Actually, I was looking for my 8-page “minimag” on buiding iOS apps with Flash CS5 from issue 181 back in…. November maybe? Can’t find it anywhere. I’ll stick it up here if I come across it.

Here’s the “Wonderwall”, almost set up and ready, while the blokes in hi-vis jackets have a shufty (it’s London, see?) at either side.

On the front, a 5m x 2m projection of an ever-changing openFrameworks piece. Six touchscreens running Adobe AIR fired delegates’ votes on four questions to a Mac running oF. We chucked them through a UDP socket and into an SQLLite database, whilst the votes streaked across the screen in light-writing paths reminiscent of the convention’s logo, to be added on the right. Here’s Stu hammering it:

To either side sat 3 touchscreens, where delegates could see and hear their Senior Leaders answer key questions. Again I used AIR, with each laptop feeding both an HD touchscreen and a 10K HD projector showing video of your chosen leader answering your chosen question. Again during set up…

…and on the day:

Oh, the red. Two days of that red. AIR’s fantastic though. It worked like a dream and hardly needed any babysitting throughout the 2 days, even with each setup constantly playing 1080p video. Here’s inside the “Wonderwall”, with all 7 monster projectors and the big front screen to the right. Needless to say, it got a bit warm in there (click for closeup).

And just one more check before the hordes descend:

It’s been a long time coming, but I’m now making the big jump to being my own boss and the master of my own destiny. I really couldn’t be happier. Five years at magneticNorth and two-and-a-half at LOVE have been simply marvellous, but as of Monday November the 8th, I shall be freelance and proud – off into the big wide world as a one man band.

So hopefully someone out there will need some cool games making, some AS3 coding, some Flash designing (oh and coding on that link – just go with it), a spot of writing, an interactive installation or maybe just something nice for Xmas. I’ve made plenty of lovely interactive stuff for people like Diesel, Sony PS3, the BBC, Kellogg’s, Warburtons, Dr Martens, Vauxhall, Microsoft, Coca-Cola and Umbro, if that helps.

Please say hello on email, twitter or LinkedIn and you’re on my site now, in case you were wondering what this was.

Cheers. As you can see above, I’m visibly excited.

United Underground 2 was an event held on the theme of conflict, so we encouraged people to show their support for peace by giving two fingers to war with the classic “V” for victory gesture. Their poses were displayed on a huge screen behind the performers, in a constantly-changing demonstration of unity.

Here’s Dorothy’s video:

U+262E: Two Fingers to War from Dorothy on Vimeo.

Check out the demo. But don’t just click on the swf when it comes up. A click saves an A2, 300dpi PNG. Just be warned that this could crash your browser, depending on memory. Don’t say I didn’t warn you.

Got some nice new features into PrintCanvas. It’s all very well having a massive BitmapData for print, but it’d be nice to see what it’s doing on-screen without actually shoving the whole thing into the display list. Particularly when doing time-based generative stuff, I want to watch it happen!

I’ve built this into PrintCanvas using a matrix to pull out a scaled version for display. You can easily return this display Bitmap with

Stick that on your stage, then in a Timer, EnterFrame or whenever you need it, call

to refresh the BitmapData linked to the Bitmap. Simple.

Then I thought well, this is nice and quick, but really I want to see what’s going on at pixel level. So I built in a loupe that returns a 100% window on the big BitmapData. Just pass a width and a point on the display Bitmap – usually the local mouse position – into

to get another Bitmap back. Then refresh it as above by calling

In the demo above, I’ve stuck the loupe Bitmap to the mouse and masked it with a circle because it looks nice. So there. And the blue squares aren’t intended as anything pretty – they’re just there to show it updating and give you something to look at with the loupe. I’ll get something nice going soon, I promise.

I’m pretty impressed with the performance on this, even on my 4 year old MacBook Pro! If you consider in the demo it’s getting both sets of data from an unseen A2 canvas at 300dpi, every frame, that’s not bad. Seems a good deal faster still in the standalone FP10 player/IDE for some strange reason.

So here, have the code if you must.

I’d been wanting to play with Mario’s “image foam” experiments since I saw him present them at FOTB a couple of years ago and finally got round to it yesterday. The Late, Great Sid James was just the first image to hand. Here’s a disturbing detail:

Turns out Mario never posted the source, or at least I can’t find it. So I had to work it out for myself, which I suppose is better really. At least now I more or less understand Bitmapdata.hitTest(), getBounds() (yeah, never really needed it before), finding transparent pixels, etc. It’s set to keep scaling up the Sids to fill transparent areas till the space is 95% full, which equated to 40199 swirling Sid heads. Try not to stare at the big one on Flickr for too long. You’ll go into a Carry On trance.

So next I need to get this onto my PrintCanvas and try using different images and rotations for grey levels – like you would with perlin noise – to make up a huge picture. Should be fun. Might use porn…

Oh and cheers, Jamie, for putting me straight on some of the more complex Bitmapdata stuff!