Oooh look. Much toil, blood, sweat, tears and seemingly never-ending meetings have finally culminated in the all new LOVE. site!

A lot of people really didn’t like the old one, but sod them – we did. After all, it was funny, it won awards, it got us the business we were after and acquitted itself admirably, now bowing out gracefully for the new generation to take over.

And this time, we’ve taken a different tack. Firstly, the work’s all there up front. Big, bold and colourful. Then there are loads of new videos and web walkthroughs, not least of which is LOVE’s brand new retro brand film, made by our very talented video elves. And thanks in no small part to very recent advances at Vimeo, all this should look as pretty on your iPhone or iPad as it does on your big work screen.

Oh, and of course this covers BLOG, SHOP, Vimeo and Twitter too.

Hipstamatic…

Crosby beach yesterday in the company of the metal Gormleys and wouldn’t you know it – forgot the camera. Millions of photos of these fellas must exist already, but I fancied a go all the same and of course had my telephone on me.

Coloured in Mill Colour, cropped, sharpened and slightly contrast-adjusted in Photogene, I like this one with the wind farm and the clouds over the hills in the background. Not a bad resolution either.

Having played with CameraBag and everything else, nothing really stuck till Hipstamatic.

Just checked now and found you can stick higher quality on in the settings. Damn. 525px wide’ll just have to do for these.

Here’s me shepherding a couple of delightful young ladies into the booth. Then Me, Jamie and Jim signing off on the big screen. You can see there how it builds up a fullscreen wall of images and gracefully scales to take as many as we throw at it.

For Sony PS3, LOVE’s biggest digital achievement to date: The Game.

Look at the pretty games!

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.

One last ice photo from yesterday’s ice adventure. Again, retouching was great fun, so maybe I should get out and shoot more than once every six months.