of memory used by 10.1.  All of this is enabling the player to go cross platform more easily.  For example you can go to sites that are not optimized for mobile and use them as they are, flash videos included.  They also showed us a demo that shows the how hardware acceleration affects HD video, the difference was between that of a slide show and a movie.  Not only does the video play better but it uses less power by using the optimized hardware.  And the built in APIs that support 3D work seamlessly on Mobile in Flash 10.1.

AIR & Flash Catalyst

AIR 2 is now available, check the link for the new SDK.  AIR 2 now supports some new features such as Find Links and   multi-touch now supports as many touch points as the operating system.

Flash Catalyst is going to be key for UI development.  You can bring in your Illustrator or Photoshop UI designs and make things into a functional application. Turning the elements into their functional elements now auto generates flex code. The good thing about Catalyst is that it connects to the other Adobe products that offer more powerful tools.

This site was a part of my WDMD 480 class.  If you go to www.marshfieldfurniture.com you can still see their original site as it has not launched yet. I worked on this site with Corey Maretz and Ben Owen.  My contributions included: fine tuning the CSS and debugging, various development work that needed to be done code wise, customer relations and collecting user feedback.

The most interesting part of this project for me was getting a chance to run a user feedback collection software called Morae.  It was a really interesting experience because I have never done one and the feedback we got significantly improved our final product.

This was a maintenance project that my WDMD 480 group inherited. When we received it the score program didn’t work and each page was using it’s own template. Originally Prof. Krause didn’t think it would take us much time to fix this site and finish it however, we ended up spending some significant time redesigning and creating new functionality for the site.

My major contributions to this project were fixing the CSS and template issues and creating a custom Joomla Extension to display the stats for each sport.  The custom component was the most work because of the limited access we had to any data.  Originally it was designed that some one would have to enter in wins and losses in the back end of the site.  With the component I developed we created a custom iFrame that loaded information that was already available from www.allthescores.info.  We originally wanted to make calls to their database so we could manipulate the data ourselves.   However, the sites owner wouldn’t permit us access.  So I got together with the sites manager and we made a new page that would display the data in the right way and then I hooked up the iFrame component.

I enjoyed creating the Joomla extension and I am in the process of creating an off-shoot of the one I made for displaying iFrames, that I will upload to the Joomla extension database.