Eric Fickes » adobe

360 Flex, HTML5, Adobe AIR, and a bathrobe

Eric Fickes — Thu, 23 Sep 2010 04:19:02 +0000

I’m happy to share my 360 Flex presentation on HTML5 and Adobe AIR. This is a topic I have a renewed interest in after Steve Jobs decided to start a war against Adobe’s Flash player. Also, my very first major HTML5 project endlessmural.com was launched the week before 360 Flex.

Despite the title of this presentation, I didn’t put this together to bash HTML5 or Apple. Steve Jobs fired me up when he declared Flash dead, and I realized it’s time to start having the “technology is a tool” conversation again.

Bottom line, know your problem so you can pick the appropriate tool for the job. That tool might be HTML, it might be the Flash Platform, or it may be Lego blocks. Chances are your target customer doesn’t care.

If you have any interest in the sample AIR applications I demoed, just drop me a line, comment, email, tweet, smoke signal, or carrier pigeon.

Screw HTML5, make cool shit with AIR

View more presentations from Eric Fickes.

BTW, I gave this preso wearing a bathrobe.

* this was posted from the backseat of @thecompilers mini van while driving home from 360 Flex. We’re currently heading west on I70 ( Go go Sprint 4G! )

EMERGENT COLLECTIVE released, the community rejoices!

Eric Fickes — Thu, 22 Jul 2010 22:33:59 +0000

I’m happy to announce my band The Compilers have been included on the new EMERGENT COLLECTIVE ONE cd. This compilation is made up of developers in the Adobe community who are also involved with making music. Go download it now, it’s free for all!

Download this free album now!

A huge thanks goes out to creator of this compilation Joseph Labrecque. Thank you for making this compilation and thank you for letting The Compilers submit our song ‘Sleep Tick v2′. Be sure to read Joseph’s comments about the compilation he so graciously put out for all to enjoy.

It’s official, The Flash Platform rocks!

Eric Fickes — Fri, 18 Jun 2010 06:00:26 +0000

* UPDATE : all the videos were originally made and hosted at http://screentoaster.com which is now defunct. I will get these videos updated someday. Sorry for the loss.

In case you missed the June RMAUG meeting, my band The Compilers played our first hybrid concert and presentation show. Who are The Compilers? As far as I know, we’re Denver CO’s only Tech Funk Fusion trio that use internet technology along with analog instruments. By day we’re internet programmers, and by night we’re rockers. Right now majority of our software revolves around the Flash Platform, so it was only natural that we play at RMAUG.

Below is a recap of our setlist, and notes about the technology we presented on. When you see mentions of a Flash movie, these are not run as standalone SWF files. They are actually played by our Flex based Compilers Live Player. This application runs on our guitarist Jun Heider’s laptop, and the entire app is controlled over MIDI, via a Behringer FCB1010 Foot Controller, MMJ, and MERAPI.

Intro Song

For the first song of our set we decided to use a funny and informative Flash movie to give the audience a hint at what they’re about to see. For the June RMAUG show, this movie was updated to include spoken thank you slides for the companies that make our technology, and special shout outs to all the people who help us put on a great show.

Watch Flash Intro Movie

I want an iPhone

For our iPhone song we have another entertaining Flash movie that gets played during my iPhone solo part. Both this song, and the Flash movie where updated a bit for RMAUG. Unfortunately Soundbooth crashed on us when saving the recording of our live set, so I can’t play a clip for the remixed iPhone song, but you can watch the updated iPhone Flash movie.

Watch Flash iPhone Movie

All your base, are belong to us

This song is pretty straight forward when it comes to technology. We have a backing Flash movie that plays scenes from the ZeroWing video game, as well as the ‘All Your Base’ iPhone app for ZeroWing audio samples. I’m not including anything for this song besides, if you’ve seen us play before, this song now has a reggae feel to it. Prior to this show, ‘All Your Base’ was a hard driving all your punk are belong to us.

Sleep Tick

This is one of our original rock tunes which has been given a minor touch of technology. There is a middle part that I now break out into an iPhone solo, and we also have an AIR 2 powered audio visualizer. This particular app is one of the most exciting for me because I’ve been waiting for the day when we can use getMicrophone to pull raw data. Instead of explaining this one, you can watch it instead.

Tweet Jam v2

I’m happy to report our crown jewel of internet technology and audience interaction mashup “Tweet Jam”, has reached version 2. Both the song and the application have been rewritten especially for the RMAUG show. TweetJam is an instrumental jam song where the audience tweets at @thecompilers during our show, then our Roboreader application imports the @mentions and reads them back to the crowd via robot voice. Since our application reads the live Twitter feed, you don’t have to be at our shows to participate! A final point of interest for this application is that I run this on my laptop and control it using a wired XBOX 360 controller. There’s not much more to explain, but there is a video showing it in action.

James vs. Rick

Our final song of the night uses two applications. One is a game for the audience, and the other is a simple audio app. The game is an AIR application that connects to the ‘phone game company’ MegaPhone service and displays a specially assigned 888 telephone number, and a range of numbers to press in order to vote for James Brown ( 0 – 4 ) or Rick James ( 5 – 9 ). When a player calls in and presses a number from a specific range, our AIR app will play an appropriate audio sample while we’re playing. Our AIR app keeps track and displays the running vote count, then at the end of the song we fade and play a funny video from the winner.

The second application ‘Funky Funky’ is a simple AIR2 application that uses NativeProcess to say “Funky Funky”. While this doesn’t sound like anything noteworthy, it’s a perfect application for this particular jam because OSX’s SAY command has a voice called “Bells” that speaks in a melody that matches the song we’re playing. Of course this doesn’t make much sense not knowing what the song sounds like, so here’s the actual application for you download and try out. Note, this is an AIR2 app that uses NativeProcess, so this is an OSX only application.

Download “Funky Funky” for OSX

For your entertainment, here are two funny videos from James Brown and Rick James.

The Flash Platform Rocks!

So there you go, proof that the Flash Platform rocks! I haven’t thought of any rocking ending other than, go check out AIR2. The Flash Platform is no longer restricted to the browser. Let all the HTML heads keep the browser, I want to rock on stage with Flash.

Photos

We didn’t get a recording of the show, but we do have a photo album of the June RMAUG on Facebook.

The Compilers Next Show

If you missed The Compilers at RMAUG, we are playing at Ignite Denver 7 on July 27th. If you can’t make that show, be sure to at least tweet @thecompilers on July 27th to get yourself heard.

Be sure to check out The Compilers World for information from the future of the internet rock trenches.

Come have a 360Flex chat with me and Jun Heider

Eric Fickes — Wed, 10 Feb 2010 23:16:52 +0000

Chat is @ Thursday Feb 11th, 11:30am MST

Jun Heider and myself will be talking to the 360|Flex guys tomorrow about our session. It’s actually going to be a back-to-back mega session comparing the latest and greatest on both the Flash Platform and the Silverlight Platform.

Come check it out and feel free to ask questions…although for the good stuff you’ll have to wait until our talks.

Here’s the full details: http://www.360flex.com/blog/2010/02/360flex-speaker-chat-eric-fickes-and-jun-heider/

I hope to see you online tomorrow or at 360 Flex in March.

I'm speaking at 360 Flex 2010

From joke to AdobeMAX in 6 months

Eric Fickes — Sat, 31 Oct 2009 05:43:16 +0000

Hey, we should jam! Yeah, we totally should. No seriously, we should jam sometime. We can play bad 80s cover songs and play under the name April Fools.

That’s the gist of how my current band formed. A handful of computer programmers who used to play in bands decided it was time to get back on the music horse. At first we had five or so people interested in jamming and seeing where things go. A few jams later and we were down to the power trio that is now known as The Compilers.

The name of the group didn’t come around until a month or so after we had been jamming as the April Fool’s. All three of us are internet programmers who work with Adobe’s Flash platform, as well as contribute to our local Adobe community. About the time we officially became a power trio we were kicking around the idea of becoming the house band for our local user group meetings ( RMAUG ). In the process of laughing this one out, we were asked by RMAUG to play an upcoming Adobe technical event that was happening in two weeks. That technical event was the “Next Generation Flex & Coldfusion Tour“.

At first we were hesitant booking a show when we didn’t have a real band, or enough material to play a show. Long story short, we decided to play the show, decided to name the band The Compilers, and decided we should probably integrate some sort of tech into this show. We didn’t set out wanting to mix technology with music, it just seemed appropriate for this first gig to do something technical. That technical music nugget is now known as Tweet Jam, our smash hit that plays tweets from @thecompiler‘s Twitter timeline while the band plays underneath the robot voice.

That first show was fun, funny, and the beginning of an interesting musical project. In the last six months we’ve played four shows, and we gave a presentation at the 360|MAX unconference at Adobe MAX 2009 in Los Angeles, CA. This really isn’t a lot of gigs, but considering we started this band in June, it’s been quite a whirlwind of musical and technical action. Jun has built at least three versions of the TweetJam application, as well as integrated his midi foot controller with TheCompilers Flex player. I’ve gotten pretty comfortable playing iPhone, made a few Flash movies for our set, and started looking into sound generation with Sonoflash. Scottie has been the mad scientist behind the green velvet curtain. Drummer man, electric drummer man, sound man, idea man, recorder man, crazy Brazillian ghord instrument player.

It’s so great to be back in a band. These last six months have been a blast, and it was all started from a few jokes. Speaking of jokes, below you will find two flash movies that I built for our 360|MAX presentation, as well as our talk. The concept of melding tech with music is new to us, so this talk was a bit off the cuff, but it was still a great time.

360|MAX assets

It’s a Laser! – My first experiment with the Sonoflash library. Adjust your laser properties then click shoot. Each slider has a keyboard listener. Attack = A, Release = R, and Frequency = F.

Click to launch the laser maker

By Note – This sample is the beginning of layering sounds and controlling notes and octaves. This one can play the major notes C, D, E, F, G, A, B using your keyboard and the play button. The octave controller on the right is powered by mouseover, 1 is low and 9 is high. The sounds also have keyboard listeners. Laser = 1 and Ping = 2. Note, the event listeners don’t kick in until after you’ve clicked a button, so it may be quirky at first. I built this on the plane ride out to LA and couldn’t figure that one out.

Click to launch this madness

360|MAX presentation : “Geek Rock with the Flash Platform”

@thecompilers at 360 MAX from Eric Fickes on Vimeo.

411 on The Compilers

Facebook : http://www.facebook.com/pages/The-Compilers/110943240897

MySpace : http://www.myspace.com/compilers

Twitter : http://twitter.com/thecompilers

Dreamweaver CS4 Feature Tour video

Eric Fickes — Sat, 11 Oct 2008 20:20:46 +0000

While I still wish Adobe would bring back Homesite, Dreamweaver CS4 is looking pretty exciting. Webkit powering Live View. Javascript code hinting, and more. Check out the feature video.

If you have any problems watching this video, go here and watch it on AdobeTV.

Flash10 and PixelBender is going to be awesome

Eric Fickes — Fri, 10 Oct 2008 02:03:33 +0000

Not a day goes by that I don’t hear of some new Adobe technique or technology that I want to learn. Today was no different. I started reading about Flash Player 10 and came across the Pixel Bender Toolkit. I’m not going to rehash what Adobe has already documented here, but I will show it to you.

webmonster pixel bended

This is an example using Ryan Taylor’s HSL Pixel Bender kernel. Check out the Pixel Bender Toolkit:Gallery for some other sweet filters.