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Creative JavaScript training courses for 2012

Seb Lee-Delisle — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 08:30:51 +0000

A quick heads-up : I’m in the process of putting new courses together for March and April in Brighton and Amsterdam. There’ll be a new Creative JavaScript course for complete non-coders, ideal for designers and artists to learn to code in a visual and fun way. But the existing CreativeJS is getting an overhaul too – it’s become so full of stuff, I’m making it a 3 day course, just to fit it all in!

Creative JavaScript training courses 2012

Christmas round up!

Seb Lee-Delisle — Fri, 23 Dec 2011 13:09:13 +0000

It’s been a busy December so here’s a quick round-up of Christmas related things I’m involved with this year.

12 days of CreativeJS – for each of the 12 days of Christmas, we’ll be posting a bite-size CreativeJS tip.

Festive Creative Coding Podcast with Dan Shiffman, author of “Learning Processing” and creator of the Processing Kinect plug-in.

And on a more personal note, here’s our annual Christmas video song. A bit of a simpler one than in previous years but I hope you enjoy it!

No related posts.

Angry Birds in 30 minutes at Update 2011

Seb Lee-Delisle — Tue, 06 Sep 2011 11:31:27 +0000

The angry exorcist and ghost graphics by Jonathan Clapham

Yesterday was Aral Balkan‘s Update conference as part of the Brighton Digital Festival. I don’t think I’ve ever been to a conference where organiser sings a song to open the event! (with a full live band I should add!)

It was a really fantastic and enjoyable conference with a great mixture of different presentations, panels and musical interludes. Although I found Aral’s musical number a little cringeworthy (sorry Aral!), I admire the guy – and why can’t he have a little fun at his own conference?

Anna Debenham kicking arse at Update, photo by Jeremy Keith

I presented a session about Corona; a mobile development platform for iOS and Android that is really good at making games and simple toys. In my session I built an Angry Birds clone – “The Irritable Exorcists” with graphics made by my nephew Jonathan.

I love Corona – like any simple accessible platform, it has limitations, but if it can do what you need, you can produce excellent results very very quickly indeed. It’s very good at moving bitmaps around (with GPU acceleration) and has Box2D built in, so it’s perfect for an Angry Birds type game.

UPDATE – video now online.

~~I know the session was recorded – I’m not sure what Aral will do with it.~~ But you can download the code and assets here. You’ll also need the Corona SDK to try it for yourself.

It’s naturally pretty rough around the edges. Click and drag the exorcist back to play the game. Oh and you need to run it in the iPad simulator. (Select iPad from the drop down of devices when you open the folder).

Live iPhone coding video now online

No hardware accelerated FlashPlayer on Linux

Seb Lee-Delisle — Sun, 03 Jul 2011 18:48:52 +0000

[UPDATE] Seems that Adobe aren’t the only ones having trouble with OpenGL on Linux. I’ve asked Mozilla for an update and will elaborate in a separate post when I hear back. (Thanks to Steven Johnson for the link)

First we heard that Adobe would no longer develop AIR for Linux and now they’ve quietly dropped Molehill on the Linux FlashPlayer. So if you’re on Linux, you can forget about the new hardware accelerated graphics capabilities coming in the next version of Flash.

I first heard about it from Tom Chiverton and this forum post that suggests that there were difficulties getting it to work on Linux and Adobe would concentrate on other platforms. This lack of support was later confirmed by Thibault Imbert (FlashPlayer manager) on Twitter.

This was a surprise – I’ve seen so many Adobeans talk about how Molehill would be implemented with openGL on Linux, even the Adobe labs page confirms it (at the time of writing, screen grab below):

Adobe labs talks about Linux implementation using OpenGL

This comes shortly after Adobe drops Linux support for AIR and they won’t be making Adobe Reader X for Linux either.

For Adobe to support a specific platform, there has to be a short-term business reason to do so and it’s only natural that outliers get discarded along the way.

This is a continuing trend of Adobe moving away from the open source platform and if I’m honest, I’m not entirely sure how I feel about it. If you look at the numbers, sure it makes sense to focus on stronger platforms (like Android). But if Adobe want Flash to be taken seriously as a cross-platform technology then isn’t Linux support important?

Given the rapid encroachment of HTML5 on many FlashPlayer strongholds, GPU graphics could be an important part of the future of Flash. Especially when Microsoft have no plans to support WebGL. So if you want 3D accelerated graphics that work in all browsers including Explorer then Flash with Molehill has the edge.

But it’ll certainly be interesting to see the whether projects using WebGL (which is supported by Linux browsers) can affect browser upgrade and installation. Already Chrome is encroaching on MSIE – will that trend continue? And will Molehill ensure that the high penetration rates of the FlashPlayer are maintained? I for one, watch with interest.

JavaScript HTML5 Canvas Snow in 3D

Seb Lee-Delisle — Wed, 24 Nov 2010 17:38:42 +0000

Incredibly, the early bird tickets on my HTML5/JS training course sold out in just 20 minutes today! And to celebrate I thought you might like an early Christmas present – JavaScript HTML5 canvas snow in 3D!

(There are still 4 standard price tickets left on the course if you’re interested in learning more about this stuff!)

I adapted one of the Mr.doob‘s three.js Particle examples. I’ve extended the particle class and added velocity to update it’s position. Anyone that knows me knows that I’ve been making snow for a while now! Most people’s first approach is to make the snow move left and right but actually you don’t need to do that. If there are lots of flakes all moving in different directions it pretty much has the same effect, and it gives much simpler and more uniform effect.

As ever, the code is fully commented and available on github.

[UPDATE: code has been updated now to work in Three.js revision 46]

openFrameworks for Flashers

Seb Lee-Delisle — Mon, 11 Oct 2010 18:12:27 +0000

Continuing on my personal quest to encourage you to learn everything, we’re putting on a dotBrighton meeting all about openFrameworks.

made with openFrameworks from openFrameworks on Vimeo.

openFrameworks is an open source creative coding library, here’s the description from the website :

The library is designed to work as a general purpose glue, and wraps together several commonly used libraries under a tidy interface: openGL for graphics, rtAudio for audio input and output, freeType for fonts, freeImage for image input and output, quicktime for video playing and sequence grabbing.

The code is written to be both cross platform (PC, Mac, Linux, iPhone) and cross compiler. The API is designed to be minimal and easy to grasp. There are very few classes, and inside of those classes, there are very few functions. The code has been implemented so that within the classes there are minimal cross-referencing, making it quite easy to rip out and reuse, if you need, or to extend.

Simply put, openFrameworks is a tool that makes it much easier to make things via code. We find it super useful, and we hope you do too.

I’ve also heard it described as “Processing on crack”

We’re really lucky to have James Alliban from London’s Skive coming to tell us all about it. James is a Flash developer who has been exploring oF so he’ll be ideally suited to tell ActionScripters the best way to get started.

We also have Jo Summers giving an extended news report on Flash on the Beach and I’ll demo the visual sampler from the Jam Session.

If you’re lucky enough to live in Brighton, there are a handful of tickets left. Otherwise you can join us via the video stream courtesy of Influxis. Either way, please sign up here and we’ll send you the details.

The meeting is Wednesday 13th (2 days time!) and starts at 7pm UK time. 11am PST, 1pm EST.

dotBrighton openFrameworks night – video

AIR for Android first steps

Seb Lee-Delisle — Mon, 26 Jul 2010 17:11:36 +0000

Having finished my first iPhone app in Objective C I thought it was probably time to have a go at setting up my Nexus1 with AIR for Android. Yes. I’m a digital slut. And no. I’m not gonna pick a side. Deal with it.

But anyway, I digress! I found Lee’s very cool intro to Android videos which have been a big help. ~~But I did get a warning from Stephan Jones on Twitter who tells me that there is a virus on the site, so possibly make sure you’re running virus software first!~~ UPDATE : Lee and Serge both assure me there’s nothing wrong with their sites so I can only assume Stephan’s virus checker was being a little overzealous!

A few things caught me out, if you navigate to the tools folder in terminal you can’t just type adb devices as the permissions on the files didn’t seem to be set right. the easy workaround is to type ./adb devices or else change the permissions with chmod if you like that sort of thing.

But the biggest thing was that it just wasn’t recognising my phone. I’m not sure if Lee mentioned it or not (maybe I wasn’t paying attention) but you need to turn on USB debugging on the phone itself. Go to Settings->Applications->Development->USB debugging. That’ll do it!

Also the link for AIR for Android wasn’t on the front page of Adobe Labs and it was surprisingly difficult to find it. But it’s here : http://labs.adobe.com/technologies/air2/android/

And finally I couldn’t actually get my app to deploy from Flash CS5 – the reason? I hadn’t turned USB Storage on – doh!

And it’s working! Lunar Lander on Android, anyone?

Papervision3D training on Lynda.com

Seb Lee-Delisle — Mon, 12 Jul 2010 12:04:14 +0000

Remember when I disappeared mysteriously to LA for a week in February? I can now reveal that I was in Ventura, CA recording a 4 hour long tutorial series for Lynda.com that has just gone live!

It was such a great experience, the team at Lynda are so professional and they have many recording booths with the best gear. I think there were 6 courses being recorded while I was there so it’s quite a production! And they have teams of editors cutting out all the gaps, and fixing my mistakes (thanks guys )

So come learn about importing 3D models, particles, interactivity, ViewportLayers, and much, much more. I’d love to hear your feedback and find out how you get along so let me know!

Papervision3D Essential Training on Lynda.com

How we broadcast FlashBrighton meetings

Seb Lee-Delisle — Sun, 28 Mar 2010 10:03:31 +0000

I’ve just written a post for Influxis explaining how we used their TVStation app, to broadcast Branden Hall’s remote Hype presentation last week.

Streaming a remote presentation with TVStation

New York City training course announced

Seb Lee-Delisle — Tue, 23 Mar 2010 11:00:51 +0000

In association with Flash and the City, I’ll be running my new Flash games programming workshop in New York on the 13th May. I first ran this course in Brighton last month and it went really well with over 97% approval rating.

Whether you’re an beginner or advanced coder you’ll get something out of the course. We walk through the anatomy of several arcade games with all source code and game engines provided. We’ll also be covering simple physics and collision detection beyond hitTest!

There are only a handful of super-early bird tickets left and I expect to sell out so I wouldn’t hang around if you want a place!

And I really look forward to seeing you in New York!

This workshop will also be available in :
Cologne for FFK in April (also a PV3D workshop)
New York City sponsored by Flash and the City in May
Minneapolis for FlashBelt in June

UK and Norway dates coming soon.