Posts
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Apple Crumbles on 3rd Party Tools
This just in, though the Twitterverse probably makes this old news already…
Apple has just announced that it is “relaxing all restrictions on the development tools used to create iOS apps”. In other words, it looks like the Flash CS5 iPhone publishing flow is now actually usable. Full announcement here:
https://www.apple.com/pr/library/2010/09/09statement.html
The only mentioned restriction is the requirement that the “resulting apps do not download any code”. I’m pretty sure the CS5 flow doesn’t cross that boundary.
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Kindle Font Sizes
Just for reference.
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Kindle 3: Under the microscope!
Yeah, this took a while, but I finally got around to sticking my new toy under the ‘scope. To be honest, the differences between the Kindle 2 and the new version are amazingly apparent the first time you turn the thing on. The contrast is supposedly 50% better, but my eyes say it is many times better. When I look at my Kindle 2 now, it does indeed look like “wet newspaper” as one of my dear commenters said in my last Kindle post. 😉
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Stephen Fry on Blog Comments, Twitter, etc.
Really timely quote with some of the stuff I was talking about with others today.
You know there is nothing easier than writing an article against something, which is so simple. It writes itself. You just got to be angry about something and just got to puff and wheeze with indignation and fury and resentment and bile and malice and the thing writes itself and if you write anything that’s for something it looks sentimental and cutesy and you know so much… and so much harder to write, so much harder to write well. So all the successful columnists are… certainly in the British press are vicious and they’re good at being vicious and admirable and if you share their politics mostly their viciousness is something you can applaud. If you don’t then you just call them beasts and animals and revolting. It just gets so annoying. It’s such a pity and that’s one of the reasons I love the online world is that although that exists in abundance you can choose absolutely which part of the online world you want to live in. You can make your own kingdom in that sense, so things like Twitter or whatever I’m sure there are all kinds of Twitter you know clusters of people who have politics that I would find horrific and really just views that I would preposterous and impertinent, but I just don’t have to follow them and I can block them and I will never know they exist and that’s glorious.
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Kindle and iPad Displays: Up close and personal.
This really isn’t meant to be a contentious post. It really only came about because I got a new toy, something I’ve been wanting to get for a while – a USB microsope! Here’s the model I got:
Veho VMS004 DELUXE USB Powered Microscope
The family had great fun playing with it tonight – looking at everyone’s skin and hair and dirty fingernails and bug bites, and paper and money and cloth and salt and sugar, etc. I could barely pry my daughter away from it. The software allows you to capture images and videos and even notate them with actual measurements, etc. based on the level of magnification.
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New Kindle, Interview with Jeff Bezos
So the rumors were true. A new Kindle was announced today.
I ordered mine within minutes of it being possible to do so. While more evolutionary than revolutionary, it’s got some nice features: smaller size (with same screen size), one month battery, double storage size, improved contrast, etc. You can read all about it on its own site.
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AS3 Sound Synthesis IV – Tone Class
In order to make the code so far a little more reusable, I moved it over into its own class, called Tone. I also implemented some optimizations and other little tricks. The most important is that instead of calculating the next batch of samples along with the envelope on every SAMPLE_DATA event, I precalculate all the samples within the envelope right up front, storing it in a Vector of Numbers. Here’s the class:
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AS3 Sound Synthesis III – Visualization and Envelopes
In Part I and Part II of this series, we learned how to utilize the Sound object to synthesize sound, and how to create sounds of various frequencies. This post will just be a quick detour onto a couple of tricks you can implement.
The first one is visualizing the wave you are playing. In the SAMPLE_DATA event handler, you are already generating 2048 samples to create a wave form. While you’re creating these, it’s a piece of cake to go ahead and draw some lines based on their values. Look here:
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AS3 Sound Synthesis II – Waves
This post will show you how to generate sine waves for specific frequencies using the AS3 Sound object. It assumes you have read, or are familiar with the data in Part I of this series.
Basics of Sound
Sound itself is essentially a change in the pressure of the air. Extremely simple layman’s terms here. Air is composed of various molecules. They are not uniformly smoothly distributed. There can be areas where they are under more pressure and packed more tightly together, and other areas where they are more spaced out. When something like a guitar string vibrates, it moves quickly back and forth at a specific speed. When it moves in one direction, it pushes the molecules of air closer to some other molecules in the same direction. The creates a dense pocket of air. Then the string moves back in the opposite direction, creating a bit of a vacuum. Not a real vacuum, but an area where there are less molecules. It then moves back again, creating another dense pocket.
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Sound Synthesis in AS3 Part I – The Basics, Noise
I’ve been meaning to write something up on this for quite a while. It recently struck me that there still wasn’t a whole lot of good material on this out there already. So I figured I’d throw something together.
We’ll start by looking at the basic mechanics of the Sound object, how to code it up, and create some random noise. Later, we’ll start generating some real wave forms and start mixing them together, etc.
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