Flosc (Flash Open Sound Control) is a project by Ben Chun that looks like it’s been around for a while but I’d never heard of until I had call to use it in FWiidom.

In fact I’d never heard of Open Sound Control either, but apparently it’s intended as something akin to clunky old MIDI, but over TCP. Flosc is a little Java server that sits and intercepts OSC packets and turns them into Flash XML packets. The classes in the zip below will allow you to connect easily to the Flosc sever and send and receive events and data to any connected OSC device.

I was using these classes for two way communication between Flash and Glove Pie (and thus the Wiimote) and it all worked fine. In theory you should be able to control any OSC device, including some pretty cool sound kit such as MaxMSP or Traktor.

>> Download Flosc AS3 Classes <<
This zip just contains the new AS3 classes, you’ll still need to get the main Flosc files.

So I’ve been spending some downtime converting some old projects to AS3, one of which is an old Webcam to Ascii experiment.

While it worked OK in AS2 it was pretty lacking in the speed department, meaning you couldn’t convert at any great resolution (about 20*20 ascii ‘pixels’ was tops). In AS3 however it’s a whole different story, as this demo shows …

(click the image to launch, latest FP9 & a webcam required, right click to go fullscreen)

Oh yeah, cheers Tink for the Flex help, it’s clever this Flex stuff, init?!

Really nice use of a 3d engine on the site of Japanese designer Masayuki Kido, Roxik.com.

He’s also produced a really fun little viral drawing game called pictaps, see my attempt here.

…ok, well the standalone player anyway. I’d got the impression from the release notes that the new Flash beta simply couldn’t do fullscreen on Linux, but I was reading it wrong. The browser plugin can’t, but the standalone goes fullscreen just fine, shouldn’t be hard to get this working for the final release…sweet.

Hadn’t had time to look at it before, but the standalone player even includes a few extras I don’t remember from widows, a URL entry field and a Bookmarks menu…

Must say it’s a lot nicer than I had expected, it even has a working ‘create projector’ option to make standalone binaries, although they’re not all that svelt at around 6mb for the base package…

There’s some reviews and pictures up of the info from the Adobe Keynote, sounds like they showed some interesting things including Flash9 on linux.. wohoo!

Perhaps the most interesting thing there sounds like the new ‘Copy Motion as ActionScript 3′ functionality, allowing you to turn a timeline animation into an exact code representation. This could be a great timesaver and reduce a lot of the niggling quality issues when working with design heavy flash sites.