rendermouse blog

Macro-moolah!

Macromedia announced their rocking Q4 earnings...and they reap the benefits. MACR shares jumped as much as 22 percent today.

See the stock market info.

Way to go, MM!

Somehow I get the feeling there's one HUGE happy hour coming this evening in the pub across from MM's offices...

Sketch-o-matic

I was playing around with the movieclip drawing API a while back, and built this for fun. It's nothing fancy, it just draws random bezier curves with varying transparency & thickness. Then I realized that the shapes it draws were oddly fascinating to me in a Pablo Picasso-ish sort of way. So I added a little random circle shape here & there to add more interest to the "sketches." Click the "again!" button for a new sketch.

You can download the fla if you like.

The new age of digital cameras

Foveon is a company that invented a new digital camera sensor. One that uses a 3-layer CCD instead of a single 2D grid of color receptors.

The images are nothing less than amazing.

For a while now, you could only get this technology if you bought a Sigma SD-9 or SD-10 camera, and they're a bit pricey.

Now Polaroid has announced a new 4.5MP Foveon-enabled camera for around $399 retail.

The coolest part about this chip is that EACH of those pixels can grab all three color components (see diagram below). Normal 1-layer CCDs have to use averaging algorithms to approximate real color because each pixel can only be receptive to R, G, or B. So those Foveon pixels are working harder for you, and the image clarity and color reproduction is nearly impossible to beat.

One BIG downside is that this Polaroid model is using the lower-res Foveon chip, which only produces a 1420x1060 image. Boooooo.

This chip really is the next big thing in digital photography (at least the hi-res one), and I wish it was more widely available.

Need a vector version of your client's logo?

What if there was a site that had a FREE database of the world's logos, so you could just download one and get started on that big proposal design, instead of waiting on the client, or trying to recreate it yourself?

Brands of the World

This site has FREE EPS versions of over 86,000 company/brand logos. From A to Z.

All in vector format, just waiting to jump into your super-fly designs.

Revenge of the Blogspam

A while back, I changed my blog to use gotoAndPlay's MTGotoAndComment Flash-based comment form for Movable Type in an effort to prevent blogspam.

It worked great...for a while. Then floods of spam began rolling in again.

It appears that some blogspammers skip the form altogether and hit the comments cgi file directly. Arrgggg.

Fortunately, Stef at gotoAndPlay addressed the situation (translated to English) with a clever fix that should prevent this from happening again.

So I'll give it another shot before I give up and close the comments in all of my older posts.

Flash Math: Drawing Supershapes in Flash

I ran across an article online about an equation by Johan Gielis called the "Superformula" which lets you draw a wide variety of shapes using a few basic parameters.

More research revealed some sample source code that allowed you to plot these supershapes.

So I ported the code to MX, and built a simple UI for varying the parameters so you could see how this equation works.

You can see my Supershape viewer here.

All I did was convert the sample code to use the Flash drawing API, but it's a neat little math toy to play with.