Background AddIn and PlayState

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Published: Wednesday, 19 January 2011 06:47

I was somewhat disappointed to discover that a windows media center background addin cannot receive PlayState or PlayRate events from the host process. This makes sense at one level in that the AddIn is hosted out-of-process from the host media center application (at least starting in Windows XP MC Edition Update Rollup 2). I guess it would have been nice though if Microsoft had thought to supply a mechanism within the Media Center SDK that would enable compensate for this. So for now, I'm forced to poll the properties at regular intervals and write my own little routine to raise events internal to my application. Maybe Windows 7 Media Center will have some improvements here... I'll be watching :)

Meteor Math

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Published: Wednesday, 19 January 2011 06:21

To help my daughter memorize her multiplication tables, I put together this little app using the Flex 2.0 Public Alpha. Read the story behing Meteor Math and play the game. You may be surprised how rusty your multiplication skills have become. Note: Requires Flash Player 8.5 or higher. 



An alien race has discovered Earth! In long standing alien tradition, to determine if earthlingsare worthy of existence, a challenge is issued. Failing this challenge will result in the complete annihilation of earth and all it's inhabitants.
Earth is to be subjected to an onslaught of mathematical meteors! You alone have been chosen to pilot the Earth?s ship in defense of the alien attack. Your mathematical skills will be our only hope!

Good Luck!

Responsive Face

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Published: Wednesday, 19 January 2011 06:31

I've been tinkerin with the new flex 2.0 Beta and what started as an effort to test ActionScript 3.0 math performance turned into something considerably more. Having always had a facsination with 3D math, I decided to write a simple 3D engine in flex 2 thinking it might be useful someday. While the usefulness remains to be seen, I had a lot of fun building this thing. Here are some of the highlighted features:

• XML model definition
• Ploygon surface styles (fill color, line color, alphas)
• Symmetry math to mirror a model (see the face demo)
• Vertex tweening so you can control a vertex’s movement
• Animation Sequences to combine multiple vertex tweening groups 
  • see the talking and/or kiss animations in the face demo

!!!DEMOS!!! Note: These flex demos require Flash Player 9 or higher..

Read more: Responsive Face

3D Visualization

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Published: Wednesday, 19 January 2011 06:04

I've been trialing the flex 2 alpha with player 8.5 and have been most interested in the strict typing and the implications it has in compiler optimization and application performance. So I put together a little demo app to experiment with some math calculations. You can see some apps here and here . Please note that you will need flash player 8.5 to see the demo. Here is a screen snapshot:

This little guy was also showcased on the macromedia labs web site here.

I look forward to throwing some more examples up on my blog in the near future and maybe even getting a another spotlight on the labs site :)