Richard Leggett on New Media

Caught this over at BoingBoing, it’s a nice Flash-based simulation that runs through rapidly evolving a vehicle design, using a physics engine to test the thing out over some terrain (not sure whether it’s home-rolled or one of the big ones).

Quote from BoingBoing article, from Matthew the author:

“This is a GA I wrote to design a little car for a specific terrain. It runs in real-time in Flash. The fitness function is the distance travelled before the red circles hit the ground, or time runs out. The degrees of freedom are the size and initial positions of the four circles, and length, spring constant and damping of the eight springs. The graph shows the ‘mean’ and ‘best’ fitness.”

Check it out here.

I got a tip from my friend Alex Peretti regarding the built in search in OSX. Skip to the end if you are familiar with the default search pains.

I couldn’t understand why, when you start typing in the search box inside any folder’s Finder window, it defaults to searching inside files of the entire computer for matching text, instead of looking at filenames inside the current folder. That means every time I search for something I have to change the settings (they aren’t stored) because 99% of my searches seem to bring up some wordy Nietzsche e-book instead of what I’m looking for.

The screenshot below shows the default search options for context.

My guess is they do it like this so that search works almost every time for the average Joe who doesn’t tend to have thousands of source files and libraries (particularly given Spotlight is insanely fast anyway). Either way, for the power-user help is at hand. This search syntax works inside Spotlight or a Finder search:

• name:hello - find files who’s filename contains “hello”
• kind:action - find ActionScript files
• date:today - find files modified today (or Apps used today)
• date:>1/1/08 - find files modified after 1/1/08

No need for wildcards, although I imagine they work too. You’ll find Spotlight searches are now lightening fast and hopefully more relevant. Cheers Alex.

Update: There are more commands available, this page has a good summary.

It’s that time of year again. “Give good food to your Mac” is back with another set of software to choose from. The twist is the more you buy, the cheaper it gets, literally. Choose 3 apps, save 30%, 4 gets you 40% but 5+ gets you 50% off. It’s time limited, so 10 days to go.

Last year I purchased 10 pieces of software for the price of the 1 piece I actually wanted (Unity 3D). In that package I also got an impressive casual 3D modeler, Cheetah 3D. It won’t replace Maya or MAX, but for a lot of tasks it’s perfect. Yes some of the apps on there are a little gimmicky, some of them you may never use, but it really doesn’t matter if you’re getting the other apps for free (in my case anyway).

So what’s on this years list? My picks would be:

• Cheetah 3D - Fast 3D modeler, raytracer renderer and animation.
• Toon Boom Studio - A well known fully featured animation package.
• Hydra Aperture Plugin - HDRI images done fast.

• Scribbles - One of those lovely little quick to use apps (see video).

• MacPilot - Access 900 power-user/hidden Mac features, e.g. show hidden files (better than the AppleScript alternative perhaps.
• Renamer - If you’re not a Terminal Guru, or want to save some braincells you might like this batch file renamer, if it saves you 30 minutes, ever, it’s likely paid for itself.

If you’re in the market for any of these or one of the other utilities on there you might consider the 50% off a deal clincher. Disclaimer: I have no affiliation with this site nor its creators.

One of the little pet peeves I seem to share with other Flashers is the frankenstein-like html/flash settings manager pages that you have to access via Adobe’s site. This is the thing you see when you right click a Flash movie and choose “Settings” -> “Advanced". It allows you to trust certain locations on your hard drive, delete “Flash cookies” (LSOs) , auto-check for player updates and other tasks.

The thing is this thing really looks and feels old now (it’s an FP6 file and it shows), it seems strange I have to be online and visit a site to delete files the Flash Player creates on my hard drive… if it’s a chore for a Flash dev, what’s the chance someone else can use it, particularly if people are storing sensitive info in there (bad devs!). I just got pinged a link to a Silverlight site and as I had to update to 2.0.something so I thought I’d check out the new settings panel (below, click to view full size):

I think you’ll agree much better all round. Very clear, and more importantly I don’t have to browse to another website to use it. Adobe, can we see an updated version of the settings panel for Flash Player some time soon? Perhaps a column to sort by usage/date too so you can quickly delete older LSOs. Perhaps there’s a really good reason for it and I’m just missing the obvious.

Just a quick note for future reference. When you are using getDefinitionByName("ClassName") inside a SWF that is being loaded into another SWF, it might not find the symbol from its own library (see ApplicationDomain and LoaderContext for why).

The solution is to get a reference from the ApplicationDomain of the SWF being loaded using the getDefinition() method. So the code:

var mySymbol:Class = getDefinitionByName("MySymbol");

becomes…

var mySymbol:Class = loaderInfo.applicationDomain.getDefinition("MySymbol");

Hopefully that resolves any issue you had with getDefinitionByName(). Of course you’d use a similar mechanism to work the other way around, and get at classes inside a loaded SWF. In this case it would be loader.contentLoaderInfo.applicationDomain.getClass()… however this depends on what ApplicationDomain you’ve loaded your child SWF into (see LoaderContext class).

In my case I wanted to attach a different “scroll thumb” symbol for each section SWF in the site I’m working on, so I couldn’t just use a single runtime shared asset.